von

ful of their kind, possessing scholarship, philosophical grasp, delicate fancy, a sense of humor, literary feeling and expression, and beautiful form. The subjects are: The Medieval Feeling for Nature, The Memoirs of an Old German Gallant,) (Neidhart von Reuenthal and his Bavarian Peasants,' (A German Farmer of the Thirteenth Century,' 'Childhood in Medieval Literature,' (A Mediæval Woman.' The first essay contrasts with the modern feeling for nature -what Ruskin somewhere calls the "sentimental love of it, and von Humboldt the "mysterious analogy between human emotions and the phenomena of the world without us »- the mediæval feeling, which in everything saw only religion. The second essay is on the trials and tribulations of Ulrich Lichtenstein; whose thirteenth-century autobiography is declared to contain "the most detailed example» of that "mediæval gallantry » which has had no equal in the world before or since. The essay is both instructive and amusing. The third and fourth essays are on the rural life of the Middle Ages. The fifth, while taking the view that, using the race as a scale. all mediæval folk were children, gives much curious information on the status of the young during the Middle Ages. The "mediaval woman" of the last essay is Héloïse. The essay is eloquent and touching, and shows that the author is able to do what ot all scholars can, comprehend a woman's heart, as well as musty medieval chronicles. Abélard is described as in egoist, but also as one of the most striking characters of his time. Some of the author's translations of verse show the touch of a true poet.

Thre

Three Americans and Three Englishmen, by Charles F. Johnson, is a volume of six lectures on six of the great figures in the literature of the century: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Longfellow. With a critical and dispassionate mind, the essayist attempts to fix the place in final judgment of each of these men. Wordsworth he celebrates as the first democrat in poetry; almost the first English writer of good birth who had not the point of view of the aristocrat. His love of nature, and his love of children, were Wordsworth's two doors to

from the coldness and formalism of the eighteenth century, only to fall into pits of dreary sentiment and bathos. Coleridge, Mr. Johnson considers as a manysided genius, whose prose and poetry alike he used for noble purposes. He was a good logician and a great poet, and he never mixed the two offices together. His prose is plain, argumentative prose; and his poetry is purely an imaginative product of a high order. The Ancient Mariner is "a poem without a fellow in any tongue." Both Coleridge and Shelley were men apart; their genius was unlike other men's; they seemed no logical outcome of English thought and race. There have been other poets as great as Shelley, but never one like him. He stands as the representative of the idea of youth. His chivalry, his hot enmity to injustice, his hatred of conventionalisms, his failure to understand the necessity of slow painful ef forts if society is to be reformed, are the attitude of a noble, impulsive boy. Hawthorne, Mr. Johnson calls the first distinctly American writer. Irving copied Addison, and Cooper was a reflection of Scott. Poe wrote of a life that never really was in any country. But Haw. thorne, though he deals with the things of the soul, is yet entirely American. The great poet and seer of our land far the greatest poet in Mr. Johnson's opinion, is Emerson. Longfellow is distinguished for his broad culture, his beautiful workmanship, and his sweet and sane views of life, rather than for lofty and original thought.

The

he Romance of a Poor Young Man, by Octave Feuillet. This very popular novel, which first appeared in 1857, is one on which the attacks of the followers of the school of "naturalism » have most heavily fallen. They claim that the plot is exceedingly improbable and melodramatic. Maxime Odiot, Marquis de Champcey, by the rash speculation of his father, is left without fortune. Through the intercession of his old notary, be becomes steward of the Château des Laroque. His intelligence wins the esteem of all; but leaving all in ignorance of his noble birth, he confines his intimacy to an old lady, Mademoiselle Porhoël Goël, an octogenarian. Marguerite, the daugh. ter of Laroque, treats him with the greatest consideration; but he professes

the greatest indifference for her. Finally, through the machinations of Madame Aubry and Mademoiselle Hélonin, suspicions are raised as to the loyalty of Maxime's intentions. Marguerite is made to believe that Maxime seeks to make himself the heir of Mademoiselle Porhoël Goël, and is warned that he may so compromise her as to oblige her to marry him. Entering the tower of an old ruin one evening, she there finds Maxime. After conversing with him, she seeks to go, and finds the door locked. She believes that Maxime hopes to compromise her by obliging her to remain with him all night in the tower, and accuses him of treachery. He acknowledges his love for her; but to save her honor, leaps from the tower, in spite of her attempts to detain him. It is found that Marguerite's grandfather had formerly been the steward of Maxime's family, and had enriched himself from the estate during the Revolutionary period. Madame Laroque restores the fortune to Maxime, and he marries Marguerite.

