from the recollections of Professor J. R. Seeley, Mr. Walter Besant, and others. The delightfully informal character of the sketch is in keeping with the unconventional character of the man whom it illustrates, and is more satisfactory than a set biography. Calverly's college pranks, his athletic feats, his astonishing tours de force in Latin and Greek verse-making, and back of all this exuberance of physical and intellectual energy, his gentle and manly nature, are all sketched for us with a sympathy of the most contagious sort. As for the "Remains," they include some of Calverly's best Greek and Latin poems and translations, a few original pieces omitted from other collections, and a series of English versions of Latin hymns which should find their place in every anthology of English sacred song. The volume also contains three brief but weighty papers on verse-translation, in which are stated the principles that guided the author in his own work of this sort. And it is safe to say that no better work of the sort exists in our language. This statement the "Theocritus," which occupies a volume by itself, sufficiently attests. So nice a preservation of both form and sense is exceedingly rare, although it must be premised that Calverly's ideal of form in translation is something very different from the mere reproduction of the metre. He insisted that a translation whose artificiality is obvious, sins in the spirit, however it may be mechanically correct; and, judged by this test, even Lord Tennyson's alcaics fail of their purpose. So Calverly translated the Theocritean idyls in a variety of metres, some of which are far enough removed in mechanical structure from the originals. But the result and this is the supreme testis indubitably poetry, and it is at the same time what Pope's "Homer," for example, is not, a real translation. Mr. Lang has made a very beautiful version of Theocritus in prose that is almost poetry, as the following passage from the first idyl will illustrate : "Now violets bear, ye brambles, ye thorns bear violets; and let fair narcissus bloom on the boughs of juniper! Let all things with all be confounded, from pines let men gather pears, for Daphnis is dying! Let the stag drag down the hounds, let owls from the hills contend in song with the nightingales." But Calverly has done even better than this, for, with hardly less of literality, he has turned the passage into such English poetry as the following: "From thicket now and thorn let violets spring, Now let white lilies deck the juniper, And pines grow figs, and nature all go wrong: For Daphnis dies. Let deer pursue the hounds, And mountain-owls outsing the nightingales." Merely to call this poetry is not enough; it is poetry of the divinest sort; it has the harmony of which Shakespeare alone was the constant master. And it is safe to say that no English translation of Theocritus will ever surpass that which is tuned to this key. After the lapse of ten years or more, Mr. Arthur John Butler has completed his edition of "The Divine Comedy" by the publication of the first Cantica. The method is that employed in the other two; text, prose translation, and notes all coming together on the page, by far the most convenient arrangement for such a work. The translation is hardly equal, as English prose, to Dr. Carlyle's, but scholarship has done much for Dante since Carlyle's Inferno" was published, and the advantage to Mr. Butler's version is inevitable. The latter, in his preface, pays a handsome tribute to Carlyle, as well as to Cary and Dr. Moore. Cary's translation, we are told, remains "unquestionably the best book to which the study of Dante in England has ever given birth. It is astonishing how constantly. it occurs that when one has hunted up, or fortuitously come across, some passage to illustrate Dante rather out of the ordinary run of literature, one finds that Cary has got it already." Mr. Butler's volume has a glossary and notes that represent the latest results of investigation, and that are as noticeable for what they omit as for what they include. It is a matter for congratulation that English scholarship should have produced so thorough and attractive an edition of "The Divine Comedy" as that now completed. In this connection, we also note the appearance of the "Purgatory" in Professor Norton's prose translation. There is little choice between the prose of the two translators. Mr. Butler is more literal; Professor Norton more graceful. It seems to us desirable, if one must err, that the error should be in the direction of literality. And Mr. Butler's edition has the great advantage of presenting the Italian text with the translation, as well as offering a better selection of notes. WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE. BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. IT WERE hard to find a happier illustration of the vitality of genius than the charming volume of Emily James Smith's "Selections from Lucian" (Harper) affords us. A man of letters in the latter half of the second century of our era put his wit and wisdom into such perfect moulds that under all the disadvantage of transfer into an alien tongue, and with sixteen hundred years to dull the edge of them, they are