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bloody, and his eyes looking like fire. Seeing ns come up he slunk off, but the farmer fired t him before he could reach the wood close by, and he fell and rolled over. I ran up to finish him with the heavy stick which I had in my hand, but I could only give him one stroke before he rose to his feet and made off. The blow was a heavy one, and struck him on the fore-leg, and he went off into the wood howling and limping.

"We found the poor child quite dead; its throat was frightfully torn by the wolf's teeth, and the blanket was soaked with blood.

"Now, it was noticed almost immediately that the girl Joana had not been seen since the child had been put out, nor was she in the house when we got back. Then for the first time did the truth flash upon us-the woman had been an accursed lobis-homem, and had murdered the child; and, in wounding the wolf, we had in truth wounded the girl, who had assumed his form. The next morning we followed the traces of the wounded wolf, and, inside the wood, not ten paces from where he had been seen to enter it, we found Joana lying on the ground covered with blood. She immediately began to explain to us that she had crept into the wood when we had left the child, fearing that some mischief might happen to him; that she had heard screams, and had run toward the child in the darkness; that just as she was getting to the outside of the wood the moon rose, she saw us coming, saw the wolf run toward her, heard the gun fired, immediately felt herself to be wounded in the side, and fell to the ground, where she had lain ever since.

"Of course, we knew that these were lies suggested by the devil, so we sent for the priest, but before he came she had died. They buried her where she lay, and the 'wise woman,' who came to look at her, said she had the mark of the lobis-homem on her breast quite plain, and was evidently a servant of the Evil One. The woman said that if she had seen the girl's eyes she could have told at once what she was, for the lobis-homems all get to have the long, narrow eyes and savage look of the wolf. She also explained to us that if a lobis-homem can murder and drink the blood of a newly-born child the enchantment ceases, and they are lobis-homems no longer."

"And what did the priest say?" I asked. "He said," replied the farmer, "that we were fools to have any thing to do with a woman from Tarouca, for it was a nest of witches and warlocks."

"And you are quite sure this girl was a real lobis-homem?"

"I never doubted it for a moment. Did I not see Joana's own eyes in the wolf as he turned round when I struck him? How can I doubt? Besides," said the farmer, after a pause, "there was the mark of a heavy blow on her right arm-exactly where I struck the wolf. She never accounted for that."

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And trembled, but no word he said.
His thought was something more than pain ;
Upon the seas, upon the land,
He knew he should not rest again.

He turned to her; but then once more
Quick turned, and through the oaken door
He sudden pointed to the west.
His eye resumed its old command,
The conversation of his hand,
It was enough: she knew the rest.

He turned, he stooped, he smoothed her hair, As if to smooth away the care

From his great heart, with his left hand.
His right hand hitched the pistol round
That dangled at his belt. . .

The sound

Of steel to him was melody
More sweet than any song of sea.

He touched his pistol, pressed his lips,
Then tapped it with his finger-tips,
And toyed with it as harper's hand
Seeks out the chords when he is sad
And purposeless.

At last he had

Resolved. In haste he touched her hair,
Made sign she should arise-prepare
For some long journey, then again
He looked a-west toward the plain-

Toward the land of dreams and space,
The land of silences, the land
Of shoreless deserts sown with sand,
Where desolation's dwelling is,
The land where, wondering, you say,
"What dried-up shoreless sea is this?"
Where, wandering, from day to day
"To-morrow sure we come
To rest in some cool resting-place;"
And yet you journey on through space
While seasons pass, and are struck dumb
With marvel at the distances.

You say,

Yea, he would go. Go utterly
Away, and from all living kind,
Pierce through the distances, and find
New lands. He had outlived his race.
He stood like some eternal tree
That tops remote Yosemite,
And cannot fall. He turned his face
Again and contemplated space.

And then he raised his hand to vex
His beard, stood still, and there fell down
Great drops from some unfrequent spring,
And streaked his channeled cheeks so brown,
And ran unchecked, as one who recks
Nor joy, nor tears, nor any thing.

And then, his broad breast heaving deep
Like some dark sea in troubled sleep,
Blown round with groaning ships and wrecks,
He sudden roused himself, and stood
With all the strength of his stern mood,
Then called his men, and bade them go
And bring black steeds with bannered necks,
And strong like burly buffalo.

The sassafras took leaf, and men
Pushed west in hosts, and black men drew
Their black-maned horses silent through
The solemn woods.

