fidence in the virtues and harmlessness of unrestricted immigration. It is visibly perturbed by the immensity of the problem it has allowed to grow up, and it has no desire to complicate it by opening the door to the Yellow man. And apart from this there is but too much reason to fear that an anti-Japanese prejudice, due to commercial rivalry and to a suspicion of Japanese ingratitude, is gaining ground in the United States. When the question of Japanese immigration is formally raised, as it unquestionably will be, the South will side with the Pacific coast and the East and Middle West may conceivably join with them. The Outlook.

That is not a prospect to be anticipated without the gravest concern. The Japanese, one may feel sure, will never submit to the treatment at American hands that even China could not patiently endure. They are not, for one thing, a submissive people, and for another they cannot but be conscious that they, and they alone among the Powers of the world, have the whiphand over the United States, and that it is upon Japanese forbearance and good will that the security of the Philippines and of Hawaii and the development of American commerce throughout the greater part of the Far East must for many years depend.

The sixteenth century was a period of revolution in French arts and letters. In the sculpture of Sluter and the work of Beauneveu, in the poetry of Villon and the craft of her mastermasons, France then possessed a fund of living traditions sufficient for the development of a distinct Northern culture. By combining Gothic idealism and Flemish realism she had founded an art as different from that of the thirteenth century as it was from that of the neo-classic school. It was informed neither by a mediæval spirituality nor by a pagan passion for earthly loveliness, but by a lively and catholic interest in the common things of life. The note of the art of the French Renaissance of the fifteenth century was a fine and keen expressiveness, an expressiveness which still endows the verses of Villon and the sketches of Beauneveu with a strangely modern quality. Poet and painter both disregarded a certain conventional beauty in order to achieve a greater fidelity in charac

terization, and discovered thereby a novel and admirable kind of natural beauty. They were, in fact, the forerunners of the romantic movement in modern art and literature; and, if the younger generations of French artists and writers had resumed and consummated their work, France might have regained in the sixteenth century the position which she attained in the thirteenth. To her, and not to England, it might then have been given to open up that new world of imagination in which the genius of the Northern races of Europe finally expressed itself. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the French mind was so dazzled by the brilliant neoclassic art of Italy that it destroyed its glorious heritage of romance traditions and adopted Italian models in architecture and sculpture as well as in poetry. But, although the neo-classic movement of revolution was more thorough than the romantic movement of reaction which long afterwards ensued, it was more gradual in its operation.

In the age of the Pleiad, for instance, French verse had not lost all its wild, native beauty.

"J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage," said Ronsard, and the poetry of his school has somewhat of the charm of the gardens that he loved. It is the most delightful thing in French literature, full of art, yet racy of the soil, and incomparable in freshness, delicacy and sweetness. Like the verse of Campion and Herrick, it lacks the poignancy and the passion of the highest sort of lyrical poetry, but in its union of Latin clarity and romantic color it is perfect of its kind. It is informed only by a light flow of fancies, but the fancies are true and exquisite, and drawn from a lovely source. They are touched with the hues and odors of spring. Ronsard and his companions had a quicker sense of natural beauty than any other French poets. Their finest lyrics seem to have been composed in that delicious moment when upon the air of spring there is wafted the fragrance of summer flowThere was nothing even in English literature in 1550 of so vernal a Ronsard's verses grace as to Cassandre:

ers.

And the minion nightingale,

Sweet and frail,

In the shade with nimble tongue Sets the tune he loves to sing,

Quivering

To the music of his song . . .

May shall boast of breezes sweet,
Fruits to eat,

The abundance of her dew,
Manna, honey too, that swells
Ruddy cells,

Sweetening her grace anew.

But, for me, I give to fame

One whose name

Tells of her that from the sea Rising through the wreathing foam, Saw the home

Of her new nativity.

The feeling for natural beauty was the one strain of true sentiment in the poetry of the Pleiad. Their shows of passion were scarcely real; their relish for refinements was little more than make-believe; their interest in the general movements of their time was somewhat feeble: but their love of a country life was genuine and deep. Living in a wild age of dissension, tumult, and bloodshed, they averted their eyes from the tragic pageantry of human existence, and sought to forget it in the amenity and quietness of nature. Their delight in the open country is a trait which distinguishes them from Villon, who was essentially a poet of the town, and connects them with the English poets of the Elizabethan period. By the fresh emotion which they infused into it, they transformed the rather formal pastoralism of mediæval and classic tradition, into a vivid and lightsome kind of literature, and from them Spenser and other Elizabethans learned to sing of country ways and country pleasures. And they learned not only the matter but the art of pastoral verse. As Mr. George Wyndham remarks in an introduction to his admirable anthology of the poetry of the Pleiad ("Ronsard and La

That is written to an air of Ronsard's devising. The leader of the Pleiad won his position in French literature more by art than by inspiration. Materiem superabat opus might truly be said of all his poems. Possessing an exquisite sense of style and an extraordinary fertility in metrical invention, he perfected the orchestration of French poetry and created a hundred new forms of verse. The value of his work resides in its subtle simplicity of diction and its elaborate delicacy of rhythm. He is much more of a poet's poet than Spenser. In him the general reader will find less of the stuff of poetry, and the fellow craftsman more of the manner. And happily for his fame he failed to accomplish that which he intended. He tried to found a new movement of neo-classicism in agreement with the taste of the Court: he succeeded in rallying together the last group of writers of the old romantic school in agreement with the taste of the nation. Neo-classicism was not really established in France until the reign of Louis XIV. Even then it was so opposed to the veritable genius of the French people that, as soon as they were able to express themselves freely, their art and literature again became romantic, and Ronsard was at once recognized by Hugo

and Sainte-Beuve as a glorious ancestor.

