per of Mr. Crawford's English is like that of a Damascene sword. — Dally, by Maria Louise Pool. (Harpers.) Dally was a North Carolina waif whom a benevolent lady rescued from squalid surroundings and sent for rearing to a conscientious Yankee widow. The contact of this piece of "poor white trash," albeit possessed of a native charm, with the fixed ways of a thrifty New England woman offers a chance not only for most amusing incidents, but for the more subtle disclosure of the reciprocal influence of the two characters. There is introduced also the girl's dreadful brother, Barker, who is a masterly production. The book is indeed one of striking merit in the matter of characterization, and if Miss Pool's own writing were as good as her dialectic parts the book would be one of rare excellence, but the rudeness of the country element calls for greater delicacy in the setting. In spite of obvious defects, however, the book is decidedly one to be read. Recent numbers of Lee & Shepard's Good Company Series of paper novels are, Which Wins? by Mary H. Ford, who calls it further a Story of Social Conditions, and dedicates it to the Farmers' Alliance; Sweet and Twenty, by Mary Farley Sanborn, a brightly written novel of the conventional sort, a society man and country lass, with interference, misunderstanding, reconciliation, and bliss. These two novels are new; a third is a reissue of a collection of J. T. Trowbridge's rememberable stories, Coupon Bonds, Madam Waldoborough's Carriage, The Man who stole a Meeting - House, and others; the twelfth number is a reissue of Amanda M. Douglas's tale of Osborne of Arrochar, an American story with figures and scenes more or less consciously copied from English fiction. Carine, a Story of Sweden, by Louis Enault. Translated by Linda da Kowalewska. With illustrations by Louis K. Harlow. (Little, Brown & Co.) A pretty story, told in a kind of falsetto voice, of a young girl whose mind has been unhinged by a cruel disappointment in love, and who moves through the tale as in a sort of dream, waking at last to reality through the medium of the love of the hero of the tale. The pictures of Swedish life are not native but foreign, and a French accent touches all the speech. Otto the Knight, and Other Trans-Missis

sippi stories, by Octave Thanet. (Houghton.) The scene of the stories is chiefly in Arkansas, and though the writer is not a native of the region she has known it by sojourn so intimately as to be able to write with confidence. Something more, however, than intimate acquaintance with a country is requisite before one can speak its language artistically; there must be penetration, sympathy, selective power, apprehension of what is common as well as perception of what is distinctive. These Octave Thanet has; and more than this, she has the pervasive humor which makes her work full of a fine humanity and rich feeling. She tells a story well, and thus her separate pieces are not mere sketches of transMississippi life; they are artistic wholes. — Passion-Flowers and the Cross, by Emma Howard Wight. (Calendar Publishing Co., Baltimore.) Stuff. "A robe of some soft clinging stuff," "perfumed hair," and all the other well-worn phrases of the amatory novelist. Masters and Men, by Eugene J. Hall. (Charles H. Sergel & Co., Chicago.) The author of this story intended, apparently, to make it a contribution toward the solution of labor problems. It may be said that a political economist should not be judged by his success or failure as a novelist, but one may be permitted to doubt the value of his studies in the science of society when his productions in the art of society are so mechanical and unreal. — Chattanooga, a Romance of the American Civil War, by F. A. Mitchel. (American News Co.) All things are possible in a romance which deals with the adventures of a spy, and so the hero of this tale, besides carrying out his mission to learn the movements of the Confederate army, brings back a wife whom he has captured by some sleight of human nature from her Confederate lover. There is a capital study of a boy who wears stupidity as a mask. — A Prince of Good Fellows. (American News Co.) This story is located among the cottou plantations lying on the Mississippi River. The author affects to be a Virginian gentleman, and appears to be a reader of Thackeray, with the result that, though there are many individual scenes and pictures of interest, the novel as a whole is a somewhat elaborately tedious tale. Fourteen to One, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. (Houghton.) A collection of

