rian suggestion, which, though subordinate in the narrative, finally absorbs the thought and interest; and in the remaining poems, which do not stand out like those that have been named, there is a very even execution together with power in the thought itself.

In Miss Reese's collection, A Handful of Lavender,' the most excellent portion is that which describes in minute detail objects of nature, and especially scenes about the house and garden which appeal to the reader through old and familiar associations. The writer studies these sketches very carefully and renders them faithfully, and in the sonnets in particular she frames vignettes of landscape that are almost photographic. Possibly there are more daffodils in her verse than usually blow in our gardens, but the blackberry sprays and other favorites of the American roadside are also to be found, and she succeeds in introducing a bit of fine sky here and there with good effect. It was in such work that her verse first attracted attention, and it is not unnatural, therefore, to find this still the best; but in other parts of the collection there is more ambition, and, as was to be expected, in these later poems there is something of literary affectation. The proof is to be found in her metres, which are not simple, and in the imitativeness of the diction and the mood. In a young writer such work as this represents a period of experiment and trial; but as yet her original talent has not freed itself from the literary traditions, not altogether of the best, which she has adopted. It is as a landscape writer that she succeeds, in minute realistic rendering of the traits of nature which she knows by heart. This is one of the provinces in which minor poetry

A Handful of Lavender. BY LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1891.

2 Days and Dreams. Poems. By MADISON

is often especially fortunate, and, by the modesty of its aim, avoids many dangers. Here, at least, Miss Reese is most pleasing, while in her "lily" poems, refrains, and Browningesque tragedy there is less of value.

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Mr. Cawein, in his latest volume, Days and Dreams, has avoided some of the graver faults of taste and the absurdities of his earlier verse, but in so doing he has lost what chiefly characterized it without developing anything new to take the place of the old. The single remarkable thing in his muse which still remains is the fluency of his words. There is no effort in his utterance, and it goes on without any sign of weariness; but, excepting verbal flow, there is nothing distinctive in his verse. The gift of language is a useless gift when one has nothing to say, and this is the trick which some bad fairy seems to have played on him.

The Epic of Saul3 is one of those long poems upon religious subjects which appear about once in a decade, and appeal to a certain part of the community on pious rather than on poetical grounds. The present epic describes the career of Saul as a persecutor, and finds its dénoûment in his conversion. It has occupied, we are told, several years in the composition, and the author took the trouble to visit Palestine in order to make the work more valuable by fidelity to the actual scenes of the story. So much pains deserves reward. The study of Milton, too, is apparent in the blank verse, though the presence also of the incongruous style of Browning makes an odd mixture. It is hardly necessary to say that judgment should not be delivered in such a case on poetical grounds merely. The substance of the work is reflection upon St. Paul's character

CAWEIN. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1891.

3 The Epic of Saul. By WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1891.

blended with a fictitious narrative of his early experiences. Much thought of a religious sort is necessarily introduced, and there are, as a matter of course, minor characters, such as Stephen the Martyr and Rachel and Ruth out of the Scriptural side, and Sergius the Roman soldier out of the pagan side. The labor shown is considerable; the thought

is apposite to the subject; the characterization commits no fault in violation of sacred associations; and to many readers, doubtless, the book will be welcome, and by them it will be valued. We are bound in conscience to add that with all this it has one singular defect, — we have been unable to discover any poetry in it.

It seemed a good deal to believe, when one was told that the least dramatic of modern story-tellers had turned one of his analytic fictions into an admirable play. But the statement was made with such apparent conviction by certain of those who had seen the "first night" of The American in the provinces that one could only wait impatiently for its promised promotion to the London stage. After all, nothing gives such a lift out of the mire of realism as to have a paradox proved true.

Well, Mr. James's American has got its "grade." It has, at this writing, been running a fortnight at the Opéra Comique, and is not yet threatened with displacement, which proves at least that the British public likes it fairly well. With out, then, pausing to discuss the abstract worth of such a verdict from a public whose idol, though a highly distinguished man, is probably one of the very worst actors who ever won histrionic fame, let us inquire, "in a spirit of love, my brethren," what the merits of the new play really are.

They may be summed up in one word, the part of Christopher Newman, which is so much better played by Mr. Compton than might have been supposed possible for an Englishman that it seems quite worth while to indicate the points at which his conception

fails. Mr. Compton's make-up is faultless. He has managed in the most remarkable manner to attenuate his English frame without sacrificing an atom of its power. He has duly observed that curious distinction which causes some London tailors to advertise as a specialty "the American shoulder.” His honest, clear, beardless face, at once guileless and knowing, amiable and shrewd, is that of the valiant soldier of fortune, who is also the universal brother, ready anywhere and on the slightest provocation to "hit out" for a lady in distress.

