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origin in this story; and because of it mainly the author, Walter Besant, was knighted. The story concerns chiefly two characters, the very wealthy orphan Angela Messenger, and Harry Goslett, ward of Lord Joscelyn. Miss Messenger, after graduating with honors at Newnham, resolves to examine into the condition of the people of Stepney Green, Whitechapel region, where she owns great possessions (including the famed Messenger Brewery). To indicate to the working women of East London a way of escape from the meanness, misery, and poverty of their lives, she sets up among them a co-operative dressmaking establishment, she herself living with her work-girls. Her goodness and wealth bring happiness to many, whose quaint stories of poverty and struggle form a considerable portion of the novel. The book ends with the opening of the People's Palace, and with the heroine's marriage to Harry Goslett, whose dramatic story is clearly interwoven with the main plot.

Gertrude of Wyoming, by Thomas

Campbell, was written at Sydenham, in 1809, when the author was thirty-two, eleven years after the publication of The Pleasures of Hope.' It had every advertisement which rank, fashion, reputation, and the poet's own standing, could lend it. He chose the Spenserian stanza for his form of verse, and for his theme the devastation by the Indians, in 1778, of the quiet valley of Wyoming, in Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna. The poem, which is in three parts, opens with a description of "Delightful Wyoming," which Campbell, who had never seen it, paints as a terrestrial paradise. One day, to the house of Gertrude's father comes the Oneida warrior Outalissi, bringing a boy whom he has saved alive from the slaughter of a British force. The orphan, Albert Waldegrave, the son of a dear family friend, lives with them three years, until his relatives send for him. Gertrude grows up into a lovely woman, roaming among the forest aisles and leafy bowers, and reposing with her volume of Shakespeare in sequestered nooks. Albert returns, splendid to behold. They enjoy three months of wedded bliss, and both are killed in the incursion of Brant and his warriors. The whole style and manner is pseudo-classic and old-fashioned; the treatment is vague, unreal, and indefinite: but a certain sweet

ness and pathos, combined with the subject, has kept the poem alive.

Bride

from the Bush, A, by Ernest William Hornung, is a simple tale, directly told. There is little descriptive work in it, the characters are few and distinct, and the story is developed naturally.

Sir James and Lady Bligh, at home in England, are startled by the news from their elder son, Alfred, that he is bringing home a "bride from the bush,» to his father's house. The bride arrives, and drives to distraction her husband's conventional family, by her outrages upon conventional propriety. Gladys tries hard to improve; but after an outbreak more flagrant than usual, she runs away home to Australia, because she has overheard a conversation which implies that her husband's prospects will be brighter without her, and that he has ceased to love her. Alfred, broken-hearted at her disappearance, and apprehensive for a time that she has drowned herself, breaks down completely; and as soon as he is partially recovered, he goes out to Australia to find her. On the way to her father's "run,» he takes shelter from a sand-storm in the hut of the "boundary rider," finds a picture of himself on the pillow, and surmises the truth, of which he is assured a few moments later, when Gladys, the "boundary rider," comes galloping in. Explanations follow; and the reunited couple decide to remain in Australia, and never to return "home" except for an occasional visit. The book is full of a spirit of adventure, and a keen sense of humor, which give value to a somewhat slight performance.

Gaverocks, The, by S. Baring-Gould,

published in 1889, is one of the tales of English rural life and studies of distorted development of character, mingled with a touch of the supernatural, in which the author excels. Hender Gaverock is an eccentric old Cornish squire, who has two sons, Garens and Constantine, whose natural spirits have been almost wholly crushed by his harsh and brutal rule. Garens philosophically submits, but Constantine rebels; and the book is chiefly occupied with the misdeeds, and their consequences, of the younger son, whose revolt against his father's tyranny rapidly degenerates into a career of vice and crime. He marries secretly, deserts his wife, allows himself to be thought drowned, commits bigamy, robs his father, and is

finally murdered as he is about to flee the country. Exciting events come thick and fast, and the various complications of the plot gradually unravel themselves. The chief characters are boldly and forcibly drawn, and the scenes on both land and water are vividly portrayed; notably the storm in which Constantine and his fa

ther are wrecked, the "Goose Fair," and

Garens's samphire gathering. The interest is sustained to the end, and the book as a whole is a powerful one, though it can hardly be called pleasant or agreeable.