as fresh today as Hawthorne and Thackeray, as modern as M. Halévy or Miss Wilkins. The cock might have crowed or the ass brayed this very daybreak. Loukios and Palaistra flirt like the boys and girls we know. As one reads, it is not Lucian who is translated; it is oneself. The delicate pellucid air of Greece is between him and these living shapes. It is not the Greece of Lucian's day, but of the unfading epoch six centuries earlier. It is hard to think of Lucian as writing in a time of decadence, as later than Plutarch and coëval with Galen and Dion Cassius. It is hard to be persuaded that these choice dialogues were as much a literary reconstruction in their time as Thackeray's "Esmond" or Landor's "Imagin ary Conversations." It seems as if Lucian, before abandoning sculpture for literature, must have been employed on the frieze of the Parthenon, have had his lessons from Phidias, gossipped with Aspasia, and discussed the gods with Socrates. Very adroitly has the long-buried wine been decanted to retain so well its sparkle and aroma. The scholars must have their say as to the accuracy of the present version, but all who read may note its grace and vivacity. The translator is enough at home in her task to venture to play with it. She can use a spirt of slang on occasion without disturbing the classical repose of her English, and talk of "a person not bad to look at," and "the daintiest thing going." No most modern writer of "short stories" could be less musty and pedantic, more lightly colloquial. An admirable introduction proves that she can write wisely and well in her own person, with a critical discrimination as to the precise worth of her author. Even Coleridge once strained his pen in declaring "the moral sublimity of Rabelais," and who knows what critic may discover the deep philosophic significance of Kipling? Our translator indulges herself in no such vagaries, but presents Lucian to her readers as the man of letters pure and simple, who fluttered about the old Greek temples and the cookshops for his own amusement, and jotted down his thoughts about them afterward for ours. HENRY T. KING'S new volume, "The Idealist" (Lippincott). is made up of some 130 brief moralizings upon various random themes, the author's purpose being, as he tells us, "to make men feel uncomfortable." With this amiable end in view he assails various abuses and hypocrisies, and develops his own views of the right ruling of conduct with a snappishness of tone and a lavish use of the first personal pronoun that will tend, we fear, to set his readers upon demanding Mr. King's credentials rather than upon weighing his precepts. The volume opens ostentatiously with a "Prelude" in which the writer tells us all about his book and his methods, his likes and his dislikes (the latter greatly preponderating), and takes himself, on the whole, rather more seriously than the occasion seems to warrant. "I care not," he says, "how violent [sic] the storm may rage, how bitter the denunciation I may invoke, but I do care if any reader shall believe that I am writing obtrusive paradoxes." Mr. King proposes to be nothing if not original, and he affects a lofty contempt for "grammarians' rules" and the deference to approved models that fetter the pens of lesser men. "I know of no statute," he avers, "which declares the true use of the English language; no author who holds it in trust. It is free to every man to use as best fits his purpose." Just stopping to point out to Mr. King the confusion of tongues that might possibly ensue were his opinion to prevail, and to remind him as a lawyer that there is a body of unwritten law no less binding than that which is statutory, we may say of his style which is singularly harsh, crabbed, jerky, and at times by no means so clear as he honestly tries to make it, that it is even more likely than his censure "to make men feel uncomfortable." Mr. King does "not think that there is anything second-hand" in his book. "I have no quotation padding," he proudly asserts. A few pages later, however, we find him saying, "I know of no flattery so soothing as to have your words quoted by others." We suggest that if our author expects others to soothe him in this way, he ought, as a Christian and an ideal moralist, to be willing to soothe them; and we may add in passing that a casual review of his pages, in which there is certainly an occasional hint of triteness,― indicates that one may, in effect, pay compliments of the kind designated without being aware of it. The volume at its best denotes a considerable faculty of stringing together pungent aphorisms with a touch of Baconian sententiousness and a full measure of Emersonian disconnectedness. The publishers have shown good taste in their part of the work, and the volume is an attractive one externally. THERE is a good deal of presuming in this curious world of ours. Men presume on their muscle, and women on their weakness, and children on the graces of their immaturity. Each would dominate without an effort, and be graciously deferred to. Each is conscious of specific admirableness, and expects recognition. Americans presume on being natives, and claim credit for not having been born Irish or Chinese. The Frenchman is quite certain that