One midnight when
The curled moon tipped her horn, and threw
A black oak's shadow slant across
A low mound hid in leaves and moss,
Old Morgan cautious came and drew
From out the ground, as from a grave,
A great box, iron-bound and old,
And filled, men say, with pirates' gold,
And then they, silent as a dream,
In long black shadows crossed the stream.
JOAQUIN MILLER.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

AR

RECENT English case of extreme cruelty, passing under the guise of justice, has been much commented on in the papers on both sides of the Atlantic. There seemed to be something peculiarly revolting in the circumstance that a little girl of thirteen, who had plucked a geranium-bud in an almshouse garden, should be sentenced to imprisonment for a fortnight in jail, and for four years longer in a penal institution all too mildly termed "reformatory." But, as a matter of fact, severe sentences such as this are by no means rarely pronounced from the benches occupied by the "unpaid magistracy" of England. Justice, in the hands of the gentlemen who are called upon to administer punishment to petty offenders in the English rural districts, is especially stern with those who in any way invade the sacred rights of "property." Theft or trespass, in their eyes, is too apt to be regarded as worse than wife-beating or slander, than perjury or murderous assault. Such sentences as that accorded to poor little Sarah Chandler are far from being as uncommon as the conspicuousness of her case would imply. The very same clergyman who sought, in his capacity as a magistrate, to brand her for life as a "jail. bird," because she plucked a flower, seotenced, not long ago, a small boy scarcely out of his pinafores to prison for a month, because he scraped the leavings of a discarded tobacco-cask, and sold his scraps for a half-penny; and condemned a young servantgirl to six weeks in jail for putting some photographs, which she found in a waste-paper basket in the bouse where she served, into her pocket to show to some friends. Not long ago sixteen fishermen and women, living on the Northumbrian coast, were cast into jail for a month for picking up mussels on the shore, with which to bait their hooks. It was an audacious assault upon the property rights of the squire whose estates ran to the water's edge; and the clergymen and squires who administered the law without pay in that region could not let the flagrant defiance of the rights of property pass. In Essex three very reputable and not disorderly lads, aged about sixteen, sallied out for an afternoon walk. In crossing the fields they came to a brook; a grassy knoll on its banks tempted them, and they threw themselves upon it and began to read some books they had brought with them. Suddenly up rode the owner of the field on horseback, and roughly demanded their names. Soon after they had returned home they were taken in charge by a policeman, brought before the magistrates, accused of trespass, and heavily fined. A little girl of thirteen was recently

condemned at Dorchester to twenty-one days' imprisonment at "hard labor," and five years in a reformatory, for stealing an earthen milk-jug. It turned out that the jug, which was cracked, had been given to the girl without authority by a servant. The supposed thief, too, was ascertained to have the best character for honesty.

These are but a few illustrations of cases of judicial cruelty that are constantly being reported in England. All of them indicate that with the English country magistrate "property" is still a kind of fetich, which it is as horrible to desecrate as it is, in the eyes of a Parsee, to enter a fire-temple with shoes on. It is no wonder that a loud cry is every now and then raised by civilized and humane Englishmen for the abolition of the system of unpaid magistrates. The trouble is that this system is an ancient and therefore supposably a venerable one. It is derived from the feudal times when the lord of the manor was the despotic head of the community—its judge as well as military and civil chief. The magistrates are for the most part country squires and country rectors, with little knowledge of the law, and, as would appear, not always with an enlightened sense of justice. They are appointed by the lords-lieutenants of the counties, are removable by the Lord Chancellor, and the sentences they give may be reversed by the Home Secretary, in whom rests the pardoning power. It is an obvious disadvantage that the owners of property and the clergy who serve as magistrates should reside in the neighborhood where the misdemeanors are committed and over which they have jurisdiction; they are very apt to base their judg ment, not on the particular offense, but upon the character of the person charged as they know it to be. Offenses against property are visited with peculiar severity, because the magistrates are property owners, and, while professing to deal out justice, are intent on the protection of their own acres. The tyrannical game-laws, also a relic of feudalism, are executed with extreme severity by these unpaid magistrates. The time is no doubt not far distant when there must be a thorough reform in the system of the rural magistracy of England, and in the old laws which hedge about property with so many bristling defenses. It is becoming clearly evident that clergymen are least of all fitted to sit in judgment upon the petty offenders of the shires. They lack the judicial temperament, which, when they are confined to their proper sphere, may be a virtue rather than a failing; and experience has shown that, although the messengers of "peace on earth, good-will to men," they are generally inclined to deal with small offenses against property with even greater severity

than the squires themselves. That a country squire, who has never opened Blackstone, and who has been brought up with a dominant idea of the sacredness of property, and the worthlessness of the lives and liberties of the poor folk who now and then, wittingly or unwittingly, invade it, is the proper person to deal out justice upon them, seems absurd enough to us in these modern times; and it is to be hoped that legislation will ere long abolish the anomaly.