stories, some of which have already won their place in popular favor. There is nothing of the idle singer in Mrs. Ward, for she writes stories only when the theme of the story has possessed her, and thus the outcome is always a distinct contribution, some positive expression of faith; for, however artful she may be in construction, her art holds some bit of human action tried by the highest standards. Diana Fontaine, by Algernon Ridgeway. (Lippincott.) A novel of Virginian life, in which the old and the new are curiously blended. The story is slight enough, the author's chief end being to sketch a few characters to whom he is attracted. The old "Southern" type of fiction is faintly remembered by the reader, but war and new industry have affected the novelist as well as the life portrayed. There are many interesting passages, such as the description of the dance after the tournament, and frequent keen reflections, as in the comment on the Southern mind during the early reconstruction period. With more of a story to tell, the author might easily have made a book of much significance. — Balaam and his Master, and Other Sketches and Stories, by Joel Chandler Harris. (Houghton.) The staying qualities of Mr. Harris's work are to be referred to the depth of his portraiture. However grotesque the external features of his characters and scenes, there is always to be found, whether the figures are black or white, a fundamental, substantial, and firmly drawn piece of human nature, so that the impression produced is a solid and not a superficial one. The half dozen stories and sketches which make up this volume (the title-story, A Conscript's Christmas, Ananias, Where's Duncan? Mom Bi, The Old Bascom Place) have a power to fix themselves in the reader's memory which merely graphic tales do not possess.

Humor. Farming, by Richard Kendall Munkittrick. Illustrated by A. B. Frost. (Harpers.) The army of potato bugs marching across the cover of this showy book notifies the reader before he opens it that he is to have the travesty and not the serious side. The facetious conception of the city-bred man making a somersault and coming up a farmer, only to execute another turn at the end of the year and become once more a sadder and a wiser city man, is worked out with somewhat

sparse humor. Even Mr. Frost's pictures seem to have caught something of the indifference which results from using so well worn a theme. Diary of a Pilgrimage (and Six Essays), by Jerome K. Jerome. (Holt.) The pilgrimage was to Ober-Ammergau to see the Passion Play, and Mr. Jerome stops laughing when he comes to this point, and does not begin again till he has passed it. High spirits confused by vigorous effort at sentiment and subsequent exhaustion characterize this book like others of the writer's production. Was it for this America was discovered, that American humor should revisit England? There is humor in the book, yet so slouchy is the style that, after reading it, one finds Mark Twain severe and Burnand a classic to be examined in. The Life-Romance of an Algebraist, by George Winslow Pierce. (J. G. Cupples, Boston.) Mr. Pierce stirs a mixture of algebra, verse, philosophy, nonsense, and sentiment, and leaves the reader to decide whether it is half baked or good for human nature's daily food.

History and Biography. Boston, by Henry Cabot Lodge, is a volume in the English series of Historic Towns. (Longmans.) Mr. Lodge has had a clear conception of the task to be undertaken, which was to set forth the Puritan ideas as demonstrated in the most noteworthy concentrated product of those ideas. In tracing the development of Boston, he has found it necessary, therefore, to spend a good deal of his strength in expounding what is in effect the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Possibly this course could not be avoided, but we think something has been lost in the vividness of the impression to be made by the town itself. There has been a loss also in this regard, that the proportions of the subject have suffered, and not enough space was reserved for a portrait of Boston in its latest historical phase. That is to say, there was a true culmination in the history of the town to be found in Boston just before the influx of immigrants and the efflux of BostoniThen it was that the provincial town showed the finest flower of its two hundred years of cultivation, and indicated what generations of seclusion from Europe had accomplished under Puritan ideas. Mr. Lodge gives a slight hint of this in his closing chapter, but we think he scarcely dis

ans.

closes the marked difference between the Boston of 1840 and that of 1890. The past fifty years have seen great changes which are still in progress, but the perspective permitted by this space of time renders the Boston of 1840 a fit conclusion to the study of the town as an historic one. Mr. Lodge writes with the ease of one to whom the subject in its larger aspects is familiar. Theodoric the Goth, the Barbarian Champion of Civilization, by Thomas Hodgkin. (Putnams.) A volume in Heroes of the Nations Series, and written with a clear notion of what the readers of such a series desire. Mr. Hodgkin shows excellent selective power in setting forth, freed from the entanglement of historic speculation, the figure of this man born before his time. His chapters illustrative of the civilization of Rome at the period are especially interesting, and he is often quite happy in making his points clear by a comparison with modern conditions and events. Mr. Hodgkin, in attempting to explain the affinity of Theodoric and other barbaric heroes with Arianism in its contest with the Athanasian believers, possibly overlooks the influence of the Arian notion of the Godhead which tends to emphasize the objective, kingly notion, so obvious to these commanders and rulers. Peel, by J. R. Thursfield (Macmillan), is one of the series of Twelve English Statesmen, and answers well the design of the series to present "in historic order the lives and work of those leading actors who by their direct influence have left an abiding mark on the policy, the institutions, and the position of Great Britain among states." Nothing so well illustrates the distinction between English and American political life as these studies of statesmen, and the career of Peel, devoted by his father to public life as religiously as a New England woman might devote her son to the Christian ministry, is an example of the profound influence in public affairs of the person who made statesmanship a profession at a time when the governing body of England was small, and whoever was at the centre of things had it in his power to mould institutions and laws much as the ruling authority in a great railroad corporation may do to-day. Mr. Thursfield writes with vigor and with discrimination. Indeed, the history of statesmanship in England is so much the bio