Raiders, The, by Samuel R. Crock

ett, (1894,) the best story by this author, is an old-time romance, dealing with the struggles with the outlaws and smugglers in Galloway early in the eighteenth century. It is a thrilling tale of border warfare and wild gipsy life, and it embodies many old traditions of that time and place. The hero, Patrick Heron, is laird of the Isle of Rathan,"an auld name, though noo-a-days wi' but little to the tail o't." He is in love with May Maxwell, called May Mischief -a sister of the Maxwells of Craigdarrock, who are by far the strongest of all the smuggling families.

Hector Faa, the chief of the Raiders, sees May Mischief, and he too loves her in his wild way. The Raiders are, for the most part, the remnants of broken clans, who have been outlawed even from the border countries, and are made

Sand, the Still Hunter, a mysterious person who "has the freedom of the hill fastness of the gipsies." He has proved himself the faithful friend of Patrick Heron. He turns out to be John Faa, King of the Gipsies. The charm of the story is the bewitching May Mischief.

in McLean, by Owen Wister. (1897).

This volume contains six sketches and a short poem; and in each of them the "charming cowboy," as the Vassar girls call him, is the central figure. The scene is laid in Wyoming "in the happy days when it was a Territory with a future, instead of a State with a past." Lin McLean is a brave boy and a manly man, who does right from inherent goodness, not because he is afraid of the law; and he is successful, whether he is trying to rope a steer or win a sweetheart. He has his troubles, too, but rises above them all, his imperturbable goodnature being a ready ally. The chapters are sketches, primarily, for those who are tired of the pavements and brick walls of cities; the air breathes of summer, and the little cabin on Box Elder is like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. The most noteworthy of these sketches is 'A Journey in Search of Christmas'; others are: How Lin McLean Went East); (The Winning of the Biscuit-Shooter'; 'Lin McLean's Honeymoon'; 'Separ's Vigilante'; and 'Destiny at Drybone.'

"The curse that Richard Maxwell sent back is remembered yet in the Hill Country, and his descendants mention it with a kind of pride. It was considered as fine a thing as the old man ever did since he dropped profane swearing and took to anathemas from the psalms,which did just as well."

The outlaws then proceed to attack the Maxwells and carry off May Mischief. Patrick Heron joins the Maxwells in the long search for their sister. After many bloody battles and hair-breadth escapes, he is finally successful in rescuing her from the Murder Hole. he accomplishes by the aid of Silver

This

was first published serially, in 185960, under the name of "The Professor's Story. The romance is a study in heredity, introducing a peculiar series of phenomena closely allied to such dualism of nature as may best be described by the word "ophianthropy." Delineations of the characters, social functions, and religious peculiarities of a New England. village, form a setting for the story. Elsie Venner is a young girl whose physical and psychical peculiarities occasion much grief and perplexity to her father, a widower of gentle nature and exceptional culture. The victim of some pre-natal casualty, Elsie shows from infancy unmistakable traces of a serpent-nature intermingling with her higher self. This nature dies within her only when she yields to an absorbing love. Like all the work of Dr. Holmes, the story is brilliantly written and full of epigrammatic sayings; it is acute

though harsh in dissection of New England life, and distinguished by psychological insight and the richest humor.

utocrat of the Breakfast Table, The,

A"

by Oliver Wendell Holmes,- a series of essays appearing first in the Atlantic Monthly, consists of imaginary conversations around a boarding-house table, and contains also many of his most famous poems: The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay';

The Chambered Nautilus); The Old Man Dreams'; 'Contentment); Estivation'; the bacchanalian ode with the teetotal committee's matchless alterations; and others. The characters are introduced to the reader as the Autocrat, the

Schoolmistress, the Old Gentleman Oppo

site, the Young Man Called John, The Landlady, the Landlady's Daughter, the Poor Relation, and the Divinity Student; but Holmes is far too good an artist to make them talk always the "patter» of their situations or functions, like automata. Many subjects-art, science, theology, philosophy, travel, etc.—are touched on in a delightfully rambling way; ideas widely dissimilar following each other, with anecdotes, witticisms, flowers of fact and fancy plentifully interwoven. This is the most popular of Dr. Holmes's books; and in none of them are his ease of style, his wit, his humor, his kindly sympathy and love of humanity, more clearly shown. While there is no attempt to weave these essays into a romance, there is a suggestion of sentimental interest between the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress, which affords an opportunity for a graceful ending to the conversations, when, hav

after that, the presence of a beautiful woman caused him to faint away. A love story is interwoven with the story of his cure.