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OUR Paris correspondent writes of drenching rains and chilling winds that are sending back to Paris disappointed sea side and mountain sojourners by the thousand. Our own July and early August were not free from similar unseasonable and altogether unreasonable manifestations of weather. Long, cold rain-storms in summer are really something more than ordinary human nature endures with patience. To the busy townworker who has anticipated for months his vacation among the hills; to the young la dies who have calculated with so much longing upon their summer boatings and picnics; to those who delight in the gay animation of watering-place hotels; to my lady whose fine country villa is lonely without summer guests -to everybody, in truth, who with summer days associates skies of gentle blue, winds that fan the willing cheek with soft airs, hills in shadow and sunshine that seem to sleep in dreams of beauty, transparent lakes that mirror the lazy oar, forests where murmuring boughs and glancing lights charm both eye and ear, meadows that lie under yellow suns and passing clouds to everybody whose summer memories bring up pictures like these, the winds and rains that usurp their place seem like very cruel manifestations of power.

But these, after all, are but minor instances of our contest with conditions that continually subdue us. Must mankind, we may venture to ask, be always at the mercy of elementary forces? Must floods drown, winds overwhelm, suns scorch, and life continue at every turn a fierce struggle with its environment? Are we really prostrate and powerless in this matter? History and current experience declare emphatically that we are; but here and there a wild thinker is prone to utter a belief that the weather bears an ascertainable relation to man, and that it is competent for the united efforts of the race, under wise direction, to do something toward modifying the irregularities of the seasons. Inasmuch as forests influence rainfalls, electrical currents follow the iron track of the railway, and rain comes to arid regions where man has carried his civilization, it is believed by these dreamers that these facts are the prologue of a vast science which is not only

to formulate the laws of the winds and the clouds, but to show how their coming and going may be modified, and perhaps directed. At first glance it would seem as if it were a consummation devoutly to be wished. One may permit himself to fancy some of the changes that would be desirable to bring about under this new weather dispensation— as, for instance, that there should be no rainy days during all the long summer, but only a nightly shower to refresh vegetation and lay the dust; that during the rest of the year the rain should fall decimally—that is, every tenth day, so that our storms should periodically recur like our Sundays. There is no difficulty in imagining many fine things as coming from the new order, but, unless the science should also teach how to modify human nature, we fear there would be some difficulty in getting a general concurrence in any fixed plan. There are some who would banish the "beautiful snow," and others who would have more of it; some who would have all our winds summer zephyrs, and others who like the briskness of a gale; and in all other details opinions would be almost as various as the people.

Perhaps, after all, the best science for the weather is a little philosophy-that sort of mental condition that enables one to adapt his pleasures and his occupations to his external conditions, and, instead of fretting over a rain-storm, goes to work to extract entertainment from it. It is tolerably certain, moreover, that this is the only science that will ever successfully manage the weather.

SOME recent utterances by Charles Francis Adams, in regard to the need of a more fervent style of preaching, have been quoted in defense of certain pulpit exaggerations recently characterized as the "gospel of gush." Mr. Adams thinks that "the demand at the present time is for sympathy, bordering, it may be, upon passion. While," he says, "I fully believe that in no country are to be found a greater proportionate number of pious, learned, faithful, and assiduous servants in the Church, I trust it will be no disparagement to them if I frankly confess a craving of many years for a warmer, a more effective, and a more sympathetic manner of communicating their valuable lessons both of law and love." All this may be heartily sanctioned without approving of the excesses of manner and extravagances of sentiment which have recently called down the censure of the world. Our preachers are very apt to be either cold and stolid, or declamatory, sensational, and hysterical. What we suppose Mr. Adams to ask for is genuine earnestness -a warm, impressive manner, a sympathetic and heart-felt utterance of the great lessons of "law and love." True earnestness never

