almond-eyed mongolian watching for his "cousin"; yes, and if the place is putting out any bullion, that privileged class the "road agents" are likely to be represented. If the stage on the following day comes to an abrupt standstill before a double barreled shot gun and a request to "halt and shell out, boys," you can rest assured that a "pointer" was found the previous day.

The saloon is the rendezvous for all sorts of miners. Here you can gain a fair insight into mining customs, idioms, and life. Here is where bargains are struck and sales effected, the reason probably being the convenience offered for getting drinks "to bind the bargain with." Here schemes of good and questionable repute have their origin, and men green but enthusias tic in the business of mining are often "ginned up" for a purpose by the schemer. The schemer is a notorious character about a mining camp; he is a prototype of the stock sharp of big cities, and it is said does more harm than good to the place of his residence. His power of persuasion is something wonderful, and as he employs it upon a subject that has a peculiar fascination about it, more than ordinary resolution is required to withstand it Gifted in the art of lying and possessed of a flowery tongue he can rattle off glowing perorations on gold, hidden treasure, and wonderful finds by the hour or the day. His seventh heaven of delight is when he has edged into the good graces of an incorporated company of verdants, and has located them upon some ordinary hole in the ground. The presence or absence of a

quartz lead don't matter, so long as he has charge of the opening up part.

There are two systems of mining, the legitimate, cursed by mismanagement, and the illegitimate, by trickery, jobbery, and misrepresentation. You will find men managing valuable properties who actually know no more about mining than a baby does about politics; things are run on a big scale, fancy prices paid for superintendents, foremen, and other help; mills, shops, buildings for show and for use, are constructed without regard to what is in sight, and the probabilities are that when the enthusiasm for this novel way of showing off abates, the pay chute has failed or the property become involved in ponderous debt.

Trickery, jobbery, and mismanagement have come to be as closely identified with mines and mining as a political boss is with a whisky shop. The outcome of such a state of affairs is ruin; capital avoids the place, and inhabitants lay in a fresh supply of hope and wait for something to turn up. A district or town in this condition is said in mining phraseology to have a “black eye.”

Nevertheless life in a mining town possesses many redeeming qualities; though business may be depressed and mines shut down, the people are ever gay and hospitable even to excess. Though coming here in palmy times with the expectation that golden nuggets hung like morning dew-drops to the surrounding foliage, they have accumulated despite their disappointment an unfailing fund of good nature.

J. H. Coyle.

Stedman's Victorian Poets.1 TWELVE years after the first appears this thirteenth edition of Edmund Clarence Stedman's "Victorian Poets" More editions than years seems to prove either a perverted taste in the reading community or a critic who knows how to fit glasses to the public eye. The book was só generally and thoroughly reviewed on its first appearance that it would be useless to retravel that large ground, or do much more than notice the supplementary chapter, which brings the criticism down to the Victorian jubilee year. Yet it should be said, however briefly, that the work is not only the author's best, visibly superior to his succeeding "Poets of America" or to any of his verse, but that it very well fills an ambitious niche. No American except Poe had written a book of such extended and artistic criticism. Lowell and Whipple have given us scattered critiques, which Mr. Stedman could not have written, but there has been noth

Victorian Poets. By Edmund Clarence Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach.

ing in the way of a long plan and the coherence of contrasts. Mr. Stedman's two books are the only ones of their kind in this stage of American literature. The public desire for such critical sweeps over a cycle of poetry is the best evidence that they were needed to stimulate good reading. Under no view

a success.

can Mr. Stedman's venture be counted as less than It may not be the coldest or the most thorough dissection; it may not be always discriminating praise; but it strikes a thrill of sympathetic perceptions in most brains, and must therefore be confessed to be human and good.

The new light thrown upon Walter Savage Landor, and the comparison between the idyl of Tennyson and Theocritus, are the most striking and generally accepted chapters of the volume. The examination of Robert Browning is less satisfactory. Undue stress is laid, if such could be laid, upon his rough vagaries of form, and much, but too little, praise is awarded to his matchless interior insight. But exactly the right word is spoken when Mr. Stedman writes of him : "And here I wish to say, - and this

is something which, soon or late, every thoughtful poet must discover, that the structural exigencies of art, if one adapts his genius to them, have a beneficent reaction upon the artist's original design. By some friendly law they help the work to higher excellency, suggesting unthought-of touches, and refracting, so to speak, the single beam of light in ways of varied and delightful beauty. The brakes which are applied to the poet's movement not only regulate but strengthen its progress." Swinburne was, to Mr. Stedman, the master of form. The outcome of the examination of Swinburne releases us from much of the fear that the begininng excited.

The supplementary chapter is a less careful resume of the Victorian poets in their later years, and a brief recognition of the new choristers in the stately grove.

Briefer Notice.

