in a recent lecture which has been printed, stated that Mr. John Digby, one of the senior Benchers of the Inn, remembers dining in the famous old Hall with Dickens and Thackeray, though not, as Dr. Blake Odgers, with lawyer-like precision, was careful to add, with both at once. Gray's Inn, where Dickens served as an office boy, and where Traddles had his chambers at the top of a "crazy old staircase," is neglected; and so is Lincoln's Inn, where, in the old Hall, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce dragged its slow length along. Not in its omissions, however, does the chief defect of the book lie. The text, apart from the extracts from the novels, is in need of the apology with which the introductory note opens. It is strewn with such American terms as "plank-shadding and" Johnny-caking," of which we confess a European ignorance. But that is not by any means its worst drawback. Though not without a certain liveliness and geniality, it is, for the most part, trivial and irrelevant, and not infrequently is wanting in good taste. Mr. Hopkinson Smith is quite as much concerned in relating how he journeys to the various haunts of Dickens and his characters, in chronicling his conversations with the policemen and other unimportant persons whom he meets on his way, as in recording his impressions of the bits of Dickens's London he has chosen to portray. Thus we read : "It was on one of these June afternoons, and at an hour when the traffic was thickest, that I halted my cab at one end of London Bridge, touched my hat to the officer in charge, and began my story, opening up with some light, desultory talk on a variety of subjects, punctured [sic] at the critical moment by the tender of one of my choicest one with a red-and-gold band-which he thrust between the front buttons of his coat-cigars being fragile and pockets ungetatable in a tight-fitting uniform." That is the style in which these trivialities are recorded. The time devoted to their composition might profitably have been spent on the production of a few more sketches or of an Index. The Heart of East Anglia: the Story of Norwich from Earliest to Latest Times. By Ian C. Hannah. (Heath, Cranton & Co., 7s. 6d. net.) THE cultivation of the historical sense through the channels of local patriotism becomes a more important and valuable branch of education as each year leaves us more cosmopolitan than it found us. That city which to Borrow was the most curious specimen extant of the genuine old English town is an admirable subject for a writer who can combine topographical knowledge and enthusiasm with a wide historical outlook. Such a writer we are rejoiced to greet in Mr. Hannah, who has given us a model treatise in historical topography. As he remarks, there is a singular solidarity about the capital of East Anglia, and no city which is more interested in its past; so that he has had no lack of material for his story. But the mere antiquary, even if ardent and accurate, is as likely as not to be overwhelmed with such affluence, and his readers are liable not to be able to see the wood for the trees. Mr. Hannah, however, knows how to keep things to scale, and never loses himself in a maze of detail. His minute architectural knowledge, amply displayed in the text, notably that of the chapters on the building of the Cathedral and the city churches, is allowed an overflow into a pool of notes; whilst the orderly lucidity of the general narrative remains unbroken by pedantic discussions concerning vexed points of minor archæological or purely local import. established at Worstead by Edward III., and revived by the Spanish persecution of the Netherlands in the reign of Philip II. By the end of the seventeenth century it was decaying, despite the immigration following on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A century before the Norwich traders had emerged successful from legal warfare with the City of London itself, provoked by their prosperity. To-day weaving is but a cottage industry in the place, and Norwich is "emphatically a mixed industry town." The visitor to Norwich cannot fail to be struck with the over-supply of churches, which often seem to jostle one another within a small area. The chief reason for their great number is, probably enough, attributed here to "the ambition of individuals to set up a sort of family shrine." The Cathedral is a splendid, but almost solitary example of Norman; and it is a singular fact that the greater number of the existing churches owe their origin to the fifteenth century and early part of the sixteenth, most unquiet times, whilst examples of Early English are "almost wholly non-existent." Scrupulous acknowledgment of indebtedness to the research of others is constantly made; yet the author as often gives evidence