offends the most captious listener; but just transfer. The book is sold for a certain
as there is but one step from the sublime to definite and obviously limited purpose, and
the ridiculous, so there is but a narrow line the republication is upon the face an appro-
between true and false eloquence-between priation of a right not conferred by the sale.
that simple and fervid intensity that sweeps It may be assumed that a man once purchas-
over the hearts of men and those gushings ing a book has, in the absence of a special
that are made up of attitude and affectation. A law limiting the use to which he may put it,
preacher may be very earnest and very affec-
a right to make any disposal of it he pleases.
tionate, and yet full of manliness and simplici- If he chooses to duplicate copies; he is fully
ty; his sermons may be entirely free of mawk-privileged to do so. The book has become
ish sensibility, and yet possess an abundance
of "sympathy bordering on passion." It is
just this distinction between noise and earn-
estness, between affectation and genuine sym-
pathy, that needs to be established. It is
not to be assumed, because one deprecates
the high coloring of many pulpit utterances,
that he is thereby wedded to cold and ex-
clusively argumentative sermons. Every
body likes spirit, movement, and glow, in
literary style, but no reader of taste likes
strained excess in piled-up adjectives as a
substitute for these qualities; and a similar
distinction exists in the liking of cultivated
people for oratory, whether of the pulpit or
not. We may be sure that Mr. Adams, in
view of his culture and his temperament, had
no thought of sanctioning the noisy and con-
valsive methods that here and there are ex-
hibited in the pulpit. A man that storms up
and down a platform-tossing his arms in the
air, uttering platitudes in tones of thunder,
now shedding tears at his manufactured pa-
thos, and now exploiting some sensational ir-
reverence-may imagine these displays to be
the sort of thing Mr. Adams and the rest of
us spiritually crave, but the mistake is a woful
one. Simple fervor subdues and captivates all
hearts, but would-be eloquence that accumu.
lates upon wretched matter the affectations
of a bad histrionic manner, is about as offen-
sive a thing as man or woman can listen to.

Is the general assumption that proprietorship in literary property can only be secured by special statute, the common law of property failing to cover it, have all the facts been fully considered? The common law of property covers, it is conceded, an author's manuseript; but, once the manuscript is printed and published, then the book becomes the property of the public, unless protected by a special enactment. Let us see for a moment how the operation would be, supposing there were no law of copyright. A book is published, let us assume, which sells for two dollars per copy. What is it that the publisher sells for two dollars? Is it not simply the pages of printed matter and the binding thereof for such ordinary use as pertains to a book—that is, for its perusal and study? If the purchaser reprints the book, it is obvious at once that he is putting his purchase to a use not designed in the

his property, and his control over it is abso-
lute. To this it can be replied that the
rights involved in a purchase are limited by
the clear, obvious intent of the seller, and
that this intent can commonly be ascertained
by the terms and conditions of the sale. In
a dispute pertaining to any kind of proper-
ty between seller and buyer as regards what
has been sold and bought, the price is a
very important and often conclusive witness
as to the fact. If A declares that it was the
saddle alone that he was selling, and B asserts
that the bargain was for both saddle and
horse, the price given in such a case un-
mistakably indicates what the intentions of
the seller were, and the true nature of the
bargain. The law of equity is competent in
cases of this kind to decide what it is that
the purchaser has bought. In like manner,
a layman might venture to suppose it would
be competent to decide what it is that the
buyer of a book has possessed himself of by
his purchase. It would be very clear that
the two dollars transferred in such a case
could not give the purchaser a right worth
perhaps a thousand times this sum. Hence
if a publisher find his right of printing and
publishing a book infringed, why would not a
suit at common law establish not only his
claim but the legal limitation of use pertain-
ing to a book procured in the way we have
described? If this is bad law it is scarcely
bad common-sense.

A CORRESPONDENT, who signs his communication "Country Doctor," calls in question the accuracy of a recent paper in this JOURNAL, in terms as follows:

'death. Can such a patient, by any amount of cautious alarming, be induced to arm himself against death with some effect?'

Has

"Does the writer know that such patients will not believe the doctor when he says, 'You have lung-trouble, and if you do not do so and so you will die of consumption?' he read Dr. Austin Flint's article on the disease in his 'Practice of Medicine,' where he describes the mental condition of such patients as amounting to insane delusions when

talking of their condition - how they are

continually forming plans for the future when, as Dr. Flint remarks, it is obvious to any observer that they are on the verge of the grave?' No doubt he has read some 6 sure-cure' advertisement when he says that the disease is open to attack and defeat, and can be 'expurgated' and seized' after it has fastened its hold se

curely upon the human system. I for one would be glad to welcome any plan of treatment which promises success in one of nine cases of consumption.

