Mi-Carême, the joyful break in the long six weeks' gloom. It was called by the Church "Lætare Sunday," and on that day rose-colored vestments were worn. In Lancashire it is "Simnel Sunday," and the shops are full of gaily decorated cakes, as it comes round. "Carlings" are dried peas, which are eaten on Passion Sunday. "Paste-egg Day" is a corruption of "Pace-egg Day" ---Pace is Easter in Scotch, and Northumbrian English. The fourteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Henryson, makes the town mouse say to her country sister, "My Good Friday is better nor your Pace." The rolling and tossing of the brightly colored Easter eggs by the children is one of the events of the year in parts of the North of England. They are not seen south of York. The "lifting" of the passer-by is another custom which is not yet extinct. We read of Edward I. being "lifted" by four ladies of the Court. It was in intention symbolical of the Saviour's resurrection; but no doubt was looked upon as part of the "Easter Laughter," the "Paschales Risus," like the merry jests and pranks at Purim.

That the dying out of these commemorations and representations has weakened the hold of the people upon the facts of the Christian story no one can doubt. One has only to listen to the comments of our countrymen and of the Americans in foreign churches and picture galleries to see how slight is the knowledge possessed by many of them, not of the poorer classes only, of the great Christian facts. A tourist, pausing before a wayside Calvary and pointing to the figures standing on either side the Cross, has been heard to say, "Mary Magdalene and Peter, I presume." Truly amazing was the utterance of an American lady before a picture of the Last Judgment, at Florence, "Is that Christ or the Virgin Mary in the middle? Oh! I suppose it's Christ

he's got a light mus-tash"! The present writer has heard a lecturer in a provincial town, dilating on his experiences on the Rhine, describe a crucifix as "the Virgin Mary stuck up on a cross."

A Russian writer has given a vivid description of the custom of making "a Jordan" in the frozen rivers on the Feast of the Epiphany. A hole is made in the ice, a cross is set up, and a dove cut out of ice is placed upon it. The artist is at work on the dove, surrounded by the help and sympathy of the whole village. "All smile upon him, they sympathize, they praise Sergius, they feel that his art is not a personal matter, but one common to the whole people. Sergius himself may be insignificant, idle, drunken, a spendthrift, but when he stands with his colors and his circle in his hand, he is something higher, a servant of God.

The day of the Feast arrives. The sun shines dazzlingly. The pealing of bells resounds above, a thousand heads are uncovered-a thousand signs of the cross. The cross and the dove send out such rays that it blinds one to look. Merciful God! How beautiful! Through the crowd runs a murmur of surprise and delight." The whole scene is a capital illustration of the happiness the Church is always giving. This is a kind of joy of which there is very little in England. The wells have been stopped up. But something yet remains. The people still know the meaning of Christmas and Easter. How long they will continue to do so it is impossible to say. if the teaching of the Creed in the schools is to be supplanted by a rationalized Puritanism, a vague homeless religiosity. In a Church school known to the writer there hung on the walls some S.P.C.K. colored prints of the Annunciation, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Ascension. When the school passed into the hands of the

county council these were at once removed. The principal ornament of the walls is now a picture of the postman on his rounds. Being also a messenger, he was probably thought an appropriate substitute for Gabriel.

It is better for the mass of the people to have a religion which binds them all into one, and colors the whole of life. It is better that they should look over vast distances, and have windows opened on infinite things. The blocking up of these windows is what is to be dreaded. A Moslem child weeping The Outlook.

for the sorrows of Hassan and Hussein at a Persian passion play possesses something wanting to the English elementary school boy whose mind is fed on Scraps and Answers and Tit-Bitx. One is tempted to exclaim with Wordsworth:

Great God, I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.

Mr. H. Chatfield-Taylor, of Chicago, the author of the recently published life of Molière, has received the cross of the Legion of Honor. He had previously been named Officer de l'Instruction Publique, an honor rarely conferred upon foreigners.