Tracts for the Times. These papers,

published at Oxford between 1833 and 1841, have become part of English history; for it meant much to the English people, who held that their liberties were concerned with the limitation or extension of ecclesiastical power. The Church, in its reaction against Romanism, became, in many instances negligent in ritual and meaningless in decoration. There were no pictures of saints, but memorial busts of sinners; no figures of martyrs, but lions and unicorns fighting for the crown; and Tract 9, on Shortening the Service,' says "the Reformation left us a daily service, we have now a weekly service; and they are in a fair way to become monthly." The impetus to the Tractarian movement was given partly by the changes contemplated in the Irish episcopate. The British Parliament, which was all-sufficient to pass the Act of Uniformity in 1662, was, in the minds of the Tractarians, incompetent to modify that act in 1832. The so-called Tracts varied from brief sketches, dialogues, etc., to voluminous treatises like those on Baptism and (No. 89) "On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers," which make about a volume each. The fight for the

the

standard occurred around Dr. J. H Newman's famous No. 90, « On Thirty-nine articles of the English Church," which aroused the English public. It states that "The English Church leaves marriage to the judgment of the clergy, but the Church has the right to order them not to marry." The strong point with the Tractarians was that the Prayer Book was not a Protestant book, but was framed to include Catholics; and the leaders determined to push this point. Newman, in No. 90, says, with pitiless logic and clear statement, that "The Protestant confessions were drawn up to include Catholics, and Catholics will not be excluded. What was economy with the first Reformers is a protection to us. What would have been perplexing to us then is perplexing to them now. We could not find fault with their words then: they cannot now repudiate their meaning." As an example of skill in dialectics, these Tracts are worth studying. They were the utterances of masterminds dead in earnest. The leaders were such men as Keble, author of the Christian Year'; Dr. Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew; Dr. J. H Newman; R. H. Froude; Rev. Isaac Williams; and Rev. Hugh Rose, of Cambridge.

The Tracts have done much to restore artistic symbolism as well as earnestness to the Church; on the other hand they have alienated the bulk of Protestant Dissenters, who are willing to admit the claims of the Tractarians to rule the Church of England, but not to rule them. Fellowship with the pope was earnestly deprecated by the Tractarians, who have done good work in the Anglican Church since; but Newman and some others found their way to the Roman communion, and gave some color to Punch's Puseyite hymn:

"And nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer Rome."

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a remarkable novel by Thomas Hardy, is au embodiment in fiction of the Tragedy of the Woman,- the world-old story of her fall, and of her battle with man to recover her virginity of soul. Tess, a beautiful village girl, is a lineal descendant of the ancient D'Urberville family. Her far-off gentle blood shows itself in her passionate sensitive nature.

By a mere accident she becomes the prey of a young man of gross instincts, returning to her home soiled and dismayed. Her child is born and dies. "Her physical blight becomes her mental harvest;" she is lifted above the groping mental state of the people about her. This etherealization has fatal results. As she was once the victim of man's vices, she is destined to become the victim of his conventional virtues. At a farm far removed from the scene of her sufferings, she meets Angel Clare, a gentleman's son. Their mutual love ends in marriage. On their wedding-day Tess tells Clare of her past. From that hour she ceases to be for him "enskied and sainted," becoming a mere soiled thing which had drifted in its perilous beauty across his path. He leaves her; and her struggle with her anguish of spirit, with her poverty, and her despair, has a fearful ending: "The President of the Immortals" had finished his sport with her. 'Tess' is well-nigh primeval in its treatment. A novel created apparently by inexorable forces of nature, it is joined by its strength and pitilessness to the blind powers of the world. Yet it is not without sunny spaces, revelations of warm nooks of earth hidden from the blasts of the tempest.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., is "a heterogeneous sort of whimsical humorous memoirs." The first volume appeared January 1st, 1760, when Sterne was forty-six. Up to this time he had lived the life of an easygoing fox-hunting churchman, utterly obscure; but this, his first effort, SO amused the public, that he was persuaded to compose further in the same strain; and he published in all nine volumes, the last in January, 1767. The work is full of domestic comedy, "characters of nature," "the creations of a fine fancy working in an ideal element, and not mere copies or caricatures of individualities actually observed," like those of Dickens. Here live old Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Dr. Slop, and the Widow Wadman; and who does not enjoy their garrulous gossip, and that of Sterne himself in his frequent whimsical digressions, so full of keen observation and gentle ridicule? Sterne had evidently studied the humorists well: Tris

tram Shandy' reminds us, now of Cervantes, now of Rabelais, now of Swift; but it is sui generis nevertheless. Coleridge praised especially Sterne's power of giving significance to "the most evanescent minutiæ in thought, feeling, look, and gesture." The work has always been popular, perhaps never more so than today, when the development of realism in English fiction is receiving so much attention.