of independent judgment. For instance, he remarks that the resemblance between Fécamp Abbey and Norwich Cathedral is much less striking than has frequently been supposed; and he characterizes the prevalent tendency to assume that the Saxons knew nothing of spadework as "clearly an exaggeration." Some may think that Mr. Hannah's spelling upon the Paston Letters, and he also Mr. Hannah naturally draws largely ("clearstory," quire") savours оссаsionally of affectation; but none may the less-known writings of Bishop Herbert cites with much humorous appreciation impugn his accuracy or fairness of judg- de Losinga. Writing of Elizabethan Norment. We have noticed but one slip-wich, he notices the presence of five of where the Norwich charter is said to have the Norwich city waits with Drake's been surrendered to James II. expedition after the Armada, adding the (p. 242). recent conjecture that the failure of two of them to return may be referred to in The Babes in the Wood,' where we are told that 66 " in 1682 "" Mr. Hannah's residence in the East prompts him to observe more than once. the resemblance between the conditions in Asiatic towns of to-day and those of European cities like Norwich in mediæval times. He compares the situation of the Norfolk capital, on low land by a river with hills standing round, to that of Seoul; and a clause in an agreement between Norwich City and Carrow Priory, allowing the latter to keep off trespassing carts by making excavations, reminds him of similar "farmers' hints" to keep off crops on Chinese highways. In his chapter on the government of the city the author points out the curious fact that in the early stages of Norwich municipal government the predecessors of the mayor and sheriffs were chosen indirectly, and did not immediately proceed to take office, as is the case to-day in an American Presidential election. An interesting chapter is devoted to the stormy relations between the Norwich citizens and the Cathedral Priory, which had jurisdiction over a considerable part of the town. The climax was reached in 1272, when "certain of the town mounted the tower of St. George's, Tombland, and certain of the cowl that of the Cathedral," and proceeded to a duel with crossbows and other weapons. Curiously enough, it was the most Catholic Philip and Mary who ultimately secured to the townsmen the full fruits of the suppression of their ecclesiastical rival. For several centuries Norwich flourished greatly as the centre of the weaving trade, in a voyage to Portugal Two of his sons did dye. The significance of Norwich as a cradle of Puritanism is exhibited in the account of the Old Meeting House and of the foundation of the new Norwich in Connecticut; but the Republican authorities offended the city by interfering with its government, though they refused to accord the request of the rival town of Yarmouth for "part of the lead and other useful materialls of that vast and altogether useless Cathedral in Norwich," to be employed in the construction of a workhouse for their own poore." ઃઃ almost sterued Cicero of Arpinum, a Political and Literary Biography: being a Contribution to the History of Ancient Civilization and a Guide to the Study of Cicero's Writings. By E. G. Sihler. (New Haven, Yale University Press; London, Milford, 10s. 6d. net.) IN this full treatment of the orator and his surroundings Prof. Sihler has made a valuable contribution to Ciceronian literature. But though he knows the details of the political chicanery of the time perfectly, and gives us the squabbles and intrigues of Rome almost from day to day with amazing mastery, we cannot call his book an adequate handling of his great subject. His estimate of Cicero is, we think, perfectly sound. He has taken the middle course between German malevolence and European panegyric, and thus he has given us the real man. But it is only the politician and the man of letters from the outside that we find in his volume. He claims that it is also " guide to the study of Cicero's writings," and so it is, as far as an analysis of the contents of these speeches and essays is required; but the Cicero who has affected the world of letters is neither the politician nor the philosopher, but the great stylist, and we cannot find that the Professor has a may be was shown in the eighteenth century by Gibbon, in the nineteenth by Ruskin. There is not a word of this in the book before us, which reminds us somewhat of Froude's volume on Erasmus, in which the Erasmian Latin is transmuted into Froudian English. We do not for one moment intend to belittle Froude's prose. But it is not Erasmian, and consequently not Ciceronian. 