The florid politeness of Newman's amusingly unworldly manners is well caught, nor does Mr. Compton miss the touch of quaint romanticism which belongs to the type, nor a certain pathos in the fact that the audacious adventurer has upheld his fair domestic ideal and kept it spotless through all the devious ways he has had to travel in amassing the fortune which he hopes will enable him to realize it. The nasal tones of the American are overdone, but this is perhaps as indispensable for stage effect as the blackening of eyebrows and lashes. Where Mr. Compton oftenest fails is in his accents and inflections, in what the French call the chant of his sentences. There is a notion prevailing in England that Americans end every phrase with a rising inflection.

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slightest independent observation might show them the fallacy of this, but independent observation is a great deal to expect. The truth is that there is a certain emphatic dropping of the voice - vibrant if the organs are good, nasal if they are weak — which is much more distinctively American than the tone of everlasting inquiry. Take as an instance the really touching passage where Newman, in the midst of his manly pleadings with Claire for her love, exclaims, "I'm kind, kind, kind!" We all know how he would have said it, slowly and emphatically, "kind, kind, KÌND;" the pitch growing lower, the voice falling farther, at each repetition. Mr. Compton, true to inane tradition, briskly asseverates, "kind, kind, kind," which is false and puerile. The sentiment of Newman's speech in this instance is in fact so delicate that one almost wonders at its having been left in the dialogue of the play, where the peculiar subtlety and refinement of the original have for the most part been ruthlessly, and one cannot help thinking needlessly, sacrificed to supposed histrionic effect. There is an exquisite point in the lovemaking of the novel, where Newman says tenderly, with reference to the mysterious dangers which seem to beset his lady's path, "Come to me and you will be safe. As safe," he adds, with a certain simple solemnity, "as in your father's arms." This is cut out, of course, and very likely it would not have appealed to the average British play

goer.

But why should the playwright or play-tinker likewise have eliminated that delightfully humorous and extremely telling passage which strikes so clearly the very keynote of the American's naïve character, where Claire's brother, Valentin de Bellegarde, is vainly endeavoring to persuade the ingenuous barbarian who loves his sister of the perfect worthlessness of the Nioche family, both father and daughter? Between amuse

ment and exasperation, and with what doubtless seems to himself brutal frankness, the young Frenchman at last informs his friend that if Mademoiselle Nioche were to part with her virtue in furtherance of her ambition her father "would not do what Virginius did." "I don't know what Virginius did," replies the candid American, "but Monsieur Nioche would shoot Mademoiselle Noémie." This is inimitable provided the Nioche family must be introduced into the play at all; but the truth is they are mere excrescences there. The festive and unprincipled Noémie is a clever sketch for a gallery of modern French portraits; but she has wonderfully little to do in the galley which Newman is so manfully striving to row against the current of aristocratic prejudice; and she and her contemptible father not merely lower the tone of the piece, but confuse its action to such an extent that the wonder is how it can be intelligible to a spectator who has not previously made a close and admiring study of one of Mr. James's very best

stories.

The first act, which passes in the Nioche apartment, where the girl is seen playing off her various lovers against one another and against Newman, who makes no pretense of being her lover, is tiresome and irrelevant. The scene where she is discovered perched at the top of a step-ladder in the newly decorated salon of the American, and seemingly domesticated there, quite justifies, upon the face of it, the crafty old Marquise in breaking off her daughter's engagement. Nor is any good reason shown on the stage why Valentin, who retains more of the charm of his original character than any of the other dramatis persona except the hero, should fight a duel and die; and so the last scene of that pleasant young creature's life, one of the most profoundly tragic that Mr. James ever penned, is rendered futile and merely sensational. For the rest,

in the case both of Valentin's brother the Marquis and of the old servant Mrs. Bread, we have a colorless rendering of a colorless character, which is well enough. But the Marquise de Bellegarde is grossly and ludicrously overacted, and the greatest pity of all remains to be noted. It is that Miss Elizabeth Robins should have been led, by her unquestionable success in a very different kind of drama, to import into the chill and stately saloons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain the hysterical manners of Ibsen's morbid heroines. The fair daughter of the old French noblesse, with her exquisite breeding, her gentle pride, her unquestioning piety, her unalterable grace and composure of manner, is made to struggle and sob, to flutter and writhe, and in general to comport herself so unlike Newman's angelic ideal that the conventionally happy" ending which replaces the sombre dénoûment of the novel makes us feel rather sorry for him than otherwise; and we are inclined to echo the prayer of the preposterous old Marquise, who, when the lovers have departed together, shrieks twice as the curtain

falls, -emitting her words of warning with the timbre and tremolo of a copper gong:

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May they never come back! May they n-e-ever co-o-me ba-ack! As indeed why should they?

It may be admitted that the defects of this dramatization of The American, glaring though they be, are of a nature to show that a very much better play might have been made out of the novel, and hence, perhaps, that Mr. James may yet win a legitimate triumph in this new line of his. But whatever success may attend the present performance will unhappily be due to a sacrifice of all the distinction of the original tale, and to a substitution for the keen though quiet wit of its dialogue of such trivial catchwords as the perpetual "That's just what I want t' see of the complacent millionaire, which figures in all the advertisements. American vulgarity is always a tolerably welcome spectacle upon the London stage, and even Mr. Compton's American, in some respects an excellent conception, is made quite vulgar enough to atone for many of his virtues.