One

ure.

of

Cleopatra's Nights, by Théophile Gautier. In this charming short story, published in 1867, in a collection of Nouvelles,' the author shows the exhaustive study which he had made of Egypt and its ancient customs. He introduces Cleopatra to his readers as she is being rowed down the Nile to her summer palace. In describing the cause of her ennui to Charmian, Cleopatra graphically pictures the belittling, crushing effect of the gigantic monuments of her country. She bewails the fate of a Queen who can never know if she is loved for herself alone, and longs for some strange adventShe has been followed down the Nile by Meiamoun, a young man who is violently infatuated with the Queen, but whom she has never noticed. That night she is startled by an arrow which enters her window bearing a roll of papyrus on which is written, "I love you." She looks from the window and sees a man swimming across the Nile, but her servants are unable to find him. Soon after, Meiamoun dives down into the subterranean passage which conducts the waters of the Nile to Cleopatra's bath; and the next morning, as she is enjoying her bath, she finds him gazing at her. She condemns him to death, and then pardons him. He begs for death, and she yields, but tells him he shall first find his most extravagant dream realized: he shall be the lover of Cleopatra. "I take thee from nothingness; I make thee the equal of a god, and I replunge thee into nothingness." "It was necessary to make of the life of Meiamoun a powerful elixir which he could drain from a single cup." Then follows the description of the feast. After a night of magnificent splendor, a cup of poison is handed to him. Touched by his beauty and bravery, Cleopatra is about to order him not to drink, when the heralds announce the arrival of Mark

Antony. He asks: "What means this corpse upon the floor?» «Oh! nothing,» she answers; -"a poison I was trying, in order to use it should Augustus make me prisoner. Will it please you, my dear, to sit by me and watch the dancers ?»

Uncle Remus: HIS SONGS AND HIS

SAYINGS. By Joel Chandler Harris. (1880.) These quaint and humorous folk-lore fables "are told night after night to a little boy by an old negro who has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery, and who has all the prejudices of caste and pride of family that were the natural results of the system." The animals talk and show their native cunning,- Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer 'Possum, and the rest. These characters, as delineated by Mr. Harris, have won world-wide fame, and are familiar in all literature and conversation. Their adventures seem directly drawn from the darkey's vivid and droll imagination; though in the preface Mr. Page gives data received from ethnologists, which seem to prove the existence of like stories- some of them identical-among Indian tribes in both North and South America, and the inhabitants of India, Siam, and Upper Egypt. But in his preface to a later collection of Uncle Remus Stories Harris lightly scoffs at such learned dissertations; and suggests one's pure enjoyment, like his own, of the stories for themselves.

Uncle Tom's

Cabin, by

Mr.

Harriet

Beecher Stowe. This world-famous story was written in 1851, and appeared originally, from week to week as written, in the National Era, an abolition paper published at Washington. Brought out in book form, when completed as a serial, its popularity was immediate and immense. Its influence during the last decade of slavery was great, and its part in the creation of anti-slavery sentiment incalculable.

It opens in Kentucky, and closes in Canada. The chapters between are chiefly located in Ohio, in New Orleans, beside Lake Pontchartrain, and down upon the Red River. Their chief purpose is to depict slavery, and the effects of it, by portraying the experiences of Uncle Tom, and of those with whom he was more or less connected, through the space of some five

years. Their chief personages, rather in the order of interest than of introduction, are Uncle Tom, the pious and faithful slave, and little Eva, to whom he is devoted; Augustine St. Clare, father of Eva, and his complaining wife; Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, from whose "old Kentucky home» Uncle Tom is sold South; George Shelby, their son, who finally seeks him for repurchase, and finds him dying of brutality on that remote Red River plantation; Simon Legree, who bought Tom after St. Clare's death (which followed not long after that of Eva), who owns him when he dies, and who represents the brutal slaveholder as St. Clare represents the easy and good-humored one: Cassy, once Legree's favorite, now a half-crazed wreck of beauty; Emeline, bought to succeed her, but who escapes with Cassy at last; Eliza, who proves to be Cassy's daughter, and to whom she is finally reunited; George Harris, Eliza's husband, who follows her along the "Underground Railway" in Ohio, after her wonderful escape across the Ohio River on the ice, carrying her boy Harry; Tom Loker, Haley, and Marks, the slave-catchers, who hunt these runaways and are overmatched; Simon Halliday and Phineas Fletcher, the Quakers, with their families; and Senator and Mrs. Bird, and John Van Trompe, all of whom assist the fugitives: Miss Ophelia, the precise New England spinster cousin in St. Clare's home; Topsy, the ebony "limb of mischief," who never was born but just "growed"; and Aunt Chloe, Uncle Tom's wife back there in "old Kentuck," whose earnings were to assist in his return to her, but to whom he never returns. Other but incidental characters, field and household servants, swell the number to fifty-five.