"But it is, unfortunately, not so easily seized and expurgated; no matter how simple and few remedies we employ, no matter to what climates we send our patients, no matter to what diet we restrict them, this lurking, insidious enemy to our race works on and eventually carries its victim to the grave.

"This is the experience of every physician, whether of the 'vulgar herd' or the 'first Where one case cured is rephysicians.' ported, ninety-and-nine cases go to the grave unreported. So few, indeed, are the cases cured, that it always raises a doubt in my mind when I read of them, whether the physician who reports the case may not have made a mistake in diagnosis. It is a notorious fact, also, that a phthisical patient seldom applies for medical advice until he has his enemy securely fastened upon him. I believe that, if we have our ears so nicely educated as to detect the approach of this disease before it becomes firmly seated, we could keep it in check and cure it. But surely a physician is not to be arraigned and tried as a criminal if his ear is not susceptible of such fine education. I sincerely hope that your columns may contain an answer to this 'Mismanagement

by Physicians,' which will convince Mr. Wthat it is better to let things alone which he knows so little of. The most charitable construction I can put upon his uncalled-for and ill-chosen attack upon the medical fraternity is, that he was 'hard up' for a subject for an article in your JOURNAL for that number, and, meeting with a poor patient with consumption, listened to his plaint, and Quixotic-like has charged the wind-mill."

The opinion of "Country Doctor" that the article which he criticises was written because the writer" was bard up for a subject for an article," is very wide of the mark. Articles written for this reason are not apt to find their way into the columns of the JOURNAL. The facts related in "Mismanagement by Physicians" were derived in part from the writer's personal experience, and in part from testimony gathered during a two months' sojourn in Aiken, South Carolina; and from the character of the writer, as well as from the opportunities he possessed for arriving at the truth, they may, we think, be relied upon. But the article needs to be read with care, which " Country Doctor" has If this critic will return to the ar

"In an article which appears in your issue
of July 17th, I notice some assertions which,
for the honor of the profession which is the
subject of attack, it will be well enough to
correct. The writer asserts that a man in the
last stages of consumption, etc., and then
concludes this 'first count' by saying: 'The
result was that he returned or went to Aiken,
South Carolina, "with consumption fastened
upon him." It seems to me that he need not
have even gone to Florida to have had his dis-
ease fastened upon him, since he had the dis-
ease in its last stages when he applied to the
Boston doctor. It certainly must have been
securely fastened when the doctor tapped upon
his chest with the tips of his fingers as de-
scribed, and no doubt the few taps which the
doctor gave, and the few questions asked, were
quite sufficient to establish the diagnosis
phthisis pulmonalis,' and the prognosis not done.

ticle, he will see that there is no authority for his statement that the person spoken of in the "first count" had the disease in the last stages when he applied to the Boston physician; be was in the "last stages" when he related his experience, not when he applied for medical advice. And if the doctor's few questions were, as our correspondent affirms, "sufficient to establish the diagnosis "phthisis pulmonalis,' with the prognosis 'death,'" how, then, came this man of medicine to tell his patient, "There is nothing the matter?" Does not our correspondent herein quite confirm the allegation of our contributor? In regard to the opinion that consumption may be cured, it is quite likely that "Country Doctor" is right, and the author of the article wrong; but as to the allegations he makes, the writer assures us that they fall short of rather than exceed the truth.

Literary.

HISTORICAL fiction seems to possess

an almost irresistible attraction for all novelists above a certain grade. There are extremely few of them who have not made at least one or more attempts at it; and yet, when we have counted off Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" and "The Virginians," Kingsley's "Hypatia," George Eliot's "Romola," and a few of Scott's and Bulwer's novels, we have about completed the list of what can be regarded as genuine successes in this field. Miss Thackeray has almost an hereditary right to achieve success in this as in other departments of fiction, and "Miss Angel" is so charming a book in many ways that we are tempted to forego criticism and say that she has really done so; but candor compels us to confess that the glamour which her literary art enables her to throw over us is illusory, and that the application of a very few tests suffices to relegate "Miss Angel" to the multitudinous rank of books which ought to have attained success, but which somehow failed of reaching it. For example, burly Dr. Johnson figures among the historical personages whom Miss Thackeray has woven into the framework of her story, and we have only to read the chapters and paragraphs in which he is introduced, and then open Boswell for a page or two, in order to see how defective is Miss