It is a difficult thing to convey into modern English the peculiar charm of the verses of Ronsard and his associates. Each musical array of sweet syllables and interlacing rhymes is not merely beautiful in itself, but it has acquired an indefinable antique grace from the touch of time. Mr. Wyndham, however, has been uncommonly The Academy.

happy in the series of translations which he has added to his anthology. In some of them he recovers the choiceness, freshness and harmony of phrase which English lyrical poets long since learned from the Pleiad and out of which they fashioned a style with qualities that even Donne and Crashaw and Marvell were never able to sacrifice for others, without losing more than was gained.

Edward Wright.

A few months ago the American naturalist, John Burroughs, who is almost as well known and highly esteemed in England as at home, published his "Ways of Nature," a little book which he might have entitled "a discourse on anthropomorphosis, or the ascription of a human mind to the lower animals; being an examination of the recent writings of certain American naturalists, so-called, with an exposition of the falseness of their teachings." This kind of title is now regarded as cumbrous, and has become obsolete, but it has one advantage over the short, sharp and striking titles in vogue at present when titles are made to hit us like bullets as we run, since it tells you what the book you are asked to read is about. "Ways of Nature" is a very general title, and as it covers pretty well everything in this visible world, it leaves a good deal to the imagination; and one who knows and loves Burroughs buys it in the hope, or rather the confident expectation, of getting a new "Wake Robin," or a "Pepacton," or a "Fresh Fields," a book dear to English readers, or a "Locusts and Wild Honey." He is disappointed at finding it not an open-air

book at all, but one written in a library-an angry preachment against the "growing tendency to humanize the lower animals."

It seemed to me, when reading it, that no such protest or counterblast was needed on this side the Atlantic, where the books of the new school of naturalists, variously called the humanizing, the romantic, the sentimental and the picturesque school, are taken for just what they are. They are not taken as serious natural history and consequently have not corrupted our understandings, an effect which Mr. Burroughs believes they are having on the more excitable minds of Americans. To our sober minds these works are romances of the woods and wilds tales of romantic adventures in which the characters are foxes, rabbits, wild geese, and birds and beasts of many kinds, and very entertaining we find them, particularly those by the Canadian writer, Mr. Charles Roberts, illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull, a delightful artist. I only wish we had one like him in this country. Nor are we in England without books (and many of them) of this kind; nor can it

be said that the impulse to write them first came from America. They were not uncommon in this country before ever Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton (who, by the way, is an Englishman) began to put forth his little comedies and tragedies of animal life in the Wild West, and many persons know and admire Mr. Fortescue's delightful life of a wild red deer on Exmoor. I remember that about eighteen years ago I knew a little boy whose favorite book and most treasured possession was an autobiography, well written and well illustrated, of a rough-haired English terrier. So dear was this book to him that he insisted on taking it to bed with him every night and invariably went to sleep with it under his pillow, with one hand holding or resting on it. A "pillow book" indeed! Probably Mr. Fortescue read some such work in his early years-the memoirs of a dog, or cat, or horse-and, when he himself took up the pen, conceived the happy idea of embodying his own intimate knowledge of the red deer and his feeling for the wild scenery of his native place in a narrative of this kind. It is not improbable that the American naturalists of the "romantic" school took their inspiration from this Exmoor book. Certainly this kind of natural history has caught on and become extraordinarily popular in that land, and, it must be confessed, it is The Saturday Review.

better done than with us. We may see this in two recent books on an animal of the same species, published in the two countries-"Red Fox" by Charles Roberts in America, and "The Life of a Fox," by the author of "Wild Life at the Land's End," in England.

Mr. Roberts writes a much better style and has more invention and is more restrained; he does not read his own mind so fully into that of his fourfooted people. Nevertheless, the life story of our native fox is a delightful book, perhaps the best of its kind produced in England. Mr. Tregarthen was well equipped for his task: he knows his subject intimately; he is an enthusiast, and, albeit a sportsman, is a bit of a sentimentalist. The interest never flags in the story of the life and manifold adventures of the hero, a fine dog fox, from the cradle, among the rocks of a Cornish headland, to, not the grave, but the conclusion of the last glorious deed when at the end of a long chase he escapes from the pack by taking a fearful leap over a chasm in the granite cliffs and landing safely on a ledge on the further side. There we leave him, in full view of the raging baffled hounds, exhausted and bedraggled, but uninjured still, in the middle of his wily vigorous life, with perhaps many years to live yet, and many a long chase to come in future hunting

seasons.

W. H. Hudson.

Miss Lilian Whiting's "The Land of Enchantment" shows that the enthusiasm which burned so high in her "Florence of Landor" burns as warmly for the beauties of her own western land. The cities of Denver, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles in turn awaken her enthusiasm and she writes of the natural wonders of the region with un

tempered warmth. The illustrations are half tone after photographs. Little, Brown & Co.

Mr. William Jaggard announces as approaching completion a limited issue of "William Shakespeare: a Bibliography of our National Poet," which is planned to include every known