Crime

rime of Henry Vane, The: A STUDY WITH A MORAL, by J. S. of Dale (F. J. Stimson). Henry Vane is a man whose youthful enthusiasm has been paralyzed by successive misfortunes. He is a cynic before he is out of his teens. Disappointed and disillusioned, he never regains his natural poise. The moral of

his life is, that he who swims continuously against the current will in time be overcome, and he who daily antagonizes the world will find his only peace in death. The events of the story might good social setting. It is vividly told, occur in any American city, and in any interesting, and good in craftsmanship; while the author's pictures of the crudities of American society and the unrestraint of American girls are well if pitilessly drawn.

Moss

osses from an Old Manse is the title of Nathaniel Hawthorne's second collection of tales and sketches (1854). The Old Manse, Hawthorne's Concord home, is described in the opening chapter of the book. The remaining contents include many of Hawthorne's most famous short sketches, such as The Birth-Mark,' 'Roger Malvin's Burial,' and The Artist of the Beautiful.' These stories bear witness to his love of the mysterious and the unusual; and their action passes in a world of unreality, which the genius of the author makes more visible than the world of sense.

Common, a little journey typical of their life's long walk,-they announce their approaching marriage to the circle around the immortal boarding-house table.

Mortal Antipathy, A, the third and

last of Oliver Wendell Holmes's novels, was published in 1885, when he was in his seventy-sixth year. Like the two preceding works of fiction (to which it is inferior), it is concerned with a curious problem of a psychological nature. Maurice Kirkwood, a young man of good family, suffers from a singular malady, brought on by a fall when a child. When very small, he was dropped from the arms of a girl cousin. Ever

lhambra, The. By Washington Irving. (1832. Revised, enlarged, and rearranged, 1852.) This Spanish SketchBook grew out of the experiences and studies of Irving, while an actual resident in the old royal palace of the Moors at Grenada. Many of the forty sketches have their foundation only in the author's fancy, but others are veritable history. It was his object, he says, in describing scenes then almost unknown, to present a faithful and living picture of that singular little world in which he found himself, and to depict its half-Spanish, half-Oriental character, its mixture of the heroic, the poetic, and the grotesque. The sketches revive in the colors of life itself the splendid Moorish civilization of the Middle Ages, its industries, festivities, traditions, and

catastrophes. The author is steeped in the atmosphere of Moorish Spain; and his book has hardly a rival in its appreciation of the pathetic, grotesque, cruel, tender, and wholly fascinating past of Cordova, Seville, and Grenada.

Aztec ztec Treasure-House, The, by Thomas A. Janvier, is a narration of the thrilling adventures of a certain Professor Thomas Palgrave, Ph. D.; an archæologist who goes to Mexico to discover,

days of a summer outing amid the Massachusetts hills. The theme is not new; but in his treatment of it the author presents some interesting ethical arguments, by which the husband seeks to blind himself to his own shortcomings, and some touching examples of the young wife's self-control and abnegation. Interspersed are amusing semi-caricatures of the typical boarding-house "guest," the flotsam and jetsam of vacation life.

civilization. The reader is hurried with breathless interest from incident to incident; and the mingling of intense pathos and real humor is characteristic of the author of The Uncle of an Angel' and other charming books. Professor Palgrave, in company with Fray Antonio, a saintly Franciscan priest; Pablo, an Indian boy; and two Americans,-Young, a freight agent, and Rayburn, an engineer, starts in search of the treasurehouse of the early Aztecs. The professor goes to advance science; Fray Antonio to spread his faith; Pablo because he loves his master; and the rest for gold. What befell them in the search must be learned from the story. This volume, considered either as a piece of English or as a tale of adventure, deserves a high place.

At the Red Glove, by Katharine S.

Macquoid. The scene of this slight but pleasant story is laid among the bourgeois of Berne. Madame Robineau, a mean and miserly glove-dealer, takes her pretty orphan cousin, Marie Peyrolles, to serve in her shop. The girl finds two admirers among her cousin's lodgers,

Sarah Orne Jewett, was published in 1896. Like her other works, it is a study of New England character, subtle, delicate, temperate, a revelation of an artist's mind as well as of people and things.

The homely heroine is Mrs. Todd, living at Dunnet Landing, on the eastern sea-coast of Maine, a dispenser to the vil lage-folk of herb medicines made from herbs in her little garden. «The seabreezes blew into the low end-window of the house, laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southerwood." Mrs. Todd's summer-boarder (Miss Jewett herself, no doubt) tells the story of her sojourn in the sweet, wholesome house, of her many excursions with her hostess, now to a family reunion, now to visit Mrs. Todd's mother on Green Island, now far afield to gather rare herbs. The fisher folk, the farm folk, and the village folk, are depicted with the author's unique skill, living and warm through he sympathetic intuition. The book is fresh and clean with sea-air and the scent of herbs. Its charm is that of nature itself.