graphy of statesmen that there has grown up a school of political writers whose main strength lies in their psychological analysis. It is so much more satisfactory to study the working of one man's mind than that of a mob of men. - Colonel F. Maurice has reprinted, with additions, his article War, first issued in the Encyclopædia Britannica. (Macmillan.) The article was written for the general public, not for military critics, and the book appeals in like manner to the student of history by the skill with which it translates into the vernacular principles of the military art which necessarily find more technical expression among soldiers. Colonel Maurice, in fact, seeks constantly for the fundamental principles, not in the formulæ of writers on military movements, but in the course of action followed by great commanders, and by putting himself as far as possible in the place of those who have made war. He recognizes clearly that in the marvelous change of conditions the only permanent elements are those which lie in human thought. - The Story of the Filibusters, by James Jeffrey Roche; to which is added the Life of Colonel David Crockett. (Macmillan.) A volume in The Adventure Series, of which about half is devoted to William Walker's expedition. Mr. Roche looks upon these adventures from the point of view of the dramatist rather than of the moralist, and his narrative is full of picturesque details. The spectacle of a man indifferent to the odds against him, and especially insolent in his habit as regards national relations, has for our author a peculiar interest, and despite the fundamental difference there is sufficient likeness between the temper of filibuster and Fenian to make the subject one to win his sympathy. He has done his work capitally. The latter part is occupied by a reprint in abridged form of Crockett's racy autobiography. - The Story of Portugal, in The Story of the Nations Series (Putnams), by H. Morse Stephens, is more distinctively an annalistic history than the other volumes of the series, the author being driven to this treatment by the lack of existing histories of the country. The contact of this little nation with the rest of the world in its great period renders its history full of variety and incident. Indeed, the smallness of the unit lends to it a peculiar attraction. What Mr. Stephens

says of the occupation by Portugal of Brazil is of special interest in view of the present autonomy of the greater Portugal in America. The book is one of the freshest and most useful in the series. Choses d'Amérique, les Crises Economique et Religieuse aux États-Unis, by Max Leclerc. (E. Plon, Paris.) The author was in this country in the summer of 1890, and the two subjects which appear to have especially engaged his attention were the McKinley bill and the relation held to America by the Church of Rome. What, he asks, is the part which this church is to play? With its ancient order and its new environment, how is it to continue Catholic and yet become national? Mr. Leclerc's travels took him into Kentucky, and he gives a lively account of the new South as illustrated by Middleborough. He devotes a chapter to American characteristics, and an enthusiastic one to the portraiture of Cardinal Gibbons. The book is an interesting addition to the literature of its class. The second number of Harvard Historical Monographs (Ginn) is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart's Introduction to the Study of Federal Government. The work is rather a syllabus of the subject than an extended treatise, and is marked by the author's careful, minute analysis and scrupulous thoroughness. After discussing the theory of federal government, he takes up the subject historically, dealing with Ancient Confederations, Mediæval Leagues, and National Confederations; then he describes the four great existing federations of the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and

Canada, and closes with a chapter on LatinAmerican federations. The Appendix contains a conspectus of the federal constitutions of the four great federations, and a bibliography of federal government. Struggles of the Nations, or The Principal Wars, Battles, Sieges, and Treaties of the World, by S. M. Burnham. (Lee & Shepard.) Two volumes octavo are required by Mr. Burnham for the explication of his subject. He is not content, like Mr. Creasy, to limit himself to the decisive battles of the world, but goes over the ground by countries. Thus his first chapter is devoted to the ancient peoples of North Africa; his second and third chapters take in the nations of Western Asia; his fourth Central and Eastern Asia; and then by way of Turkey, Russia, and Scandinavian countries he comes to Greece and Rome. A queer chapter in its combination is the tenth, which includes the Gothic Race, the German Empire, the Austrian Empire, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland. The British Empire has fifty pages given it, and the last two chapters of the first volume take in South and Central America. The whole of the second volume is given to the United States and a chapter on Treaties. This is a compilation of facts run mad. Proportion is lost sight of. Cause and effect retire into the corner, but dates, figures, and names are rampant. The space given to the United States permits more detail for single engagements, and one might possibly read this volume, but we defy anybody but a proof-reader to read the first.