History and Biography. Lewis Cass, by Andrew C. McLaughlin, is the twenty-second number in the American Statesmen Series (Houghton), and is a very good example of that treatment of public men which takes special account of the material in which they work. History is more than a background to this biographical study; there is a blending of the personal and the social which evinces a keen desire on the part of the biographer to see his subject in all its relations, and to give the reader the whole benefit of his collateral study. Thus the book, besides being an admirable inquiry into the character and career of a notable figure in our history, is a full, particular, and

vigorous sketch of a section and examination of conditions which made Cass a firstrate man, whereas under other conditions and in an older section he might have been a second-rate man. The first number of A Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology (Houghton) contains two papers by the editor, J. Walter Fewkes, and one by Benjamin Ives Gilman. All the papers deal with the Zuñi Indians, and are further efforts to make available for students that curious museum of American antiquities which we know as Zuñi land. Probably the Zuñis themselves live and move and have their being without consciousness of their peculiar value as a sur

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vival, but never was there a more delightful surprise than when the cover was taken off this corner of America and we could all look in and see a mirror of antiquity. Mr. Gilman's paper on Zuñi Melodies is based upon phonographic cylinders. About an Old New England Church, by Gerald Stanley Lee. (W. W. Knight & Co., Sharon, Conn.) The Congregational church of Sharon, Conn., celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the joint founding of church and town, a year or so ago, with religious exercises, a mild bit of masquerade in the shape of an audience antiquely dressed, a dinner, speeches, singing, and an address by the young pastor. The address is preserved in this little book, and though sometimes rather conscious in its levity is a good - humored, lively running comment on manners and men in the local history, and a study in the Puritanism of a Connecticut town a century and a half ago. The offhand character of the address makes better speech than reading, but Mr. Lee may be thanked for so fresh an historical sketch. The History of the Middle Ages, by Victor Duruy. Translated by E. H. and M. D. Whitney; with notes and revisions by George Burton Adams. (Holt.) A great merit of this comprehensive work is the skill with which cause and effect in human history are kept clearly in mind in the midst of many and otherwise confusing details. The author has a clear conception of the large movements in process during the Middle Ages, and he has an artist's perception of the facts which must be noted in order that the student may be able to grasp the masses into which these facts group themselves. History of the Jews, by H. Graetz. (The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia.) The first volume of this work has been issued, covering the time from the earliest period to the death of Simon the Maccabee. The original work in eleven volumes has been translated, under the author's supervision, into English, and compressed so as to occupy but five volumes, although somewhat extended. It is of interest to Christian students familiar with the facts of Jewish history through the Old Testament to see how a modern Jewish historian will use the same facts, weaving them into a continuous history. The writer does not ignore the superNO. 410.

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natural element, but he seems disposed to treat it somewhat in the spirit of modern criticism, and the result is that Jewish history is as it were secularized and rendered less exceptional. Professor Graetz makes his early narrative a somewhat generalized one, and shows a singular absence of preciseness in the matter of dates. In speaking of the exodus from Egypt he says, "The fourth generation of the first immigrants left Egypt after a sojourn of several centuries," a sentence which carries its own contradiction. His whole method is that of a man who supposes in his readers an exact knowledge upon which he builds.Mr. Gladstone is the subject of a volume in the series The Queen's Prime Ministers. (Harpers.) Mr. George W. E. Russell, who writes the book, has done a difficult task well. The personal biography is necessarily brief, because the plan of the book calls for a political biography, and because Gladstone entered public life at twenty-two, and has lived and breathed the air of Parliament ever since. Yet it would not be possible to measure his public career justly without that knowledge of his personality which explains his temperament and his ingrained tastes. Mr. Russell has provided the needful information in a succinct form, and his final chapter, in which he analyzes Mr. Gladstone's character, is eloquent in its restraint and vigor of touch. With the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a Narrative of the First Voyage to the Western World, drawn mainly from the Diary of Christopher Columbus, by Charles Paul Mackie. (McClurg.) Mr. Mackie attempts a half fictitious and wholly eulogistic sketch of the career of Columbus. He decorates it just so far as may be done by a slight imagination of scenes and conversation, but does not depart far from the record. The result is that the reader is somewhat uneasy, not knowing whether he is reading enlivened history or can let himself go in a story founded on fact. The author's view of Columbus is that of an advocate and stout champion. It must be said, however, that it is a somewhat conventional figure presented to the eye, and one is scarcely helped to any discriminating judgment of Columbus. Austin Phelps, a Memoir, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. (Scribners.) Mrs. Ward has been able to avail herself of an autobiographical fragment by her