THE world at large finds in Shakspere's sonnets1 one side of a kind of series of poetical love-letters, giving a wonderfully vivid picture of Shakspere's feelings during a singular episode of his early life; but Mr. Hosmer finds they were written by Lord Bacon, and do not deal in realities on the surface, but are a kind of allegory recording that Bacon was the author of Shakspere's plays, and giving some account of their origin. All the warm personal feeling thrilling through the lines of the poems becomes a sham, a mere figure of rhetoric, a veil to cover the cipher. It is hard to argue with a man who tells you he can see all you see, and then something more behind it invisible to you; for instance, when the poet says he loves his mistress's black eyes, that he really refers to Othello's complexion, how can you disprove it? If a writer wants to read a meaning into a text, he can

generally manage to do it. Many an allegory has been fitted with these sonnets. They have been interpreted to mean the poet's Ideal Self, the Spirit of Beauty, the Reason, or the Divine Logos, the Catholic Church, Dramatic Art; and his mistress has even been identified with the Bride of the Canticles. Mr.

Hosmer has with great earnestness and ingenuity added one more to the list. All we can say is we do not see it through his eyes. We sympathize with his zeal but protest against his ingenuity, when he finds in the "noted weed" of sonnet 76, the solace of the cheering pipe, and in the word "tobacco and its abbreviations a cipher reference to Bacon's name. This is too much for our faith. We still think the sonnets mean just what they say - without a key.

A new book by Oliver Wendell Holmes 2 is not to be expected many more times, although his seventy-eight years sit lightly on the head that is crowned by the love of two generations. This makes us prize the more Doctor Holmes's story of his European 1 Bacon & Shakespeare in the Sonnets. By H. L. Hosmer. San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1887.

2 One Hundred Days in Europe, By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1887.

tour, written not for the public but for his friends. With no other living man are those words more nearly synonymous. With such a book the literary critic, as a critic, has little to do. His words, as encouragement or admonition to the author, would be "the height of the ridiculous," and they are no more necessary as a guide to the public. All that the public needs to know is, that Doctor Holmes has published a book. There remains for the reviewer then only to add, by the simplest and most direct expression of love and gratitude at command, a touch of gladness to the heart of the good doctor, never too old or too great to be open to such a tribute.Beside Doctor Holmes's book on his European trip there comes another physician's account of his journeyings abroad.3 Professor Glisan went from Portland, Oregon, as a delegate to the ninth International Medical Congress at London. His stay of two years was spent in Great Britain and France with trips to Italy and Germany. It is only when a subject appealing to his professional eye comes before him that he escapes from the commonplace experiences of every traveler and thus becomes interesting. The greater part of the book is unmistakably prosy, but it is only when Doctor Glisan's lack of a sense of literary congruity leads him to insert in his last chapter a twenty-five page poem of a girl's rescue from Indians, that the contrast between the books of the two doctors makes the reader lay down the present volume and refuse to be comforted.--Well-worn Roads were traveled by Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith in his character as "a painter in search of the picturesque," and he certainly is quick to detect a

"bit" that will serve as a "motive" for a sketch. These sketches are of the etching sort, where a few

rapid lines and a mass or two of shadow carry the eye through the wall against which they hang, far away into another land and another atmosphere. Seville, Cordova, Granada, the dreamy land of dark-browed beauty and departed grandeur, Amsterdam, the quaint and placid, Venice, moist and mysterious, all are real in Mr. Smith's pages. The book is daintily gotten up with pretty head pieces and a fitting binding. The Coming Kingdomɓ also is written by a worthy and enthusiastic citizen of our own State, and in advocacy of certain ideas not current among historians. The doctrine of the histories that the people of the kingdom of Israel lost national identity after their conquest by Assyria, and became merged in the surrounding races, although simple and natural enough, and according to abundant analogies in the experience of other conquered territories, has always been, to devout minds, difficult to reconcile with the

Two Years in Europe. By Rodney Glisan, M. D. For Sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1887.

