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mously of recent years. When some of us were boys the pale-blue eggs were accorded an honored place in the collection and, speaking from memory, I do not think the bird is even mentioned in that wonderful book White's Selborne. For this increase all fair-minded people have cause to be thankful. Practical agriculturists, who have the prior claim to express an opinion, are unanimous in stating the fact that there is no more useful member of our avifauna-the plover perhaps exceptedthan the starling. We who have no crops to protect from the ravages of the leather-jacket grub and the wireworm may also, for reasons of quite a different kind, rejoice that the starling is more numerous than it was. my part-and speaking for the nonce as a dweller in cities, though I have good reason to appreciate this bird's services to man in matters agricultural -I like our talkative friend of the house-top best when he cheers our hearts with news of spring. In the increasing sunshine of that season of anticipations and renewed hopes, when the cold gray slates glow again in a shimmer of iridescent reds and blues, and drowsy flies are making silly little trial trips of a yard or so, as though they would thaw the memories of winter out of their awakening lives, the starling comes as a blest messenger of good tidings. He is always there, on the chimney-pot near by, deeply engrossed with the intricate notes of his vernal proclamation, which, however, in the gaiety of his heart, and with a complete indifference for almanacs, he may sing all the year round. Of course the most imaginative ear could never consider the starling's song to be anything more than what it is. In our kindliest moments we must confess that the bird is not a finished artist. An odd medley of other birds' notesoften the harshest and most unmusical -a rattle of castanets, blended with

wheezy ejaculations, a hurried conglomeration of sounds which can only be described as "beaky" and an occasional long thin whistle in a sinking monotone- all uttered in the order given or in dire confusion-comprise the starling's music. It is a song that often goes unregarded by the hustling crowd below, a voice which falls unheard upon the city's din. A very busy man once told me he thanked heaven for that! But in a more sober moment he readily confessed to owning a sneaking sympathy with the Sunday morning listener who, from the bed-clothes, could hear with delight, in the dim chimney-corner, faint snatches of that incoherent babel speaking to him of the sunshine on the roof. For although the starling may lay no claim to being a "vernal evangelist," or anything of that kind, although his message may not inspire a poet's soul or inflame a lover's heart, there is a garland of refreshing memories woven in his song which, from the sooty chimney-top, speaks to the sympathetic listener below of the gladness of those green fields which lie beyond the sombre world of roofs. Not the most charming æsthetic sparrow that ever whispered in cockney accents of life and love in a waterspout could ever do half so much as that.

There is one very distinctive feature belonging to all the feathered minstrels of our house-tops, but to the starling in particular, which is, they all. love the sun. They worship the sun fervently, devoutly, and everyone who knows what it is to reverence that creator and sustainer of life-and most of us do so, though we do not always know it-as Richard Jeffries, for example, reverenced it, must extend a hand of sympathy to our friend on the chimney-pot. For whenever we hear the wild revelry of his pagan music sink down through the roar of great cities, it must send the thoughts back in imagination to that sun-bathed atmos

The latest addition to the "Wisdom of the East" series (E. P. Dutton & Co.) is "The Bustan of Sadi." This eminent Persian mystic is already represented in the series by his "Rose Garden" but this second volume is welcome. It contains many bits of ethical wisdom which are not outworn, though they were written nearly eight hundred years ago. This sentiment on the training of sons, "A boy who suffers not at the hands of his teacher suffers at the hands of Time," suggests curiously Solomon's more terse injunction, "Spare the rod; spoil the child."

Dr. William Jewett Tucker's little volume on "The Church in Modern Society" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) is a suggestive and stimulating statement of the needs and possibilities of the church to-day. Dr. Tucker takes a hopeful view of the future of the church: the immediate necessities which he urges as paramount are the ministry of spiritual authority and the ministry of human sympathy. Incidentally, Dr. Tucker emphasizes both the duty which the churches owe to the immigrant, and the re-enforcement which the immigrant may be to the churches.

The recent tragic mining disasters at Throop, Pennsylvania, and Littleton, Alabama, lend special timeliness to Joseph Husband's "A Year in a Coal-Mine." This is a record of perIsonal experiences in a coal mine in the middle West. The author, within a few days after his graduation at Harvard, began work as an unskilled workman in this mine, and for a year passed through all the adventures and hardships of the oddly-assorted gang of men engaged in working it. He encountered all the perils of the work,

-fire, explosions and the deadly gases; and he tells the story with singular directness and simplicity, with no attempt at literary embellishment. It is a story of vivid and compelling interest and every word bears the impress of truth. The Houghton Mifflin

Co.

Mrs. Olive Schreiner's "Woman and Labor" (Frederick A. Stokes Company) is not merely a record but itself an expression of the growing unrest among women. That Mrs. Schreiner would be extreme in her views upon this and allied subjects might safely have been predicted. She is plain-spoken to the point of daring; her style is passionate, not to say pyrotechnic. To people of calm minds it may not seem that things are in quite so desperate a condition as Mrs. Schreiner depicts them; nor that the average woman is in quite the position of parasitism which she affirms. But for those who like frenzy in argument, this is the sort of book they will like; and, after all allowance is made for exaggeration of statement and excess of emotion, there remains a residuum of truth sufficient to give pause to the thoughtful.