Thackeray's characterization. In the one case, we are confronted by a man who repels or attracts, as the case may be, but whose personality cannot be denied; in the other, we hear a voice which seems to speak in familiar accents, but which, after all, is but the faintest echo of its great original. So of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who plays one of the most important roles in the little drama. The dig. nified courtesy, the graceful accomplishments, the magnanimity and placidity of mind of that most respectable of painters, are all de

Miss Angel. A Novel. By Miss Thackeray. New York: Harper & Brothers.

picted with care and skill; and yet, in following his pathway through the story, we seem to be pursuing the phantom of a person once well known to us-with whom, in fact, we have set out many a séance of the Literary Club, and dined times without number. Even Angelica Kauffmann (for she it is whom Miss Thackeray calls Miss Angel) seems to lose her already feeble hold on our memory; she is transformed before our very eyes into an ideal and fictitious creation, and by the time the story is finished we are prepared to avow our belief that such a person never existed.

Now, the prime condition of success in an historical novel is that it shall translate names into persons for us, and deepen mere impressions into at least the semblance of intimate personal knowledge. Lacking this realistic element, historical fiction is but a more or less ingenious literary mechanism; and it is precisely on this ground that “Miss Angel" must be pronounced a failure.

Few literary writers, however, have a more perfect mastery of literary art than Miss Thackeray, and it is certainly true that a story radically defective in structure was never more perfectly finished in its details. The opening scenes are laid in Venice, and these are simply delightful permeated through and through with "the very aroma of art and of Italy." Nearly every page gives

us

a paragraph, a sentence, or a phrase, which the mind takes in with a sort of lingering, epicurean relish; and the Venice of the eighteenth century becomes a majestic reality to our imaginations. Read this as an illustration, which, though quotable, is by no means the best:

"Are they falling into ruin, those old Italian churches? Are the pictures fading from their canvas in the darkened corners? I think they have only walked away from their niches in the chapels into the grass - grown piazzas outside. There is the broad back of Tintoretto's Virgin in that sunny corner; her pretty, abundant train of angels are at play upon the grass. There is Joseph standing in the shadow with folded arms. Is that a bronze - that dark, lissome figure lying motionless on the marble step that leads to the great entrance? The bronze turns in its sleep. A white dove comes flying out of the picture by the high altar with sacred lights illumined. Is it only one of the old sacristan's pigeons coming to be fed? By the water-beaten steps a fisherman is mooring his craft. St. John and St. James are piling up their store of fagots. In this wondrous vision of Italy, when the churchdoors open wide, the saints and miracles come streaming out into the world."

Moreover, though the principal figures in Miss Thackeray's work may be defective in historical vraisemblance, their surroundings, accessions, trappings, so to call them, are made out with truly striking effect. Here is an instance of this, which might have come from the pen of the Thackeray. It refers to the period (1766) of Angelica Kauffmann's arrival in England:

"To read of the times when Miss Angel came to take up her abode among us, is like reading the description of a sort of stately ballet or court-dance. Good manners had to be performed in those days with deliberate dignity. There is a great deal of saluting and

snuff-taking, complimenting and exclaiming; people advanced and retreated, bowing to the ground and balancing themselves on their high heels.

"With all their dignity, there is also a great deal of noise, shouting, and chattering. There are runners with torches, splendid footmen in green and golden liveries surrounding my lady's chair.

"The King of Denmark is entertained in splendid fashion. The Princess of Brunswick visits England. Cornelly lights up Soho Square with wax-candles, while highwaymen hang in chains upon the gallows in distant dark country-roads. Our young King George is a bridegroom, lately crowned, with this powdered and lively kingdom to rule, and Charlotte Regina to help him.

"There are great, big coaches in the street, and Mr. Reynolds's is remarked upon with all its fine panels; but Cecilia can still send for a chair when she wishes to be carried to Baker Street. Vauxhall is in its glory, and lights up its bowers. Dr. Burney gives musical parties. The cards fly in circling packs; the powderpuffs rise in clouds; bubbles burst. The vast company journeys on its way. In and out of society golden idols are raised; some fall down and worship, others burst out laughing. Some lie resting in their tents, others are weeping in the desert. Preeminent among the throngs one mighty shade passes on its way. Is it a pillar of cloud sent to guide the struggling feet of the weary? From the gloom flash rays of light, of human sympathy not unspoken. How many of us, still wandering impatient, might follow that noble hypochondriac, nor be ashamed of our leader! He walks along, uncertain in his gait, striking alternate lampposts, an uncouth figure in soiled clothes, splendid-hearted, with generous help for more than one unhappy traveler lying wounded by the roadside. Do we not read how noble Johnson stoops and raises the prostrate form upon his shoulders, and staggers home to his own house? He has not even an ass to help him bear the burden."