A work of a very elaborate nature is being issued by Mr. Oostock of Utrecht. This is a complete reproduction of the sixteenth-century manuscript of the Hortulus Animae, in the Imperial Court Library at Vienna. Three years will be occupied in completing the eleven parts.

Readers who enjoy supping on horrors with Jack London will be disappointed to find that he has not succeeded in bringing up for them out of the Mid-Pleistocene period, anything more blood-curdling than usual. The hero of his new novel, "Before Adam," is a Tree-Man; the heroine, one of the Fire-People; the villain, an atavism of the day; and their adventures, brutal as some of them are, run along too grotesque and sordid a level to stir the sensibilities. It is hard to see how the story could have been readable, as

Selections from Dr. Johnson's "Rambler'" made by Mr. W. Hale White ("Mark Rutherford") will form the next volume of the "Oxford Library of Prose and Poetry," the editor's aim be ing mainly to reveal Johnson's mind. since in his view Dr. Johnson is but partially understood by those who know him through "Boswell." Another volume of Jowett's Essays-dissertations turning principally on his method of interpreting Scripture-with an introduction by Dr. Lewis Campbell, is also about to be issued in the "Oxford Library of Prose and Poetry." The essays selected include those on the interpretation of Scripture (published in "Essays and Reviews"), the abstract ideas of the New Testament. the Old Testament, and contrasts of prophecy, and the sermon on Richard Baxter is appended.

About a dozen years ago it would not have been so very inexcusable to think that solid information as to Balzac was a mine nearly exhausted. Of opinion on him, and of its expression, there could be no exhaustion; every generation, almost every individual, who, with some care for letters, approached the subject, must or might have something new to say on it, as on that of all the greatest men of letters of the world. But nearly half a century had passed since Balzac's death; he had been, both before that death and after it, the subject of almost infinite gossip, and of not a little serious treatment; his work had been presented in an édition définitive furnished with all the apparatus that a collector of unsparing industry, great resources, methodical spirit, and (most valuable of all) a thorough acquaintance not merely with his subject, but with its surroundings, could supply. Here, if anywhere, the attitude of "Mon siège est fait," which the literary inquirer is so often tempted to adopt, might seem justified; here, if anywhere, there might have been an excuse for regarding the communication of fresh material as otiose, impertinent, almost offensive.

Yet few people who had much experience of such things could really have thought that a stationary condition in rebus Balzacianis had been reached. It was well known that the

1 "H. de Balzac, Œuvres Posthumes. Lettres à l'Etrangère." Paris: Calmann Lévy. Tome I (1833-1842), 1899; Tome II (1842–1844), 1906.

2" L'Euvre de H. de Balzac." Par Marcel Barrière. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890.

3 "Essais sur Balzac. Seconds Essais sur Balzac." Par Paul Flat. Paris: Plon, 18931894.

4 "Honoré de Balzac." Par Edmond Biré. Paris: Champion, 1897.

5" Balzac Ignoré." Par A. Cabanès. Paris: Charles, 1899.

unhasting, unresting diligence and the ample means of M. Spoelberch de Lovenjou were still at work; and that M. de Lovenjoul, unlike some collectors, was not a person who delighted in reinterring, under jealous guardianship, the treasures which he might have disinterred. Further, Balzac's polypragmatism on the one hand, and that tendency to careful and official preservation of all business documents which the French have inherited from their Roman lords on the other, made it pretty certain that fresh matter would turn up. Moreover, there were abundant opportunities for further illumination. The principal authority for the novelist's early life, his sister Laure Surville, was sometimes quite evidently, though very innocently, untrustworthy; his middle period was subject to the rather flickering lights of Romantic anecdotage and charge; while he himself, though by no means deliberate inventor of mystifications, was too constantly under the influence of a "disrealizing" imagination to be an ideal authority. Above all, it was certain that his letters to the lady whom he adored for the greater part of his literary life, and whom he married just at its close, would, when completely published, give information that could not be neglected. To what extent this new material might affect

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