J. A. F. Orbaan's volume on "Sixtine Rome," published by the Baker and Taylor Company, is a detailed and diverting study of the memorials and monuments by which the impress which Sixtus V. left upon Rome may be traced. It is written in a whimsically leisurely style, which suggests a writer thoroughly in love with his subject, yet not too much so to be unable to hold it off now and then and contemplate it with an amused exaggeration of its importance. A large part of the book, naturally, is occupied with the two chief memorials of the Sixtine

era, the Sixtine chapel, and the Vatican library; but the author extends his researches in various directions, taking in panels and paintings and streets and monuments and even subjecting to scrutiny the Pope's accounts. One chapter is devoted to the Pope's architect, Domenico Fontana, and his achievements,-in particular, the transference of the obelisk of the Vatican; and another to the destruction of Septizonium. Altogether the author gives us a charming picture of sixteenth-century Rome and the thirty or more fullpage illustrations add to the attractiveness of his descriptions.

Biography now-a-days, like most other things, is done in a hurry; and a really leisurely biography has come to be SO rare that Frank Frankfort Moore's "The Life of Oliver Goldsmith," with its nearly five hundred octavo pages, will seem to many readers almost appalling. But whoever will take the time to read it, even cursorily, will find it a discriminating and sympathetic study of Goldsmith's life and character and a just appreciation of his writings. Mr. Moore observes reflectively, as he nears the end of his story, that if one takes a bird's eye view of the career of a man of genius, he sees without difficulty the numerous mistakes which he made, the various pitfalls into which he went headlong, and the wrong turnings which he took. The course pursued by a man of genius, he goes on to say, in his walk through the world, is usually zigzag; but one has only to draw a pen from angle to angle to straighten it out, and when one has done this one sees in a moment the track that he would have followed if he had been a man of wisdom instead of a man of genius. Moore traces this track, but he loves the man who took the zigag path too well to wish that his life had been different lest, haply, in that case, the

Mr.

world would have missed The Traveller, The Deserted Village, She Stoops to Conquer, and The Vicar of Wakefield. From his point of view the name of Goldsmith is "the best beloved in the long roll of English literature," and it is in this spirit of unmeasured yet not undiscriminating enthusiasm that this charming biography is written. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The boy whose curiosity is piqued by the title of George Cary Eggleston's latest story for boys, "What Happened at Quasi," will find, on reading the book, that a good many things happened there, and that, although some of them had a flavor of peril, the group of four school chums who participated in them emerged from their experiences of camping and cruising none the worse for their adventures. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, who publish the book, publish also this spring two other books for boys: "Dave Porter and his Rivals," the seventh volume of Edward Stratemeyer's "Dave Porter" series, in which is a fresh instalment of boarding-school athletics and other boyish experiences; and "Camp St. Dunstan" by Warren L. Eldred, in which readers who followed the spirited and humorous account of the "Crimson Ramblers" in an earlier tale will find that group of jovial youths enjoying the delights of a summer camp in Maine. The book is cleverly written. It is full of incident and also full of fun. For small

girl readers, the same publishers send out "Maisie's Merry Christmas" by Nina Rhoades, containing three stories and constituting the tenth volume of the "Brick House Books"; and for older girls a new "Pansy" book, "Lost on the Trail," a tale of the far West, the small heroine of which makes her way safely through many dangers, physical and moral. A new and attractive edition of Mary Hartwell

Catherwood's story of the middle West, "Rocky Fork," comes from the same house. The illustrations are by Frank T. Merrill.

Professor Irving Babbitt's "The New Laokoon" is defined in its sub-title as "an essay on the confusion of the arts." It derives its first title from the fact that it is at once a discussion and an extension of Lessing's "Laokoon” published a century and a half ago. Lessing dealt with the confusion of the arts of the poet and the painter, and was thought to have dealt a deathblow to descriptive poetry. But Professor Babbitt holds that the effect of his book was much exaggerated and that in fact "the nineteenth century witnessed the greatest debauch of descriptive writing the world has ever known" and that it witnessed moreover a general confusion of the arts. Studying first the "Laokoon" as a problem of comparative literature and describing the confusion with which Lessing dealt as a pseudo-classical confusion, Professor Babbitt proceeds to consider the confusion of the arts now prevailing, which he terms a "romantic confusion," and undertakes to discover and define principles which may be opposed to it. To this interesting study he brings the fruits of years of research, reflection and class-room experience. His view is that "a clearcut type of person" will normally prefer a clear-cut type of art or literature, and will not care for theatrical sermons, or for a play that preaches, or for an historical novel in which history is travestied without any gain for fiction, or for a symphony which depends for its comprehension upon some picture or poem, or for a painting that is a mere transposition of a sonnet, or a sonnet that is a mere transposition of a painting. Professor Babbitt promises a further expansion of these views

in a book on "Rousseau and Romanticism." Houghton Mifflin Company.

Professor Simon N. Patten's "The Social Basis of Religion" (The Macmillan Company) challenges attention by this conspicuously-printed preliminary dictum: "Sin is Misery; Misery is Poverty; the Antidote of Poverty is Income." This series of moral equations will scarcely pass undisputed, for if sin equals misery and misery equals poverty, does it not follow, since equals of the same thing are equal, that poverty equals sin; and, further, that, if income is the antidote of poverty it is also the antidote of sin; and, further, that the greater the affluence of an individual, the greater his virtue? But that is a conclusion which is not sustained by observation or experience. Professor Patten's work, however, is not to be disposed of by criticism of this somewhat puzzling sentence which lies upon the threshold. His book is a serious and closely reasoned statement of the problems of life and religion as related to social processes and development. Religion, he maintains, does not begin with a belief in God, but with an emotional opposition to removable evils. Social activity assumes a religious form when men recognize that they sink through degeneration and may rise again through regeneration. "So long as men hope to be better and fear to become worse, religion cannot die out." And the conclusion which he reaches is that "A movement in thought is coming that will force religion to discard traditions and dogmas that separate it from other social ideals. The blending of all social aspirations is but a matter of time. When it comes, social religion will have its full growth and be the expression of the forces that upbuild men and make social thought dominant."