Nay, more in presence of the evident diminution of traditional and local influences, literature is the most important of the elements of moral life, inasmuch as the book is the great initiator.

In order to carry out his plan, M. Bourget has chosen five writers whom he considers to be eminent and typical revealers of the moral state of his contemporaries, and initiators of sentiments and habits of thought that have been imitated by the young generation. The five writers studied by M. Bourget are Baudelaire, Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal. The intention of M. Bourget is excellent; the choice of his prototypes or generators of sentiments is perhaps less happy. Has Baudelaire really exercised the influence that M. Bourget attributes to him? Have Baudelaire's peculiar conceptions of love, his refined pessimism, his delight in decadence, really penetrated into the moral atmosphere of the epoch? M. Bourget meets our objection. Like M. Renan, M. Bourget is a literary aristocrat; he is refined, subtle, exquisitely delicate and complex, and he disdains the crowd. It suffices him that Baudelaire or any other of his types has an influence over a small group, provided that group be one of distinguished intellects, poets of to-morrow, novelists and essayists of the future. Indirectly and through them the psychological singularities that he notes doubtless penetrate to the wider public. Nevertheless, in his studies of Baudelaire and Flaubert M. Bourget has perhaps hardly made allowance enough for the spirit of charlatanism, of braggadocio and staginess, which was so prominent in the literary generation of 1830. In his studies of Renan, Taine, and Stendhal M. Bourget has analyzed, winnowed, and classified the souls of his subjects with rare finesse, clearness, and logic, and always with a sharp appreciation of their intellectual pessimism. M. Bourget seems to take extreme delight in analyzing the charms and se

ductions of decadence; the praise of decadence is the dominant note of the book. Art for M. Bourget is reduced to "the science of tasting life bitterly or sweetly;" and we shall doubtless not be far wrong in attributing to him all the moral peculiarities inherent in that decadence which he so ingeniously analyzes. analyzes. "The great argument against decadences," says M. Bourget, "is that they have no morrow and that they are always crushed by barbarism. But is it not, as it were, the fatal lot of the exquisite and rare to fail before brutality? We are right in avowing a failure of that sort, and in preferring the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of the violent Macedonian." Listen, too, to the conclusion of the volume. M. Bourget has been analyzing Stendhal's Rouge et Noir.

"Do you see, at the extremity of this work, the most complete that the author has left, the breaking of the tragic dawn of pessimism? This dawn of blood and tears is rising, and like the brightness of daybreak it tints with its red colors the loftiest minds of our age, those that tower up like mountains, those towards whom the eyes of the men of to-morrow are rising, religiously. I have examined a poet, Baudelaire; a historian, M. Renan; a novelist, Gustave Flaubert; a philosopher, M. Taine; I have just examined one of those composite artists in whom the critic and the imaginative writer are closely united, and I have found, in these five Frenchmen of such high value, the same philosophy of disgust of the universal nothingness. Sensual and depraved in the first, subtilized and sublimated in the second, reasoned out and furious in the third, reasoned out also but resigned in the fourth, this philosophy becomes as sombre but more courageous in the author of Rouge et Noir. Is it right, this formidable nausea of the most magnificent intellects in presence of the vain efforts of life? Has man, in civilizing himself,

really done nothing more than complicate his barbarity and refine his misery? I imagine that those of our contemporaries whom these problems preoccupy are like myself, and that to this agonizing question they reply sometimes with a cry of pain, sometimes with a cry of faith and hope. Another solution is to gird up one's soul, like Stendhal, and to oppose to the uneasiness of doubt the virile energy of the man who sees before him the black abyss of destiny, who does not know what this abyss conceals,

and who is not afraid!"

The influence of M. Bourget's five initiators of sentiments is evidently negative, and as such M. Bourget understands it. They are contributing to produce an epoch of decadence, and an epoch of refined sensibility and polished indifference, an epoch when the civil ized man enjoys the capital of faculties amassed by the discipline of stable societies without troubling himself as to how he came by them or exerting himself to increase that capital. And so M. Bourget shows us the high society of the present day, the society that is recruited from amongst the most refined representatives of delicate culture, arrived at that perhaps culpable but certainly delicious hour when dilettantism replaces action, an hour of curi

osity that prefers to be sterile, an hour of the exchange of ideas and manners, the hour of cosmopolitanism. A fatal evolution is attracting the provinces towards the great towns, and over the great towns there floats, like Swift's Laputa, a vague and superior city, the fatherland of supreme curiosities, of vast general theories, of erudite criticism, and of comprehensive indifference.

The Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine are full of ingenious formulations of ideas and sentiments that are in the air, so to speak; of aspirations, tendencies, vague tendencies that influence the life of the present generation. M. Bourget in these studies brings more of his own thought than he borrows from his subjects, strewing his pages with many ideas that strike one and provoke thought, though not always approval. The book is brilliant, refined, often overrefined, and it represents a sum of original thought and novelty of view that recommends it for very high praise and more than passing attention. M. Bourget, whom we have hitherto known as a graceful and elegant though hardly a profound poet, has revealed himself in these essays a thinker in sympathy with the most advanced of his contemporaries and a writer of prose of rare purity.