And, if a story must have a moral, could it be less commonplace than this?

"One day not long ago a little boy, in a passion of tears, asked for a pencil and paper to draw something that he longed for and could not get. The truth of that baby's philosophy is one which strikes us more and more as we travel on upon our different ways. How many of us must have dreamed of things along the road, sympathies and experiences that may become us some day, not ours-inward grace of love, perhaps, not outward sign of it. This spiritual blessing of sentiment no realization, no fulfillment alone can bring to us; it is the secret, intangible gift that belongs to the mystery of life, the divine soul that touches us and shows us a home in the desolate places, a silence in the midst of the storm."

For the rest, the book has some slight biographical value. The character and artistic career of Angelica Kauffmann are made more clear to us; and her relations with the Count de Horn, which heretofore have been so obscure as to have been overlooked by most biographers, are shown to have constituted the crucial episode in her life.

In "Ward or Wife?" (New York: Harper & Brothers) we find a story, rather pleasing in itself, and told not without a certain animation, utterly and irredeemably spoiled by an almost incredible vulgarity of style.

The people who figure in it are represented as belonging to a rather aristocratic rank in English society, and yet it is literally the truth to say that there are not three consecutive sentences in either the narrative or the conversational portions of the book which are not a most preposterous jargon of mixed French and English, copiously accentuated with a sort of slang which any one of the characters in it would undoubtedly have characterized as "beastly." The book is quite evidently written by a woman, and the slang, it is equally evident, was picked out of some slang dictionary. Had it been written by a man, it would have been both better and worse: worse, in that such vulgarity would inevitably have degenerated into coarseness, which is not the case here; and better, in that the slang would have been less inane, and also less in quantity. The socalled delineators of high life have done their best to make the world think poorly of English society, but it would take a much stronger book than "Ward or Wife?" to convince as that English gentlemen and ladies alternate in their conversation between the patois of school-girls learning French on the one hand, and the language of the bar-room on the other. Furthermore, we decline to accept the author's word for it that Minnie (who, on the whole, rather pleases us) takes the unnatural, unwomanly, and unnecessary method of indicating her preference for her guardian, that she is represented as doing.

If the faults of "Ward or Wife?" had been other than the particular ones we have pointed out, we should conjecture that the author might, in time, write a creditable novel; but innate vulgarity of mind is generally hopeless, and any one who could perpetrate such stuff and not instinctively throw it in the fire, is, in all probability, afflicted with precisely this malady.

Ir is plain that Mr. J. W. DeForest's -Playing the Mischief" (New York: Harper & Brothers) was suggested by "The Gilded Age," and, after reading it, we are inclined to share the author's conviction that he could use the same materials to better advantage than they had been put to by Messrs. Twain and Warner. As an analysis and exposé of the ways and means of congressional lobby. ing, "Playing the Mischief" is much the more complete performance; and Josie Murray is a decidedly more plausible creation than either Colonel Sellers or Laura Hawkins. In the latter case the caricature and exaggeration are patent throughout; the former maintains an aspect of consistency and truth, which puzzles us even if it does not convince. No doubt it is rather trying to the patience to concentrate our attention through every page of a long novel upon a woman who, while she is, as the author describes her, "beautiful, graceful, clever, entertaining, and amiable," is also a most incorrigible and heartless flirt, whose only persistent motive in life is selfish greed, and whose sole purpose, during our acquaintance with her, is to swindle the government; who bases her claim on lying, bribery, and subornation of perjury, and lobbies it through by adding to such means all the arts of a

Messalina; and who, in the end, cheats both those who have accepted her bribes and those to whom she has promised a more sentimental reward than money. Becky Sharp is a respectable person in comparison with this witching and wicked little widow; and, after a dozen hours or so spent in her company, and in that of the people who surround her, we close the book with a mixed feeling of amusement and disgust, and with a consciousness of being mentally soiled. To many readers, probably, the close will seem both premature and abrupt; but Mr. DeForest was writing the history of a claim rather than of a person, and for ourself we are quite willing to part company with Josie just when we do. The inevitable fate of such a woman is written in her character, and it was certainly commendable discretion on the part of the author to cut his narrative short before the heroine dipped below the horizon of outward respectability.

