in 1556 left Akbar the throne of Delhi, with an able but despotic Turkoman noble acting as regent. Akbar at seventeen took the government into his own hands; and by his vigilance, energy, and wisdom, with a magnanimity, toleration, and generosity rarely seen in powerful rulers, extended and consolidated his empire on a scale of territory and strength, and to a degree of order, peace, and prosperity, wholly unexampled. In addition to economic and social reforms of the most enlightened and equitable character, Akbar rose far above his age, and above his own creed as a Moslem, in establishing absolute toleration. gave the Hindus freedom of worship, only prohibiting inhuman barbarities. He had Christian teachers expound their faith at his court, and made Hindu, Moslem, and Christian meet in a parliament of religions, to study the sympathy of faiths. He even founded a new-departure faith for uniting all believers in God. He promoted schools for Hindus as well as Moslems, and was a munificent patron of literature. The enduring record of this great reign, and picture of this noble character and great mind, which his able prime minister, Abul Fazl, made, was worthy to have been seen by Shakespeare.

He

Story of the Heavens, The, by Robert

S. Ball. (1894.) Dr. Ball is professor of astronomy in the English University of Cambridge, and his books constitute one of the best existing libraries of knowledge of astronomical facts, guesses, reasonings, and conclusions. In his 'Star-Land; or, Talks with Young People about the Wonders of the Heavens,' there is a story which no less a man than Mr. Gladstone has justly pronounced "luminous and delightful.» His volume on The Great Astronomers' is a most interesting biographical account of the progress of the science, from Hipparchus and Ptolemy to our own time. The large volume devoted to "The Story of the Sun' is a richly illustrated exposition of the great central facts of our system of nature, those of the sun's nature and action, which all modern investigation more and more proves to have supreme significance for all life on the earth. In a special volume entitled 'In Starry Realms,' Dr. Ball reviews the wonders of the world of stars, for popular readers; and in a second volume, called 'In the High Heavens,' he

gives a series of sketches of certain parts of astronomy which, especially represent new knowledge.

The large work on 'The Story of the Heavens, revised to represent recent progress, brings within a single volume all the principal facts of the magnificent story of the sun and moon, the solar system, the laws which rule it, the planets of our system, their satellites, the minor planets, comets, and shooting stars; and the vast depths of the universe filled with suns which we see as stars. The special questions of the starland known by the telescope and the spectroscope are all carefully treated. Dr. Ball mentions Professor Newcomb's 'Popular Astronomy, and Professor Young's volume on The Sun,' as works from which he has derived valuable assistance, and which readers may include in a complete astronomical library. Two small works by Dr. Ball, not mentioned above, are "The Cause of an Ice Age,' discussing the possible astronomical explanations of the ages of excessive cold in the immensely remote past of the earth; and Time and Tide,' a couple of lectures on the very beginnings by which the globe came into the shape and place through which it could become the earth as we know it.

Hegel, The Secret of. Being the He

gelian system in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter. By James Hutchison Stirling. (New revised edition, 1897.) A very elaborate work (750 pages) which drew from both Emerson and Carlyle the strongest possible commendation for its lucid analysis and exposition of the teaching of the most difficult of German philosophers. Originally published in 1865, its learning, power of thought, and perspicuity, made an epoch in English study of philosophy. The literature of the subject hardly shows a greater masterpiece. The author followed it in 1881 with a complete Text-Book to Kant, comprising a translation of the 'Critique of Pure Reason,' with a commentary and biographical sketch. In Dr. Stirling's view, Hegel's philosophy is itself but "a development into full and final shape" of Kant's antecedent system. The reader of Dr. Stirling may thus cover under one master the two most famous of modern philosophies, who have turned the very principle of unreality into a basis for deeper realities.

Short Studies on Great Subjects, by James Anthony Froude. The peculiar charm of Froude as an essayist and historian lies in his picturesque and almost romantic manner, making past events and persons live once more and move across his pages. The graphic scenes in these Short Studies > are highly effective, though preserving no logical sequence or relation to one another. The first volume begins with a treatise on The Science of History> ; and the fourth ends with the social allegory called 'On a Siding at a Railway Station, where the luggage of a heterogeneous group of passengers is supposed to be examined, and to contain not clothing and gewgaws, but specimens of the life-work of each

connected with early English life and lit erature; among them The Druidical In stitution; Cædmon and Milton; Dialects. Early Libraries; The Ship of Fools; and Roger Ascham. The second volume, possessing less unity of design, has thirty-two chapters on subjects strange, familiar, and quaint: Rhyming Dictionaries are treated of; Allegories and the Rosicrucian Fludd are discussed. There are chapters on Sir Philip Sidney, on Spenser, Hooker, and Drayton, and a dissertation on Pamphlets. The book as a whole is a pleasant guide into the half-hidden by-paths of English literary history. It is a repository of much curious book-gossip and of authors' lore.

then is judged. The very discursiveness of these studies enables one to find here something for various moods, - whether classic, moral, or æsthetic; whether the thought of war be uppermost in the reader's mind, or of travel, or science, or some special phase of the conduct of life.