all good roads pass through Paris and are an extension of the Boulevards. John Bull pit-, ies the dulness that questions if all liberty and virtue are most at home in England. There is the Boston type, the New York type, the Philadelphia type, even the Chicago type, of conscious superiority and corresponding behavior. Each claims the earth and all outlying territory. The pretension is not always gracefully asserted, and impartial bystanders are a little grieved at the manners resulting. The over-assurance of privilege is very pervasive. Even authors sometimes treat themselves with undue seriousness. They dwell too long, or bear on too hard, upon even a bright idea. Oscar Fay Adams may not have thought of this in putting into a volume on "The Presumption of Sex" (Lee & Shepard) his recent magazine articles "The Mannerless Sex," The Brutal Sex," After all, it may be doubted whether any wide circle was agitated by the tossing of Mr. Adams's first pebble. It was fillipped neatly. It fell with a quite perceptible splash and splatter. The ripples ran out a little way before they died. But the mannerless and ruthless sex was hardly fluttered in its dovecots, and the brutal and vulgar sex puffed its cigar-smoke into its neighbors' faces and told its shady stories as before. There is good sense and right feeling in these papers. With a finer humor and a lighter touch they might have passed out of journalism into literature. As it is, their on etc. 66 Mr. hints may well be heeded. There is room for more gracious womanhood and manlier and purer manhood in several New England villages and one or two mining camps on our western frontier, doubt it who may. Two works dealing with a similar subject are "Books Condemned to Be Burnt " (Armstrong), by James A. Farrer, and "Martyrdoms of Literature" (Sergel & Co., Chicago), by Robert H. Vickers. It is curious to see two volumes issued simultaneously on a theme of such out of the way interest. We can fancy each author encountering his rival's volume with a stare of incredulity and a petulant outburst of "How in the world did you happen to be born?" Mr. Farrer, after a brief introduction, confines himself to the martyrdoms of literature in England. He modestly aims at "something less dull than a dictionary, but something far short of a history." His success is sufficient. He writes like a scholar and a man of letters, at home in his subject. His volume is marked by good taste in its style. Mr. Vickers's volume in its outward form suggests the better sort of school-book, an impression that its contents hardly justify. It ranges from Rameses the Great and "the trigrams of Fo Hi" to the book burnings of Malabar, of Brazil, and of Chile, of which last the recent revolution deprives us of authentic record. The author's material is somewhat muddled and undigested. His temper is quite uncritical. He has much to say of "superstitious venom," of "missionary banditti," of "fiendish fanaticisms," of "cancerous imaginings." He tells us of Abelard, that, "caught between two difficulties, he repaired as best he could the wrong caused by himself, leaving the other and greater wrong done to Heloise as well as to him by the monstrous tyranny of celibate vows to be repaired by those who were, at the bar of the high court of human nature, guilty of compassing evils of precisely that character." He speaks of a city as "eaten hollow by the devouring force of her one solitary idea." In a more distressing sentence still he announces "the story of Bohemia, which will succeed this volume." Under provocation from an overfond mother, Charles Lamb once drank to the health of the much calumniated good King Herod. Mr. Vickers's threatened volume tempts a reviewer to sigh for one hour more of the blessed Inquisition. It had its faults, but it might spare us “ the story of Bo hemia." In a AMONG the " University Extension Manuals ' (Scribner) edited by Professor Knight, has just appeared a little book by H. G. Keene, Hon. M.A., Oxford, upon "The Literature of France." concise but striking style are discussed the most famous French writings, from the oath by which Louis the German bound himself to Charles the Bold in 842 A.D., down to the criticism published by M. Paul Bourget in 1883 on Mr. George Saintsbury's "Short History of French Literature." Though acknowledging a large indebtedness to Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Keene has quite as often followed the critical judgments of La Harpe—who, if we may trust Mr. Saintsbury, "shows criticism in one of its worst forms, and has all the defects of Malherbe and Boileau with few of their merits and none of their excuses." Mr. Keene has aimed 66 neither at originality nor novelty; and with the exception of M. Paul Bourget (who is admitted to the appendix to advertise Mr. Saintsbury) has said not a word of living French writers. Though George Sand had the happy fortune to be dead when our author wrote, yet far less space is allotted to her than to La Harpe or Vauvenargues, and neither her name as a married woman nor that of any of her works is mentioned. To commend any author to the fastidious palates of our transatlantic cousins, it appears that, like their mutton, one must not only be dead, but very dead." While Mr. Keene has "assumed the existence of certain rules and standards," and endeavors to pursue the study of literature in a spirit of scientific comparison," after all, for him, "the golden rule is to look to the judgment of the past for our chief guide in the selection of books." He says: "It takes a good critic to be quite sure of the merits of a modern book," and that, to do him justice, Mr. Keene is not. He divides French literary history into "The Age of Infancy" prior to the sixteenth century, "The Age of Adolescence" in that century, "The Age of Glory" in the seventeenth century, "The Age of Reason" in the eighteenth, and "The Age of Nature" in the nineteenth. 