BEFORE me lies a pile of cuBucolic Reading. riously interesting periodicals, giving a glimpse into a world nearly unknown to cities, although so well " exploited" for dialect stories.

women to whose tastes they minister and whose needs they supply are brighter in every way than their kind in any other country.

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appearance indicate the thrift and economy which are their attributes. Having already reached tens of thousands of country kitchens, they are tireless in their efforts to extend their domain; and their premium lists are both interesting and suggestive. A Western paper offers ice-cream freezers, corsets, and cheap jewelry, evidently with an eye to farm girls. An Eastern one bids for the patronage of girls in the "singingseats" by an offer of small church organs. These periodicals are the most neighborly of visitors. No literary formality reminds that one is reading print, and not chatting over the stove or Monday's line. Their easy sociability comes of the fact that the shrewd editors allow the housewives themselves to fill much of the paper with what they call Kitchen Chats, written on the back doorstep, or, as one of them says, "sitting on the corner of the wood-box." These chats establish communication between remote sections. The farmeress in Maine writes to her paper her way of dyeing carpet rags or whitewashing her pantry. By and by a farmeress in far Oregon writes to the same journal thanking the Maine wife, and describing her own rag-mats or her way of making cheese. Not unfrequently the two are thus brought into a personal and private correspondence, exchanging recipes, patterns, flower seeds, and what not. One such correspondence between a Montana claim and a New Hampshire farm is already three years old. The writers exchange photographs and family histories; name their cows and chickens, as well as their children, for each other. They will probably never meet unless in a world where kitchens are no more, but in this one, at least, they are a "solid comfort" to each other.

The English of this "chatter" is not quietly classic. It is gasping and breathless, as if the suds were boiling over or the scent of scorching cake in the air. Cooking, washing, ironing, mending, making, the care of children, flowers, birds, poultry, etc., furnish subjects more interesting than ever came up in Noctes Ambrosianæ.

These periodicals all give stories. Nothing in the stories tempts to rainbow-following for fairy gold. The lights are all vertical, the forms definite. Nothing is there to breed discontent with the farms, where they are chiefly read, although

and here is greater than expected wisdom - even the farm is not gilded and refined, but merely brightened with the clear daylight of good temper and good sense.

In all these homespun and bucolic stories nobody travels in Europe. Ours might be a world without cathedrals and castles, without traditions, without even a past, for all these guileless stories tell. No heroine is haunted by pale memories shrieking piteously through the night; none trample the grass over graves by day with shuddering feet; and never a man covets his neighbor's wife, however he may admire her fishballs and doughnuts.

Rustic picnics, unexpected company, helpful guests or hindering, tea parties, washday meals, triumphant lunches and disastrous dinners, take the place of music and moonlight, raiment and cooings, in more sentimental fiction. One story is founded upon the religious effect of a change from salt-rising to yeast bread. Another is based upon the moral influence of carpet rags. Occasionally a deft touch in these stories, written chiefly in farmhouses, surprises, and makes one wonder how much real literary talent is born to blush unseen and to wither there.

In the homes so plainly pictured here almost everything is "home-made." The extraordinary prescience which finds treasures in apparently chaotic refuse savors of Robinson Crusoe's romantic realism.

The "poetry," which the editors announce will not be paid for, is not, strange to say, in the least sylvan, pastoral, or romantic. Neither is it picturesque, "yearning," or passionate. No Psyche soul beats its radiant wings against adamantine fate. Either hunger for the Vague has not penetrated to our American farms, or its plaints have been "declined with thanks" as insufficiently "moral” and didactic.

are

We other women, for whom all things "ready-made," from dish-mops to coiffures, may imagine such lives burdened to the last degree. We need but to read these periodicals, and mark the bright enthusiasm shimmering over every line, to realize that the necessity of work is one of humanity's blessings, and that in intelligent labor is the happiness of these active women, with their beelike and birdlike instincts to gather and build and hum.

The farm larder is seen to be, except for