THIS is an admirable little book,' and one which we strongly commend to the attention of senators and congressmen. It deals with a subject of vast importance, and in no direction can legislation produce so much direct benefit as by a right treatment of the "question of ships." Down to the year 1856, the

1 The Question of Ships. The Navy and the Merchant Marine. By J. D. JErrold Kelley,

United States had rapidly advanced in commercial greatness, and had overcome all the obstacles which had clustered about their path. At that time we were close upon the heels of England, and everything pointed to our speedily passing her in the race for commercial supremacy. Since then our

Lieutenant United States Navy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1884.

commerce has steadily declined, a misfortune usually attributed to the civil war, and subsequently to the competition of more profitable forms of investment. These circumstances no doubt hastened the loss of our commerce; but, as Lieutenant Kelley points out, they are not the true causes of its decline, inasmuch as that began before the civil war. The origin of our difficulties lay in the abandonment of our old policy, which, from the beginning of the century, consisted in surpassing all the world in the quality and speed of our ships and in our naval architecture. With the substitution of iron for wood we began to drop behind, until, with a population of fiftyfive millions, we have a tonnage but little greater than we had when half as numerous. Moreover, our percentage of wrecks is larger than that of any other seafaring people, and our ships and steamers are shorter-lived.

re

The fact that we pay one hundred and forty millions a year to other people for carrying our own products is sufficient to prove the importance of this question, and there can be no doubt that the suggestions of Lieutenant Kelley furnish the true solution of the problem. They are, in brief, that we should be allowed to buy ships of over three thousand tons where we please and without duty; that the antiquated navigation laws should be revised and in large measure pealed; that something should be done to protect seamen, and some provision made to educate them; that ship-owners should be relieved of existing burdens; and that a bureau of commerce, for the registry of ships and for all matters pertaining to our merchant marine, should be established at Washington and placed in the charge of the Navy Department. There can be no question that this policy is sound and its immediate application sorely needed.

The other branch of the subject, the navy, is of course discussed by Lieutenant Kelley with keen professional in

Here, too, his ideas

sight and affection. are thoroughly sound, and we wish that all our public men would read his terse description of the neglect and ignorance displayed by Congress in regard to the navy. As Lieutenant Kelley shows, the naval policy and the commercial policy go hand in hand, and must always be considered together. If a war with a foreign nation ever comes to us, it must be a naval war, and we have no navy. We have ten thousand miles of sea-coast, and no ships to guard them or protect our harbors and great cities. We need a navy to police the seas and watch over and aid our commerce. We have at this moment no power to extort apology or redress from the meanest nation without a naval force, and yet we have no ships of war and no good prospect of

any.

There is nothing of greater or more pressing public importance to this country than the immediate construction of a powerful and efficient fleet, and it is a question with which Congress ought at once to deal. A comprehensive policy should also be speedily adopted for naval reorganization. All the departments of coast surveys, lighthouse management, and revenue-marine service ought to be brought at once into the Navy Department, and thus furnish new fields of activity to our naval officers, and save the government from the extravagant multiplication of expensive and overlapping bureaus now scattered through all the departments. The management of yards and the building of a new fleet ought also to be entrusted to line officers, - a course which would take the gov ernment workshops out of politics, and place this important task in the hands of highly trained men, whose only ambition would be to turn out ships superior to those of any other nation.

To discuss at length Lieutenant Kelley's book in a brief notice would be impossible, for the subject of our naval and commercial policy is as large as it

is important. But our public men will do well to heed these suggestions, made by an expert, and should reflect deeply upon them in view of the approaching campaign. The party which in good faith pledges itself, next summer, by its platform and its candidates to free ships,

seamen's rights, and the restoration of the American navy will have taken a long stride toward victory; for this is a living question, and one on which the American people, whenever they have been honestly appealed to, have rendered a hearty response.

I AM little of a bibliomaniac, yet there is or perhaps I should say was - a singular edition of the Scriptures, which I would give much to see: any curious collector would count himself fortunate could he add it to his treasures, since in comparison a Bishop's Bible or a Breeches Bible would be no rarity. But alas! I fear that this prize must be foregone, numbered in the Catalogue of Things Lost, never to rejoice the book-hunting virtuoso; though it is barely possible that it may yet be exhumed from the dust of some old attic, where it has been keeping the company of the missing title-deed or other truant document of more than common interest. But I hasten to relate all that has been preserved to the present generation of the history of this obscure yet fame-worthy edition, which, it must be premised, consisted of but one copy. This copy, originally an ordinary King James version, through a mighty labor of revision bestowed upon it had come to be called, from the name of the reviser, Old Dickerman's Bible." The oral chronicle by me consulted witnesses that Old Dickerman followed the calling of a farmer; whether successful or unsuccessful in that occupation, the tradition does not state. Probably his record upon that point, could it be produced, would not bear the closest scrutiny; his was undoubtedly a case of the candle hid under a bushel, of talents

that gained no usance. Had circumstances permitted him to make the most of his natural gifts, it is more than likely that he would have specially distinguished himself in the domain of theological research and criticism. As it was, unaided by the advantages which scholarship would have afforded, remote from philological esprit de corps, he perhaps anticipated the utmost to be accomplished in the field of biblical inquiry and expurgation. Tradition represents that his reputation for piety, among those who best knew him, was very great, his conversance with the Scriptures most remarkable. I wish it might be known at what stage of his investigations he began to exercise that cool judicial faculty which rendered him the most dispassionate of scriptural critics. Exact history permits me to say that it at length became a fixed habit with him to have pen and ink at hand, when he read, and that as often as he found anything in holy writ which he judged to be apocryphal he would run his pen through the offending passage, at the same time thus tersely expressing himself: "Don't believe that; won't have that in my Bible!" It seems a pity that there should remain no Index Expurgatory to show what portions of Scripture suffered under his unsparing stylus. Suppose that he left marginal notes explaining his objections to the passages expunged, by how much is