Liberty, On, by John Stuart Mill.

(1858.) A small work on individual freedom under social and political law. It had been planned and written as a short essay in 1854, and during the next three years it was enlarged into a volume, as the joint work of the author and his wife; but according to Mr. Mill's protestation, more her book than his. His own description of it is, that it is philosophic text-book of this twofold principle:-(1) The importance, to man and society, of the existence of a large variety in types of character, the many different kinds of persons actually found where human nature develops all its possibilities; and (2) the further importance of giving full freedom of opinion and of development to individuals of every class and type. Mr. Mill thought he saw the possibility of democracy becoming a system of suppression of freedom, compulsion upon individuals to act and to think all in one way; a tyranny in fact of the populace, not less degrading to human nature and damaging to human progress than any of which mankind has broken the yoke. A reply to Mill's

views was made by Sir J. F. Stephen in his 'Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality) (1874.) Stephen attempted to so reanalyze and re-state the democratic ideas as to show that Mill's fears were needless.

My Study Windows, by James Russell

Lowell, contains a series of biographical, critical, and poetical essays, in whose kaleidoscopic variety of theme continual brilliancy illuminates an almost perfect symmetry of literary form. The charming initial essay, 'My Garden Acquaintance, treats of the familiar visits of the birds at Elmwood. This is followed by a similar essay entitled 'A Good Word for Winter. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is the third; and a review of the Life of Josiah Quincy' follows. Then come crit

ical

essays upon the lives and works of Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln, James Gates

Emerson, Pope, and the early English authors, or rather upon some of their critics and editors. Characterizations like these abound: "I have sometimes wondered that the peep-shows, which Nature provides in such endless variety for her children, and to which we are admitted on the one condition of having eyes, should be so generally neglected.» «He (Winter) is a better poet than Autumn when he has a mind; but like a truly great one, as he is, he brings you down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand him out of that, with no adventitious helps of association, or he will none of you." "All the batteries of noise are spiked!» «The earth is clothed with innocence as with a garment; every wound of the landscape is healed. . . . What was unsightly before has been covered gently with a soft splendor; as if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it." The essay upon Chaucer was always a favorite with that admirable critic, Prof. F. J. Child; and to him Lowell dedicated the volume which was published in 1874.

English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, The, by William Makepeace Thackeray, is a collection of lectures, delivered in England in 1851, in America during 1852-53, and published in 1853. Studying these pages, the reader finds himself living in the society of the poets, essayists, and novelists of the pre

ceding century, as a friend conversant

with their faults and signal merits. As twelve authors are packed into six lectures, a characteristic disproportion is manifest. Swift is belittled in forty pages; a like space suffices to hit off in a rapid touch-and-go manner the qualities of Prior, Gay, and Pope. A page and a half disposes of Smollett to make room for Hogarth and Fielding: Addison, Steele, Sterne, Congreve, and Goldsmith, receive about equal attention. These papers are the record of impressions made upon a mind exceptionally sensitive to literary values, and reacting invariably with original force and suggestiveness. Written for popular presentation, they are con versational in tone, and lighted up with swift flashes of poignant wit and humor Some of their characterizations are very striking: as that of Gay, helplessly dependent upon the good offices of the Duke

and Duchess of Queensberry, to a pampered lapdog, fat and indolent; and that of Steele, whose happy-go-lucky ups and downs and general lovableness constituted a temperament after Thackeray's own heart. His admiration for Fielding, his acknowledged master in the art of fiction, is very interesting. The English Humorists' will long remain the most inviting sketch in literature of the period and the writers considered.

Ethical and Social Subjects, Studies

New and Old in, by Frances Power Cobbe. (1865.) The various essays here collected are developments of the views of morals presented in the author's earlier works, while she was greatly influenced, among other forces, by the mind of Theodore Parker, whose works she edited. A strong and original thinker, fearless, possessing a clear and simple style, Miss Cobbe makes all her work interesting. With the essay upon 'Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ'-which have to her view little in common-the series begins. In her paper on 'Self-Development and Self-Abnegation,' she maintains that self-development is the saner, nobler duty of man. Her titles, "The Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians,' (The Philosophy of the Poor-Laws,' 'The Morals of Literature,' 'Decemnovenarianism > (the spirit of the nineteenth century), (Hades, and The Hierarchy of Art,' indicate the range of her interests. The 'Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes,' affords a vigorous and humane protest against vivisection. It should be remembered that an early essay of Miss Cobbe on 'Intuitive Morals' has been pronounced by the most philosophic critics the ablest brief discussion of the subject in English. Her breadth of view, ripe culture, profoundly religious though unsectarian spirit, and excellence of style, make her writings important and helpful.