In a Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,' its author gave matter to sustain both the severe and the mild pictures of slavery which her story had drawn. Being once introduced as the writer of that story, Mrs. Stowe disclaimed its authorship; and to the question, "Who Idid write it then?" she answered reverently-"God.»

of the style of the period it describes. "To a Devonshire man it is as good as clotted cream, almost," has been said of it; and it is Blackmore's special pride that as a native he has "satisfied natives with their home scenery, people, life, and language." But the popularity

of the brilliant romance has not been local, and has been equally great on both sides of the Atlantic. Even without so swift a succession of exciting incident, the unhackneyed style, abounding in fresh simile, with its poetic appreciation of "the fairest county in England," combined with homely realism, would make it delightful reading. Much as Hardy acquaints us with Wessex, Blackmore impresses Exmoor upon us, with a comprehensive "Englishness" of setting and character. It is out-of-door England, with swift streams, treacherous bogs, dangerous cliffs, and free winds across the moors. The story is founded on legends concerning the robber Doones, a fierce band of aristocratic outlaws, who in revenge for wrongs done them by the government, lived by plundering the country-side. Regarding their neighbors as ignoble churls and their legitimate prey, they robbed and murdered them at will. John Ridd, when a lad of fourteen, falls into their valley by chance one day, and is saved from capture by Lorna Doone, the fairest, daintiest child he has ever seen. When he is twenty-one, and the tallest and stoutest youth on Exmoor, "great John Ridd» seeks Lorna again. He hates the Doones who killed his father, but he loves beautiful innocent Lorna; and becomes her protector against the fierce men among whom she lives. slow to think, he is quick to act; if "plain and unlettered," he is brave and noble: and Lorna welcomes his placid

If

larity, not only among English speaking people but on the continent of Europe also. During the publication of these papers Mr. Scott preserved his incognito even towards his publisher. The author spent some sixteen years of his life (1806 to 1822) in the West Indies, in connection with a mercantile house in Kingston, Jamaica. The travels among the neighboring islands and to the Spanish Main, gave him not only great familiarity with the social life of the West Indies, but also a knowledge of the wild and adventurous nautical life of the times, and of the scenes and aspects of a tropical climate which he has so faith. fully and vividly portrayed. There is no plot; but the book contains a series of adventures with pirates, mutineers, privateersmen and men-of-war, storms, wrecks, and waterspouts, interspersed with descriptions of shore life and customs. The time chosen is one full of historical interest; for the book opens with an adventure in the Baltic in which the reader is brought into contact with Napoleon's army, and later on there are adventures with American men-of-war and privateersmen, during the War of 1812, the celebrated frigate Hornet playing a small part.

Few, if any, sea writers have exhibited such a remarkable power of description; and the book will stand for many years as one of the most accurate pictures of West-Indian life, both afloat and on shore, during the early part of the nineteenth century.

The publication of Tom Cringle's Log' was followed in 1836 by The Cruise of the Midge'; and these two were the only books written by Michael Scott, who died in 1835, before the publication of the latter work.

narration, certain scenes, such as Lorna's escape to the farm, a tussle with the Doones, the attempted murder in church, the final duel with Carver Doone, and others, stand out as great and glowing pictures.

Tom 'om Cringle's Log, by Michael Scott. This work was originally published as a series of papers in Blackwood's Magazine, the first of them appearing in 1829. They were afterwards published (in 1834) in two volumes; and have enjoyed a wide and well-sustained popu

This, the last but one of George Eliot's novels, she is said to have regarded as her greatest work. The novel takes its name from a provincial town in or near which its leading characters live. The book is really made up of two stories, one centring around the Vincy family, and the other around Dorothea Brooke and her relatives. On account of this division of interest, the construction of the story has been severely criticized as clumsy and inartistic.

Dorothea Brooke, the most prominent figure on the very crowded canvas, is an