On

mos Judd, by J. A. Mitchell. the outbreak of civil war in a prov ince of Northern India, the seven-year. old rajah is smuggled away to save his life, by three faithful followers, two Hindoos and an American; and for absolute safety is taken to the Connecticut farmhouse of the American's brother. Under the name of Amos Judd he is brought up in ignorance of his origin. The most dramatic incidents of his life hinge upon his wonderful faculty of foreseeing events. In this story the atmosphere of a world invisible seems to surround and control that of the visible world; and the shrewd and unimaginative Yankee type is skillfully and dramatically set against the mystical Hindu character, to whom the unseen is more real than the actual The story is well told.

279

Lytton. This is a race of imaginary beings, called Vrilya or Ana, who inhabit an imaginary world placed in a mysterious subterranean region. They have outstripped us by many centuries in scientific acquirements; making the great discovery of a force, "vril," of which all other forces are but modifications. They possess perpetual light; they can fly; and produce all the phenomena of personal magnetism. They have no laboring class, which has been superseded by machinery; there is absolute social equality; the ruler merely looks after a few necessary details. Intelligence supersedes force. Women are superior to men, their greater power over the force "vril" giving them greater physical and intellectual ability; still the more emotional and affectionate sex, in courtship they take the initiative; they are second to men only in practical science. In philosophy and religion there is unanimity: all believe in God and immortality. The discoverer of this kingdom is a New-Yorker, who tries to entertain his hosts with a eulogy on the American democracy; but this form of government, he learns, is called Koom

mean-spirited man; Mr. Barker, the Backelor of the Albany, fond of muffins and marmalade and eighteenth-century literature; and Mr. Owlet, a young clergyman with Gothic tendencies, a product of the Tractarian movement. Their story is told with much quiet humor, and with an old-fashioned absence of haste and absence of introspection, that makes it cheerful reading.

"It was now verging to the season

which in Catholic Oxford is called the Feast of the Nativity, but by Protestant England is still named Christmas,- the season of pudding and pantomimes, mince-pies and maudlin sentiment, blue noses and red books. . . . Now young ladies were busily exchanging polyglots and pincushions, beautiful books and books of beauty, Olney hymns and Chapone's Letters, with cases and boxes of twenty kinds. . . . Folly in white waistcoat was now quoting old songs and dreaming of new monasteries, as if it was a whit less difficult to turn a modern Christmas into an ancient Yule than to change a lump of sea-coal into a log of pine.»

œur

the Vrilya language. The finding of this new world gives rise to many speculations on human destiny. The entire devotion of these wonderful beings to science means the disappearance of all the arts. There are no great novels or poems or musical compositions. There are no criminals and no heroes. Life has lost its evils, and with them all that is worth struggling for. Everything is reduced to a dead level; everywhere ennui seems to reign supreme. This story, published in 1871, was a skit at certain assumptions of science; but its cleverness of invention and brilliancy of treatment, added to the craving wonder of humanity as to what its evolution is to be toward, gave it a large popularity.

Bachelor of the Albany, The, by M.

W. Savage, a leisurely novel of English middle-class life in the thirties, was published in 1847. Its plot is almost as rambling as that of Pickwick,' being merely a comfortable vehicle for the

presentation of the characters. These in clude a typical English merchant of the old school, Mr. Spread, and his healthy, handsome family; his former business

Like her Led Horse Claim and The Cup of Trembling, this is a story of the Colorado mining camps, full of realistic details. Its situations turn upon the labor strife between Union and nonUnion miners in 1892, which forms the sombre background of a bright lovers' comedy. There is a thread of serious purpose running through it, an attempt to show in dramatic fashion what wrongs to personal liberty are often wrought in the name of liberty by labor organizations. The best-drawn character in the book is Mike McGowan, the hero's rough comrade, a Hibernian Mark Tapley. If the love passages seem at times overemphasized, the author's general dialogue and descriptive writing have the easy strength of finished art; and her evident familiarity through actual acquaintance with the scenes described, gives to her work much permanent value of reality aside from its artistic merits.

Average Man, An, by Robert Grant, is

a New York society story; a novel of manners rather than plot, concerning itself more with types than with individuals. Two young men, both clever and