Culture Demanded by Modern Life.

A Series of Addresses and Arguments on the Claims of Scientific Education. Edited by E. L. Youmans. (1867.) A book of importance as a landmark indicating the expansion of education to embrace science with literature, as both knowledge of highest value and a means of mental discipline not second to any other. Dr. Youmans, to whose service in this direction American culture owes a deep debt, supplied an Introduction to

the volume, on mental discipline in education, and also an essay on the scientific study of human nature. Other essays on studies in science are: Tyndall on physics, Huxley on zoölogy, Dr. James Paget on physiology, Herbert Spencer on political education, Faraday on education of the judgment, Henfrey on botany, Dr. Barnard on early mental training, Whewell on science in educational history, and Hodgson on economic science. The wealth of suggestion, stimulus to study, and guidance of interest in these chapters, give the volume a permanent value both to the educator and to studious readers generally. It is a book, moreover, the counsels of which have been accepted; and its prophecies, of advantage to follow from giving science an equal place with literature as a means of culture, have been abundantly fulfilled.

Aspects of Fiction, AND OTHER VENT

URES IN CRITICISM (1896), by Brander Matthews, is a collection of crisp articles relating largely to novelists and novelwriting. A clever practitioner in the art of short-story writing, the author speaks here as of and to the brothers of his own craft, with an eye especially for good technique, that artistic sense of proportion and presentation so dear to his own half-Gallicized taste. The Gift of StoryTelling, Cervantes, Zola, Kipling & Co., are brilliant analyses, fresh, original, pregnant, and spiced with a just measure of sparkling wit; by means of his close study of the history of fiction, he often brings the traits and practices of older authors to illuminate by a felicitous application those of contemporary novelists, discovering permanent canons of art in fresh, elusive guises. A lighter vein of humor and observation renders the paper in 'Pen and Ink' upon the 'Antiquity of Jests' an interesting and amusing bypath of research. (Studies of the Stage' is the fruit of many years' intimacy with the history of the stage and stage conventions, aided, enriched, and deepened by an experience with such present methods of stagecraft behind the footlights as falls to the lot of a practical playwright. Mr. Matthews writes of "The Old Comedies' and 'The American Stage' in a happy tone of reminiscence and sympathetic observation. The French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century,' the best work accessible on the subject in English, is a scholarly contribution to the history

of the French stage from the Romantic movement to the present day. A lifelong familiarity with French people and literature gives the judgments of Professor Matthews an especial convincingness. His 'Americanisms and Briticisms' contains a series of telling strokes at the provincialism that still characterizes some aspects of our literature.

Journal, The (Le Journal'), of Marie

Bashkirtseff, which appeared in Paris in 1885, and was abridged and translated into English in 1889, was called by Gladstone "a book without a parallel.» Like Rousseau's 'Confessions,' it claims to be an absolutely candid expression of individual experience. But the 'Journal' was written avowedly to win posthumous fame; and the reader wonders if the gifted Russian girl who wrote it had not too thoroughly artistic a temperament for matter-of-fact statement. The child she portrays is always interpreted by a maturer mind. Marie is genuinely unhappy, and oppressed with modern unrest; but she studies her troubles as if they belonged to some one else, and is interested rather than absorbed by them. After a preface summarizing her birth in Russia of noble family, and her early years with an adoring mother, grandmother, and aunt, she begins the 'Journal' at the age of twelve, when she is passionately in love with Count H

exclaims despairingly, shortly before her death,-when, although far advanced in consumption, she is planning a chefd'œuvre. She was never unselfconscious, and her book reveals her longings, her petty vanities, and her childish crudities, as well as her versatile and brilliant talents.