Justice demands that we acknowledge that Mr. DeForest shares, or rather anticipates, our condemnation of his heroine, and that he is acutely conscious of the immorality of the practices which he exposes. His book, indeed, is a political pamphlet quite as distinctly as it is a novel; and, with all its drapery of light society fiction, it furnishes food for serious reflection. Had the book been a little less comprehensive in its denunciations, a little less uniform in its blackness, it might have been an effective attack upon certain abuses to which public attention is at last being directed. As it is, the injustice is too palpable, and the reader who was prepared to applaud judicious punishment of wrong-doers finds himself recoiling from wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter.

But exaggeration is Mr. DeForest's fault as an artist as well as his weakness as a logician. His books are amazingly clever, spirited, racy, and amusing. They are well written, too, except that he spoils his best things by insisting upon them, and drowns himself in his own fluency. His charactersketches are nearly always good; most of the people in "Playing the Mischief," for example, impress with a rather disagreeable sense of their reality. But he is not satisfied that we should recognize his cleverness, he must dazzle us with his brilliancy; a smile must be deepened into a laugh; and eccentricities of character or manner, which when they are first called to our attention only emphasize the individuality of those who display them, are so incessantly paraded, and reiterated, and rehearsed, that at last a sense of their utter artificiality is driven into our consciousness. Mr. DeForest would do better work if he could bring himself to credit his readers with quicker perceptions and larger powers of appreciation. An author encumbers himself unnecessarily when he imagines that he is always addressing an audience that has progressed no further than the alphabet.

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Ir would be superfluous at this late day to speak as to the merits of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It has long been a standard work, and, notwithstanding the appearance of several competitors in recent years, it is still, to our mind, the most satisfactory and serviceable book of its kind. What secures mention of it in our columns at this time is the appearance of a new edition-the seventh-in which considerable changes have been made. "Many authors," to quote the preface, cited who have not been represented in any former edition, and numerous phrases added which have been gathered by patient gleanings from the old fields. To the quotations from Shakespeare, more than three hundred lines have been added; and those from Emerson, Gibbon, Johnson, Lamb, Lowell, Macaulay, Montgomery, Pope, and other authors, have been largely increased in number. The notes and appendix contain much new matter, and the index has been carefully revised as well as enlarged." The index now fills upward of one hundred and eighty pages, and is a model of its kind.

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IN the preface to his "Life of Swift," the first volume of which will be published in November, Mr. John Forster says: "Swift's later time, when he was governing Ireland as well as his deanery, and the world was filled with the fame of Gulliver,' is broadly and intelligibly written. But, as to all the rest, it is a work unfinished, to which no one has brought the minute examination indispensably necessary, where the whole of a career has to be considered to get at the proper comprehension of single parts of it. The writers accepted as authorities for the obscurer years are found to be practically worthless, and the defect is not supplied by the later and greater biographies. Johnson did him no kind of justice because of too little liking for him; and Scott, with much heartier liking as well as a generous admiration, had too much other work to do. Thus, notwithstanding noble passages in both memoirs, and Scott's pervading tone of healthy, manly wisdom, it is left to an inferior hand to attempt to complete the tribute begun by those distinguished men." . . . The Athenæum sees no reason why Mérimée's "Letters to a New Inconnue" should have been published: "The new unknown' is probably no unknown at all, and no parallel beyond the title could be made with the other work published a year ago. The present volume is small, and it contains little matter, being preceded by a long preface of no particular interest by M. Blaze de Bury. The letters addressed to the Présidente of a Cour d'Amour formed by the Empress Eugénie are commonplace, and, to the general public, of no concern whatever." A library containing thirty thousand volumes of foreign works has been established at Yeddo by the Japanese Educational Department. . . . According to a note in the Bibliographie de la France, a communication was recently made to the Social Science Association at Boston, relative to the vast increase of books in the public libraries of Europe and the United States. If we may believe this statement, the various public libraries in the States contain as many as twenty million volumes instead of nine hundred and eighty thousand, which was the number in 1849. In the space of a quarter of a century the books

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In spite of all defects, however, whether of structure or of style, "Playing the Mischief" is one of the liveliest and most entertaining of recent novels, and we are confident that no one who reads it (unless it be a Congressman, who might perhaps find it depress-in the British Museum have increased from ing) will find fault with us for recommending it.

four hundred and thirty-five thousand vol

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