Amenities of Literature, by Isaac Dis

raeli, father of Lord Beaconsfield, was published in 1841, when the author was seventy-five years old. The title was adopted to connect it with two preceding volumes, Curiosities of Literature and Miscellanies of Literature. As the author relates in the preface, it forms a portion of a great work projected, but never accomplished. "A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many years. It was my design, not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide track of time, to trace from their beginning the rise, progress, and decline of public opinions. In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves, some of which from their novelty and curiosity courted investigation. Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy of books." In the midst of his studies toward the working-out of this design, Disraeli was arrested by loss of sight. The papers in Amenities of Literature form a portion of the projected history. The first volume consists of thirty-eight chapters on subjects

tles of, by Richard Bentley. (1699.) The Letters of Phalaris' was a Greek work purporting to be real correspondence of a ferocious Dorian tyrant of Sicily in the sixth century before Christ. The educated world of Swift's time accepted them as genuine; and Sir William Temple, in a pamphlet assuming the literal truth of many of the wildest legends and myths of antiquity, and setting the ancients in general above the moderns in a series of comparisons curiously naive for an educated man, had extravagantly lauded them. This led a young Oxford man, Charles Boyle, to edit the 'Letters' for English readers of Greek; and in doing this he used an insulting expression with regard to a fancied wrong done him by Bentley, who had just then (1694) become librarian to the King. Bentley had promised a friend, who wished to take the other side in the discussion with Temple, an essay on the Phalaris letters; and in this he showed clearly that they were a clumsy forgery by a Greek rhetorician of about the time of Christ. Boyle took offense in connection with the appearance of Bentley's essay, and with the help of several Oxford wits brought out a sharp reply, January 1698. It was to dispose of this that Bentley, fourteen months later, March 1699, published his 'Dissertation'; not merely a crushing reply to Boyle, but in matter and style, on lines which were then new, a masterpiece of literature. It was a brilliant piece of criticism, based on accurate historical research; it presented on several points, which are still of interest, stores of learning rarely ever equaled; and it

abundantly testified Bentley's genius as a controversialist. As a scholar, a learned critic, and a university educator, Bentley stards not only at the highest level, but at the head of the stream which has come down to our time. There began with him a broad and thorough scholarship in Greek and Latin literature, which before him was only beginning to get under way. He is thus to scholars one of the great names of learning and of letters.

was forty per cent. The Irish were bitterly enraged, became turbulent, and every effort was made to conciliate them. A report sustaining Wood, which had been drawn up by Sir Robert Walpole, was answered by Swift in these letters. Swift, who viewed Wood's patent as a deathblow to Irish independence, asserts that the English Parliament cannot, without usurpation, maintain the power of binding Ireland by laws to which it does not consent. This assertion led to the arrest of the printer of the letters; but the grand

It

than Swift, was written in 1697, but remained in manuscript until 1704. was a travesty on the endless controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, first raised in France by Perrault. Its immediate cause, however, was the position of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as to the genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris.' (See previous article.)

In the satire, the Bee, representing the ancients who go direct to nature, and the Spider, representing the moderns weaving their webs from within, have a sharp dispute in a library, where the books have mutinied and taken sides, preparatory to battle. In the description of this battle, Swift's terrible arrows of wit fly thick and fast, Dryden and Bentley coming in for a goodly share of their destructive force. Nothing is left of the poor moderns when he has finished with them, The work, despite its vast cleverness, was not taken with entire seriousness by Swift's contemporaries. He was not then the great Dean; and besides, he was dealing with subjects he was not competent to treat. It remains, however, a brilliant monument to his satirical powers, and to the spirit of destruction which impelled him even as a youth to audacious attacks on great names.

Drapier Letters, The, by Jonathan

Swift. These famous letters took their name from their signature, "M. B. Drapier." They were written to protest against an unjust aggression of the Crown, which, at a time of great scarcity of copper coin in Ireland, had granted a patent to furnish this to one William Wood, who

was to share his profits with the Duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress, through whose influence the patent had been obtained. These profits were to be derived from the difference between the real and the nominal value of the halfpence, which

triumphed, and Wood's patent was revoked. The 'Letters' were published in 1724; the sub-title being, "very proper to be kept in every family."

Artevelde, Philip van, a tragedy, by

Sir Henry Taylor: 1834. One of the best English tragedies since Shakespeare, by an author distinguished for his protest, in the spirit of Wordsworth, against the extreme sentimentalism of Byron. His 'Isaac Comnenus> (1827) – -a drama picturing the scene at Constantinople when the hero was Roman (Byzantine) emperor there (1057-59 A. D.) — was mainly a preliminary study for his masterpiece, the 'Van Artevelde'; in which, with noble thought and admirable power, he brings back the stress and storm of fourteenth-century life. The father of Philip, the great Jacob van Artevelde, an immensely rich brewer, eloquent and energetic, had played a great part as popular leader at Ghent, 1335-45; and it fell to his son to figure similarly in 1381, but to be slain in a great defeat of the forces of Ghent the next year. Taylor's tragedy recalls the events of these two years. Two songs

"Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wifeand

"If I had the wings of a dove-» have been pronounced worthy of Shakespeare, although his lyrical efforts generally were laboriously artificial. He had very little eye to the stage,- was in fact more a poet than a dramatist, and a poet of thought especially,- but he used great care in his studies of character.

Barneveld, John of, Advocate of Hol

land, by John Lothrop Motley. In this brilliant biography, the author shows that as William the Silent is called the author of the independence of the Dutch Provinces, so John of Barneveld deserves