66 As regards Prof. Sihler's prose, we have already described it generally. But we must add that there is for us too strong an American flavour in it, which, however sound English it may be, can hardly rank as Ciceronian. Here is a sentence by no means elegant: "This was a time when huge corruption funds were the chief commendation of many candidates." We do not like a dangerous person-one who would bear watching.' We have split infinitives; we have "reliable," "resurrected," and other trifles which offend the fastidious. We are not even content with the author's range of reading. On Cicero's relation to the Greeks of his day there is a special chapter in Dr. Mahaffy's Silver Age of the Greek World' which gives the results of a research wholly beyond the ken of Gaston Boissier. The present book, however, has not one word about it. Yet it is not only very interesting, but also very illuminating as thrown any light on that aspect of his to the Roman feeling of the dailosophical work. We should have expected chapters like those in Blass's Attische Beredsamkeit' on the various niceties or subtleties of rhythm and period, on the preferences of Cicero for certain of his Greek masters, on the wideness of his vocabulary, and the like. The very style of the Professor's book shows that he has no taste for such investigations, for it is anything but Ciceronian. No doubt he will repudiate this assertion strongly, and with partial truth. For there are, as writers, two Ciceros: the man of the orations, and the man of the letters. These latter our author has at his fingers' ends, and they are composed in a simple, chatty style, with short sentences and many quotations from Greek conversation. Prof. Sihler writes after this fashion. It is not unlike Macaulay's prose a series of short phrases separated by full stops in almost every line, like a staccato passage with frequent rests in music. But that is not the style for which Cicero has always been cited as a splendid model. No, it is the Tandem aliquando, Quirites, Lucium Catilinam, scelus anhelantem, pestem patriæ nefarie molientem," &c., of the orations, or the Quam gravis vero, quam magnifica quam constans conficitur persona sapientis Rectius enim appellabitur rex quam Tarquinius, qui nec se nec suos regere potuit, rectius magister populi quam Sulla, qui trium pestiferorum vitiorum luxuriæ, avaritiæ, crudelitatis, magister fuit, rectius Dives quam Crassus," and so on, of the philosophic dialogues. That was the great periodic style which mastered Europe down to the pomposity of Johnson's 'Rasselas.' But how splendid this style 66 66 66 The analyses of the dogmas are in general good and clear. But is it a clear statement to say "Faults are equal to each other," though it is the Stoic doctrine? Surely some more explanation is needed for even the American reader. The point of it is that all sins are equal in one respect, viz., they are all violations of the moral law. It is not at all so violent a paradox as the Biblical" He that keepeth the whole law, and offendeth [keeps offending] in one point, is guilty of all." Thus if the most worthy, excellent, and charitable citizen kept on committing adultery, all his virtues would have no meaning. They are only the favourable accidents of life in the case of a man who, when he encounters temptation, violates the moral law. 66 the We We turn back to the valuable features of the book, which are, indeed, far more numerous than the flaws; but why does the Professor constantly call Cæsar Regent," and Antony his Viceroy? may fairly suppose that a democrat from America is as ignorant of the use of such titles as we are of the titles of the French or German nobility. On the reading of Cæsar's character he is sound and convincing. The age of Cicero, far from being a period of ancient history, is as modern as the most advanced political life in an American city. There were bosses and caucuses and mugwumps, and whatever else marks a corrupt and decadent society. Hence the Professor is more at home than most European students in unravelling the tagled web of Cicero's political péripéties. We congratulate him on the completion of his long labour of love. History of Scotland. By R. S. Rait. "Home University Library." (Williams & Norgate, ls. net.) THIS is a more considerable book than might be suggested by the impression of its title and its size. It is no fierce abridgment of a history of Scotland, but an attempt to estimate as well as to distinguish the main factors in Scottish national development; and the author has succeeded in "drawing attention to some fresh points of view." The subjects selected for discussion are the nation, its Crown, its Parliament and its Church, its social organization, and its agriculture and commerce. Each of these is treated historically; but narrative and exposition are skilfully interwoven, and nowhere with better results than in the chapter on the Church. Prof. Rait makes it clear