66 SEVEN masterpieces of party pamphleteering, with a few explanatory words to each and a dozen pages of general introduction, make up the pretty pocket-volume entitled "Political Pamphlets" (Macmillan), edited by Mr. George Saintsbury. In these days of caucuses and committees it is interesting to get a glimpse of the earlier times when printed pages affected public policy and pamphlets fired kingdoms. The papers here collected were issued from 1687, when the Marquess of Halifax urged the dissenters of his time not to be tempted by the treacherous overtures of James the Second, to 1826, when Sir Walter Scott defended Scotch Banking in the letters of Malachi Malagrowther. We have Defoe's sustained irony, that almost loses its significance by never once dropping its mask, in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." We have two of the Drapier's letters, in which Dean Swift, with magical marksmanship but some waste of powder, shattered Mr. Wood's brass halfpence and saved Ireland from an over-issue of small change. We have Burke's philosophical review of the French Revolution, in his second letter on a Regicide Peace. Sidney Smith shows his rare good sense and "art of putting things" in four of the Peter Plymley letters. Cobbett, in pithiest Saxon, tells the working men of 1816 how wretched they are, and why, and what remedies to distrust, and where lies their safety. It is curious to find that honest demagogue warning the poor against "the new cheat which is now on foot and which goes under the name of Savings Banks"! The collection is well chosen, and Mr. Saintsbury's editing is brief and to the purpose. IN preparing his life of Viscount Palmerston in "The Queen's Prime Ministers" series (Harper), the Marquis of Lorne has wisely availed himself of the enormous amount of correspondence, official and private, left behind by the "fair and square political fighter whose official career extended over nearly sixty years, allowing him to speak wherever feasible, and thus indicate in his own way the ob jects and motives that influenced him. Most of these quotations, drawn from matter hitherto inaccessible, appear in print for the first time. Lord Palmerston's character is thus summed up by the author: "Palmerston was emphatically painstaking, but he was not a genius, whose work may be manifold, but whose career is seldom steady. Palmerston had a good head, good health, which is seldom found with genius, and a matter-of-fact way of going ahead, making his experience of one matter the solid step from which to judge of the next that came before him. He repeated himself over and over again consistently, in act as well as in phrase a very ungeniuslike quality. A plain Englishman, with many an Englishman's want of the feminine attributes of character, but with most of its best masculine qualities, he plodded on, and finally won that goal of an Englishman's ambitionthe honorable, but not always enviable, position of First Minister of the Crown." An interesting chapter on Lord Palmerston's personal characteristics rounds out the view of the politician and statesman. ANOTHER volume in the same series is devoted to the Marquis of Salisbury, and written by H. D. Traill. Mr. Traill's work may be said to be favored as well as handicapped by the fact that its hero is still in the flesh and in full public career; for while anything like a satisfactory Life of Lord Salisbury is of course out of the question at present, the book at once gains interest and favor from the general desire to know more of a statesman whose name is so closely connected with current political questions. Mr. Traill has done his work as thoroughly as space and other conditions permit; and, while making no effort to hide his strong conservative bias and his warm sympathy with Lord Salisbury's methods and ideals, he has not erred obtrusively on the side of hero-worship. It is in his favorite capacity of Foreign Minister that the Tory Premier elicits the author's heartiest approval. He says: "A just conception of our Empire and of the stupendous task of directing its destiny, may well stir in him the blood of his Elizabethan ancestors; and it is no doubt partly because he impresses other nations as a statesman hereditarily dedicated to the maintenance of our Imperial power and security that he wields the influence which is his. European courts and cabinets must know that to whatever external forces of restraint or deflection his foreign policy, like that of all other English Ministers, may be exposed, there is no public man in England who stands surety for