4 Well-Worn Roads. By F. Hopkinson Smith. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.

5 Judah and Israel. San Francisco: The Bancroft Company. 1888.

prophecies of the Old Testament; and popular belief has always been attracted by the speculation that there exists somewhere a "Lost Ten Tribes," to be discovered. Our readers may know that of late years a particular phase of this speculation, to the effect that the English are the hypothetical wandering Hebrews, has become almost a cult with a great many worthy people. Our present author carries the process a step further, holding that the Americans are the long-lost tribes, and America is the "new heavens and new earth" of promise It is worth while to fol. low the line of argument :- Four successive Assyrian kings, several hundred years B. C., conquered Israel section by section, and some of the conquered people were colonized to the district of the river Chabor, which some similarities of names indicate as upon the southern border of the Caspian. A hundred years later (about six centuries B C.) the Scythians, a tribe from the Caucasus region, according to Herodotus, began to trouble the Assyrian kingdom with descents; and the name of Sacal is sometimes used as of a Scythian tribe. Now what can Saca mean but Sacasuni-sons of Isaac ; and the connection of the name with Saxons is apparent. (Also with the Hindoo inscriptions in praise of Saka, and with Buddha's name of Sakya-muni; pointing to a Hebrew origin of Buddhism.) Prophecies of Ezekiel, with regard to a "whirlwind coming out of the north," and "living creatures" and "wheels within wheels," associated with it, obviously refer to a descent of Scythians from the north, associated with descendants of Israel It is not really necessary to add to the proof afforded by prophecy of the identity of the Anglo-Saxon stock with ancient Israel, since divine evidence is of course superior to human; but for the conviction of less reverent readers who desire to have shown some evidence of connection between the Scythian tribe of Sacæ and the West European Saxons, a number of arguments are presented: e. g., that one division of the Sacæ are named as using arrows, and the Saxons are known to have been expert bowmen ; or that Wodan or Odin was worshiped among the Saxons, which name, in the form of Godam, "is doubtless an abbreviation of Godama,' or Gautama Buddha. But the main argument is from prophecy. Thus far, we believe, the ordinary line of argument of the Hebrew-English cult is followed. But our author goes on to urge that a long list of prophecies which he cites are fulfilled by the American people and no others; hence the Americans are the " remnant" from the Israelites that are to be the crown of creation. Moreover, such prophecies as, "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth," evidently refer to the New World; and, indeed, much that has been hitherto understood to refer to heaven really refers to America. It was of Ainerica, and not heaven, that John's vision was in the Apocalypse. In "There shall be no more sea,' sea" is a symbol for vast masses of corrupt people." 66 They went out not knowing whither they went,

and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth," refers plainly to the Pilgrim Fathers. "But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly," to divinely blessed America. Whenever, therefore, the American people have abolished drunkenness and other wrongs, and have thoroughly acquired a saving faith, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven will be here, "and the nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it" until the end of time. Still a third book, and in a third direction, argues for the views of a school of popular speculation, as against the conclusions of serious scholarship. The Missing Sensel is an attempt to demonstrate from the alleged phenomena of second sight, and of the writer's own dreams, the spiritual existence of man, immortality, and the presence of higher beings abont us. It has no value as a scientific demonstration: but before one has read far in it, he finds his criticism almost disarmed by its "sweet reasonableness" of spirit; and before it is ended, he sees in it so sincere and quiet and modest, yet singularly frank an expression of the emotional and ethical experience of a human soul, and the beliefs- pure and ennobling ones, and untainted by any tawdry superstition, though not, as the writer believes, demonstrable by science in which it has found refuge and life, that he cannot but be touched and moved with some inspiration to higher mood. Its value to the general reader we should think more than doubtful, for even its human experience lies outside of the ordinary lines of feeling and thought; but for those few who can read mysticism, appropriating its esoteric transports of mood, and keeping their scientific judgments free in the matter of its readings of the facts of the physical universe, the little book has marked merits.

2 In the compass of a small and convenient volume Mr. Hittell has crowded a cyclopedia of information useful to the stranger coming to California and almost equally so to the Californian when he is bent on an outing. He begins with the overland trip and mentions all the points of interest on the way. He gives a careful study of the climates of the Coast as a whole and by sections with abundant statistics. Then follow long and detailed chapters on Central California, Southern California, the Sierra Nevada, Oregon and Washington, Camping, the Hawaiian Islands, and Mineral Springs. He closes with a chapter of the utmost practical value on distances, routes, prices, and sug gestions for traveling in comfort and safety. The book is one that will stand the test of actual use. It is full enough for any ordinary demand, and that it is accurate Mr Hittell's name is a sufficient voucher. -Bourgeois as Mr. France has dubbed himself in nom de plume, has presented rather a peculiar hodge

1 The Missing Sense. By C. W. Wooldridge. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1887.

2Hittell's Hand-Book of Pacific Coast Travel. By John S. Hittell. San Francisco: The Bancroft Company. 1887.

podge in the book at hand.1 Its name might lead one to suppose that it had a guide book tone, but it is anything but that. Fishing stories interspersed with dialogue on philosophy, law, and religion, with some attempts at nature painting and an occasional poem form the staple of his two hundred and twenty-four pages, which are humorous and picturesque enough to be readable. Gunethics2 is a little treatise apparently written by a Methodist divine, president of a western Methodist college, in earnest advocacy of the abolition of all legal discriminations against women, and still more all ecclesiastical ones. The thing that he appears to have especially in mind is

1Mountain Trails and Parks in Colorado. By L. B. France. Denver Chain, Hardy, & Co. 1887.

2 Gunethics. By Rev. W. K. Brown, A. M., D.D. New York. Funk & Wagnalls. 1887.

His whole

the opening of the pulpit to women. argument is based on Scripture; and of course among the several women who taught and ruled in the Hebrew theocracy and the early Christian church, he finds plenty of material. Some desperate ingenuity is necessary in evading a couple of passages from one of Paul's letters, but it is made a little easier by the undeniable fact that the great apostle can easily be quoted in refutation of himself, since he elsewhere cordially recognizes women teachers, and declares that within the church there is no distinction of sex. The crude logic of the pious little treatise may serve to confute the still cruder logic by which prejudice is guarded in the minds of some devout and simple folk; and it is not probable that any others will make any attempt to read a book on such a subject.