that Episcopacy in Scotland owed what strength it possessed to its being superimposed on a Presbyterian basis; and he might, we think, have gone even further and maintained that it was little more than a device favoured by moderate Presbyterians for keeping their wilder brethren in check. He has devoted to social and economic conditions more than a third of his space; and the treatment of these and of constitutional topics will be a revelation to readers-not a fewrecord of wars, feuds, and raids. As an who regard Scottish history as a mere illustration of the frankness with which feudalism was borrowed from England, we are told that David I. granted the lands of Annandale to Robert de Bruce on condition that they should be held subject to the same customs as prevailed in the adjoining lordships of Carlisle and Cumberland. In the legal sphere a similar process was at work, and Prof. Rait points out as a strange historical paradox" that, whilst the inhabitants of North Britain were kept apart from England by a predominance of Celtic blood, it was the adoption of English law that welded them all-" Angle, Briton, Scot, and even Scandinavian "-into a united kingdom. It is rather a striking fact that, though serfdom had died out in Scotland at least two centuries before it became extinct in England, the Scottish colliers, who were little better than slaves, were not emancipated till 1799. 66 66 دو We may mention, though the point is a small one, that the proposal of Duncan Forbes to raise Highland regiments was not neglected in his own day. The Black Watch was raised in 1740, and another Highland corps was in process of formation when the Jacobite rising put an end for the time to this scheme. Quern stones for grinding corn continued to be used in the Highlands long after "the days of Dr. Johnson's tour." In Dr. Colville's By-Ways of History,' published in 1897, we read: In the north querns are still in use, and a livelihood is earned by making and selling them." Appended to the work are a chronological table and a Bibliography, in which we note the omission of H. G. Graham's Émile Verhaeren. By Stefan Zweig. (Constable & Co., 6s. net.) NOTHING could be more apposite than the appearance at this time of a study of the Belgian poet Verhaeren, and the fact that this study-a panegyric-is from the pen of a German writer makes it, not indeed more appropriate, but more notable. Belgium is described by Herr Zweig, himself a lyric poet of some note, as the meeting-place of the roads of Europe"; he regards its life as "a miniature by infinitely varied synthesis of the life of Europe ; and the distinction of Verhaeren in his eyes is that he has for the first time felt and expressed for Europe, as Whitman did for America, the whole circuit of contemporary interests and activities. The whole of Europe speaks with his voice,....and already from the whole of Europe comes the answer": from the whole of Europe, and, above all, from Germany. There, Herr Zweig tells us, the Belgian poet is already as popular as any native, and "people are already forgetting to look upon him as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture." O luckless words! innocent extravagance of of admiration turned by hard facts to bitter irony ! Verhaeren's spiritual progress, as Herr Zweig reveals it, is essentially of the Nietzschean type; he illustrates its psychological stages repeatedly by quotations from that master, while at the central crisis Nietzsche's great saying is fulfilled," that "for a dionysiac task a hammer's hardness, the pleasure in destruction itself, is most decidedly one of the preliminary conditions." Certainly we may trace, through all the nobility and idealism of the great Belgian, too ready an acceptance of violence and tumult; the maturity of his self-conquest rests complacently upon experiences gained through a policy of reckless, ungoverned assault. What of the sufferers by those 66 assaults? Il boit à larges brocs et met à mal les filles ! Thus Verhaeren describes, in his old age, the youth to which he tenderly looks back. And if Herr Zweig is well informed -if Verhaeren has, indeed, been popularly assimilated in Germany-some at least of the seed of which the harvest is to-day reaped in Belgium must have fallen from the hands of her own poet. Herr Zweig's monograph is difficult to read, partly because the rhetorical German prose of which it consists seldom translates well into English (though Mr. Jethro Bithell has certainly done his best), but mainly because he is too much of an enthusiast and disciple to produce a discriminating and intelligible picture. His devotion touches, indeed, at times the point of absurdity. He discovers in the fact that his hero is subject to hay-fever (the point is developed in a chapter The Art of Verhaeren's