English interests and English honor under heavier recognizances of blood and name." All the volumes in this series contain frontispiece portraits. THE volume of "New Fragments" (Appleton), from the pen of that veteran expositor of Nature, Professor John Tyndall, presents a rather miscellaneous mélange of scientific discussion, biographical sketch, anecdote, reminiscence, and personal jottings. There are fifteen papers in all, largely occasional addresses and reprints from standard periodicals; the best, perhaps, being "Goethe's Farbenlehre," "Count Rumford," "Louis Pasteur," "Personal Recollections of Carlyle," and a suggestive address on "The Sabbath," originally delivered before the Glasgow Sunday Society, in which the Professor traces with much philosophy and humor the history of Sabbatical observances from a time when the Sabbath was so ordered as to render it a foretaste of the horrors awaiting those who broke it, down to the present day when a more humane system prevails. It is scarcely necessary to say that Professor Tyndall is not in accord with those belated zealots "That bid you baulk A Sunday walk, And shun God's works as you would shun your own; Calling all sermons contrabands In that great Temple that's not made with hands." Thoroughly readable and instructive are the critical and narrative papers on Goethe, Count Rumford, and M. Pasteur; and the essays throughout display a rare union of the solidity born of profound scientific study and first-hand grappling with facts, with the graces of literary expression. NOT all sermons fifty years after date retain their first juice and fragrance. Ministers who inherit their predecessor's provisions for the pulpit are rarely overtempted to make use of them. Something has departed. Each generation prefers its own preaching. The fledgeling from the divinity school, with his thought of to-day, draws better houses than the venerable divine. So it will not be strange if the recently issued volume of Theodore Parker's "West Roxbury Sermons" (Roberts), now half a century old, adds nothing to a great preacher's fame. They had their vogue. They were his 'prentice work, written before he reached his growth, before he had grappled with his problems, fought his dragons, flung away his unproved armor, settled down to his sling-and-stone methods, and acquired his sledge-hammer swing. He moved still contentedly in the old grooves. He had not come upon the occasion of shocking the more conservative elements of so-called Liberal Christianity. He is inoffensive to those of more orthodox opinion, who have not stood still these fifty years. These are practical discourses, suited to common parochial use. Men of all creeds can enjoy their pithy sense, their earnest manliness, their devout spirituality, their "Saxon sincerity," their rich poetic illustration. They may be glad to see this earlier and simpler aspect of the admired or the dreaded heresiarch, whose outlines are growing somewhat vague to us in these latter days. MESSRS. Macmillan & Co.'s series of primers has long been favorably known. In order better to adapt Professor Nichol's "Primer of English Composition" to the requirements of school use, a companion book of questions and answers was prepared by Professor Nichol and W. S. McCormick, and the two are now published in one neat volume under the title of "A Manual of English Composition." TOPICS IN LEADING PERIODICALS. Aeroplane, The. H. S. Maxim. Cosmopolitan. Hull, Commodore, Birthplace of. Illus. Jane Shelton. Harper. Kentucky: How It Became a State. G. W. Ranck. Harper. Modern Life and Art. Walter Crane. Cosmopolitan. Mt. Etna. Illus. A. F. Jaccaci. Scribner. New France, Downfall of. J. G. Nicolay. Chautauquan. Whitman, Walt. Atlantic. Whitman, Walt. C. D. Lanier. Chautauquan. Wounded Soldiers' Actions. G. L. Kilmer. Popular Science. Wrens. Olive Thorne Miller. Atlantic. Yucca Moths. Illus. C. V. Riley. Popular Science. BOOKS OF THE MONTH. [The following list, embracing 161 titles, includes all books received by THE DIAL during the month of May, 1892. HISTORY. A Half-Century of Conflict. By Francis Parkman, author of "Pioneers of France in the New World." In 2 vols., 8vo. Little, Brown, & Co. $5.00. New Chapters in Greek History: Historical Results of Recent Excavations in Greece and Asia Minor. By Percy Gardner, M.A. Illus., 8vo, pp. 459, uncut. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $5.00. The History of Sicily from the earliest times. By Edward A. Freeman, M.A. Vol. III., The Athenian and Carthaginian Invasions. With maps, Svo, pp. 750, uncut. Macmillan & Co. $6.00. The Spanish Story of the Armada, and Other Essays. By James Anthony Froude. 12mo, pp. 344. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50. The Colonial Era. By George Park Fisher, D.D. With maps, 12mo, pp. 350. Scribner's "American History Series. $1.25. The Story of the Discovery of the New World by Columbus. Compiled, from accepted authorities, by Frederick Saunders, Librarian of the Astor Library. Illus., 12mo, pp. 145. Thomas Whittaker. $1.00. Columbus Memorial, 1492-1892: Discovery, Settlement, Independence, etc. With descriptions and illustrations of World's Fair Buildings, and maps and plans. 4to, paper. Chicago: J. W. Iliff & Co. 50 cts. |