Life') a symbol of the elemental and physical way that Verhaeren feels Nature ; entitled 66 for it is, if I may say so, an elemental illness that, when pollen flies along the breeze, when spring lies out in sultry heat across the fields, a man's eyes should be filled with senses irritated, and his head tears, his oppressed." After a passage such as this we are not surprised when Herr Zweig informs us that Verhaeren attains at his highest to the same truth as Maeterlinck; "only Maeterlinck has found it by listening to the mysticism of silence, Verhaeren by listening to the noise of life." The identification is unfortunate, and it drives home our suspicion that the critic is out of his depth in many of the ideas in which he strives to disport himself. He shows no ease or serenity; all is forced, inflated, overstrung. Verhaeren is to some extent responsible for this attitude in his follower. Toute la vie est dans l'essor is a motto easily misinterpreted; and the chapters The New Pathos' (where pathos means passion) and The Ethics of Fervour' suggest at once the tendencies to which it naturally leads. Believing that we only live when we are in ecstasy, we soon begin to induce ecstasies when they cease to arrive spontaneously. Verhaeren does not seem fully aware of the obvious dangers that beset this path. is Il faut dans tes élans te dépasser sans cesse a characteristic exhortation. Yet nothing is more remarkable in his workhis mature work, that is-than the completeness with which it is lifted above the effort and the conflict; and it is a serious fault in Herr Zweig's account that he fails to give this achievement its relative weight. The new faith which Verhaeren would embody in his poetry is one Qui fait du monde l'homme et de l'homme le monde, Et lentement s'impose et se condense en loi ; and this recognition of an ultimate and sustaining calm, though little made prominent, is implied in his artistic control, his poetic architecture – an architecture in not a few respects reminding us of that of George Meredith, with whose metaphysical conceptions Verhaeren has also much in common. Verhaeren is undoubtedly a great craftsman, a considerable poet; but he is not the Whitman of Europe because, deeply indebted as he is to Whitman, he lacks Whitman's truest and deepest source of inspiration. To the American poet religion was the future; to the European it is the past. His nouvelle foi, centred in spiritual life, and, while it may purify man, denies the central principle of the the thought of those to whom religion has been superstition, it provides no basis for a recovery by minds so purified of the ultimate spiritual values of which their superstitious faith was at least a symbol. Heroically Verhaeren celebrates a part of life as if it were the whole. But his ecstasies are unsatisfying because they are self-sustained-because they leave the source of all ecstasy unrecognized. Not on such a foundation will the united Europe, of which he nobly dreams, be consummated. Cannes and its Surroundings. Illustrated and described by Amy M. Benecke. (Allen & Unwin, 3s. 6d. net.) "TOUT est aimable, coquet, romanesque, poétique, et une peu fade sur ce délicieux The author of Sur rivage de Cannes." l'Eau' looked on Cannes with the eye of a Benecke's water-colours will show how born seaman, and more than one of Miss truly, in half-a-dozen adjectives, he has hit off the leading characteristics of the place. An appreciation of colour is, indeed, one of the requisites for the enjoyment of Cannes, for intrinsically it is a rather dull spot, and, like all the towns to the east of the Estérels, is apt to act prejudicially on the nerves and liver. The population of Cannes is made up of French and English, with a few Russians as a makeweight. The merit of discovering Cannes is in dispute between the two principal nationalities. The British claim Lord Brougham as their Columbus; the French, Prosper Mérimée. Of these two, perhaps Mérimée has the better right to the title. Brougham, to the twentieth century, is little more than the vague shadow of a dull and prosaic past; the great writer who bridged the gulf that divided the "classic from the romantic " is still a living force, if we may judge from the numerous works that in recent years have been devoted to him. Mérimée first visited Cannes in the winter of 1835 in company with his friend Fauriel, the historian; twenty-two years afterwards he again made a journey to the south, and was so struck with the beauty of Cannes and its surroundings that he declared it was a place où on devait vieillir moins vite, mourir plus tard." M. Augustin Filon has described the place as it appeared to him in the early sixties: 66 Un vieux village provençal serrait ses rues étroites, pour s'abriter du mistral, au pied de son promontoire dont le profil seul A droite et à gauche, est resté le même. deux plages de sable, deux golfes solitaires où le flot mourait doucement dans la langueur et le silence, comme aux premiers jours du monde." At Cannes Mérimée wintered for many years, and it was there that, stricken returned to die in the autumn of 1870. with the terrible calamities of the war, he FRANCE AND AUSTRIA. MR. GORDON HOME Confesses that "the more one knows of France and the French at first hand, and the more one reads the ideas and opinions of other people concerning this great people, so does one feel less and less able to write down any definite statements about the country and its inhabitants." He has, therefore, to take refuge in generalizations. In these he is fairly successful, though he does not go to any great depth. He might, for example, have supplemented his remarks on French character in the first chapter by pointing out that the French, as a whole, take life with their eyes wide open, whereas the English are, as it were, afflicted with chronic cataract. Nor does he carry out his comparisons to the full. In a French bedroom the writing-table is “not necessarily provided with adequate writing materials." A reference to the works of Surtees will prove the same thing of England-at least in the "fifties" Mr. Sponge had to cut the Puffington quills with Jack Spraggon's razor. Baths may not exist in every French house, but there is always a cheap and clean établissement round the corner of the street; "Those Scotch are everywhere," as the Cockney said when he saw the prevalence of the word "Bains." the book is calculated to tempt visitors to many places at present inaccessible, except, we may suppose, by kind permission of the Russian army. The chapters on Hungary are excellent. The Austrian Danube has, deservedly, a chapter to itself, which contains more than one amusing story. That on Schneiderschlossel merits quotation in full :— The unfortunate tailor attempted to throw a dead goat over a precipice, but lost his balance and fell himself instead. His mangled body, smashed up by the razoredged rocks, was washed down the stream. The country folk asserted that the goat was the part of a dead goat to tempt the tailor to no animal at all but the fiend himself playing his doom. To confirm this it appeared that several of them had seen the goat leaping up the precipices alive after the catastrophe. The bishop's chaplain thereupon sprinkled holy water over the precipice. Now it happened that the tailor had been doing it was discovered that he had stolen at least some work for the bishop, and after his death a third of the glorious brocade which had been given him to make the robe. Now, of course, the judgment which had fallen on him was explained, for it was his impious theft which had given the evil one this power over The offerings of the pious to the bishop that year were doubled! him. Miss Mitton, when mentioning Tilly in added to that general's claims on history connexion with Tillysberg, should have the sack of Magdeburg. She does well to commemorate St. Florian, put to death in the reign of Diocletian Marriage Mr. Home should have emphasized the point-is in France a settle-by being flung into a river with a stone ment for life, not a romance; else why for assistance in putting out fires. tied round his neck, hence his peculiar famë The the contrat, that most careful surety for invocation to him ran: Ŏ Florian, martyr material arrangements? and saint! Keep us, we beseech thee, by night and by day from all harm by fire or other casualties of this life." As to education, without doubting Mr. Home's knowledge, we may suppose that there has been a distinct movement within the last few years towards athleticism and the spirit of the English public school. But it should be remembered that English schools of the better class have been, and still are, really private foundations, whereas French schools are, in spirit if not in fact, Government institutions. Mr. Home would probably be the last to claim that his book is a standard work. On the whole, it is a sound guide, with plenty of information, though we cannot always admire the style in which the information is presented. The illustrations, if occasionally casual in their placing, are good, and convey a reasonable impression of various aspects of French life and scenery. Miss Mitton's book on 'Austria-Hungary' is, in a sense, more successful. Conscious of the extent and variety of her theme, she does not tempt ambition too far. She prefers general scenic description, combined with interesting historical touches where they are most effective. In fact, France. By Gordon Home. With 32 Coloured Illustrations. (A. & C. Black, 10s. net.) Austria-Hungary. By G. E. Mitton. With 32 Coloured Illustrations. (Same publishers, 10s. net.) We trust that insurance companies will no longer neglect to enshrine St. Florian as their patron. Vienna and the Viennese are briefly but adequately sketched, with an apposite remark on the contrast between Austrian and English nobility, though as far as the brewer-barons and their like are concerned, it might well have been expanded and strengthened. 66 Enough is said about Bohemia, Tyrol, the Dolomites, and Illyria to make us wish for much more: the fact is that every one of these regions is worth a whole volume to itself. For the Dolomites Miss Mitton does well to quote G. C. Churchill's excellent work The Dolomite Mountains' and Amelia Edwards's Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites.' Miss Mitton's quotations and additions give a most picturesque impression of a wonderful land. Many of the illustrations are admirable. The Castle, Schoenbrunn,' 'Kufstein,' 'Cortina and Mte. Cristallo,' 'King Laurin's Rose Garden' (where the peculiar Dolomite tint is well caught), and Clissa' are among the best; while there is a delicate and telling sketch of the Barbara - Kapelle in Cracow and a most effective picture of Cottages in the Alföld.' DOWDEN'S LETTERS AND POEMS. A SUCCESSION of volumes of letters and poems has made the gentle and lovable character of Edward Dowden as well known to readers since his death as in his lifetime to his close friends. No other of his correspondents evoked from him so much of his most intimate and most charming self as E. D. W., at first a student in his classes, and finally his second wife. This second series of his letters to her covers, like the first, the whole period of their correspondence, and, while no one would suppose that it was made up of second choices, it naturally and inevitably conveys no new or additional impression of the nature which the first series fully revealed. Readers to whom the first gave pleasure may here obtain one of life's rarest gifts-the same pleasure repeated. Of A Woman's Reliquary,' the lyrical offering of 101 by Dowden to E. D. Ŵ. after she became his poems addressed wife, we have already expressed our judgment and recognition. We now gladly welcome a more popular edition of the work. It was characteristic of Dowden, with the wonderful faculty he great power of sustained spiritual feeling, had of humility in devotion and with his to reserve for poetry-poetry, to which he had at one time hoped to dedicate himself, and which he had so regretfully given up-a field into which the Muse least readily enters and from which she earliest departs. That he was under no illusions as to the difficulties of his task we may infer from some remarks on Patmore in one of the letters now before us : 66 Coventry Patmore is an old favourite of mine. His Angel in the House' is a record of pure curiosities of love....But as I was brutal enough to say to Aubrey de Vere (before the Odes came), I always found in absence of manly strength; he decks a Coventry's love a certain spooniness, and certain mortal like a shrine and does worship of a ritualistic kind before it; and that I could conceive a harder and better comradeship.” Patmore undoubtedly increased the difficulties of poetry of this genre by the form he adopted-half-narrative, halfreflective. Dowden more wisely concentrates effort upon a series of symbolic objects, ideas, moments, leaving the continuous and inexpressible background of harmonious life and happiness to be implied. He figures also this happiness and harmony in the perfection of the lyrical form and finish to which he brings his work; for in all the 101 pieces there does not occur one unrhymed line. little his attitude as a husband was conventional may be gathered from the stanzas, entitled Madonna,' which are also adequately representative of the tone and atmosphere of the work and its poetical attainment. How Fragments from Old Letters: E. D. to E. D. W., 1869-1892. Second Series. (Dent & Sons, 4s. 6d. net.) A Woman's Reliquary. By E. D. New Edition. (Same publishers and price.) FICTION. Blindstone. By R. A. Foster-Melliar. MR. FOSTER - MELLIAR is undoubtedly 66 The chief character, Richard Trevail, 66 (Letch- Ad Lucem. By Mary A. Woods. of unconscious altruism to set up an art admirable of her adorers. - Blantyre Alien. By Alan Sullivan. THIS story belongs to a class which has The Clean Heart. By A. S. M. Hutchinson. 6 THE CLEAN HEART' is too spasmodic for narration. That gift in Mr. Hutchin- The Great Release. By K. Keith. (Chap- 'THE GREAT RELEASE' has many merits, space, while the Mr. Keith needs to pay more attention Playing with Fire. By Amelia E. Barr. 6 She MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL's novel The to make the mistake of mentioning Molly's Husband. By Richard Marsh. MOLLY and her husband, though in many |