Cuore

uore, by Edmondo de Amicis. A series of delightfully written sketches, describing the school life of a boy of twelve, in the year 1882, in the third grade of the public schools of Turin. They are said to be the genuine impressions of a boy, written each day of the eight months of actual school life; the father, in editing them, not altering the thought, and preserving as far as possible the words of the son. Interspersed are the monthly stories told by the schoolmaster, and letters from the father, mother, and sister, to the boy. The stories of the lives of the national heroes are given, as well as essays on The School, The Poor, Gratitude, Hope, etc.; all inculcating the love of country, of one's fellow-beings, of honor, honesty, and generosity. The title, 'Cuore (heart), well expresses the contents of the book-actions caused by the best impulses of a noble heart. Although it is dedicated to children, older persons cannot read the book without pleasure and profit.

years later a handsome Italian engages her vanity rather than her heart. But, as she herself vaguely felt, her struggle for self-expression unfits her for marriage. From the age of three years she cherished inordinate ambition, and felt herself destined to become great either as singer, or writer, or artist, or queen of society. Admiration was essential to her, and she records compliments to her beauty or her erudition with equal pleasure. Her life was a curious mixture of the interests of an attractive society girl with those of a serious student. The twenty-four years that the diary covers were crowded with ambitions and partial successes. Her chronic discontent

was due to the disproportion between her aspirations and her achievements. In spite of the encouragement which her brilliant work received in the Julian studio, she suspected herself of mediocrity. The canvas is there, everything is ready, I alone am wanting," she

lerie des Femmes Célèbres), by C. A. Sainte-Beuve. This compilation of essays is drawn from the 'Causeries du Lundi (Monday Chats) by M. SainteBeuve, in his own day the greatest literary critic of the century. The range of subjects treated extends from Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Lafayette, of the classic age of French literature, through the violent periods of the Revolution and the Empire as illustrated by Madame Roland and Madame de Rémusat, well into the time of the Second Empire in the person of Madame Guizot, wife of the historian. Thanks to the peculiar methods of criticism introduced by the Romantic movement, which, awakening a taste for what was ancient and exotic, necessitated a careful historical knowledge of time, place, and environment, M. SainteBeuve was enabled both accurately and minutely to depict the literary efforts, and consequent claims to future consideration, of each of the various types of woman which he has treated in this book. The

pioneer critics of the new school. -as Mesdames de Staël, de Barante, and even the capable Villemain - had contented themselves with seeing in literature simply the expression of society; but SainteBeuve pushed farther on, regarding it also as the expression of the personality of its authors as determined by the influences of heredity, of physical constitution, of education, and especially of social and intellectual environment. This introduces one not only into an understanding of the motives of the public acts and writings of the authors he treats, but also into the quiet domesticity of their homes. It has fallen to the lot of but few men equitably and dispassionately to judge of feminine effort and achievement in letters, but the general favor accorded to SainteBeuve proves sufficiently that he is preeminent among those few. True, by some he has here been reproached for lack of but this, it would seem, is but enthusiasm ; another way of congratulating him on having broken the old cut-and-dried method of supplementing analysis with a series of exclamation points. Analysis, then, and explanation and comment, rather than dogmatic praise or blame, are what may be found in the 'Gallery.'

onfessions, by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The Confessions' of Rousseau were written during the six most agitated years of his life, from 1765 to 1770; and his state of health at this time, both mental and bodily, may account for some of the peculiarities of this famous work. The first six books were not published until 1781, and the second six not until 1788. According to more than one critic, the "Confessions,' however charming as literature, are to be taken as documentary evidence with great reserve. They form practically a complete life of Rousseau from his earliest years, in which he discloses not only all his own weaknesses, but the faults of those who had been his friends and intimates. In the matter of his many love affairs he is unnecessarily frank, and his giving not only details but names has been severely condemned. The case is all the worse, if, as has been supposed, these love affairs are largely imaginary. As the first half of the Confessions' is, in the main, a romance with picturesque embellishments, the second half has little more foundation in fact, with its undue melancholy and its stories of imaginary spies and enemies. In the matter of style, the

'Confessions' leaves little to be desired; in this respect surpassing many of Rousseau's earlier works. It abounds in fine descriptions of nature, in pleasing accounts of rural life, and in interesting anecdotes of the peasantry. The influence of the Confessions,' unlike that of Rousseau's earlier works, was not political nor moral, but literary. He may be called from this work the father of French Romantisme. Among those who acknowledged his influence were Bernardin de St. Pierre, Châteaubriand, George Sand, and the various authors who themselves indulged in confessions of their own,-like De Musset, Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine, and Madame de Staël, as well as many in Germany, England, and other countries.

onfessions of an English Opium.

Confe

Eater, by Thomas De Quincey. These Confessions, first published in the London Magazine during 1821, start with the plain narrative of how his approach to starvation when a runaway schoolboy, wandering about in Wales and afterwards in London, brought on the chronic ailment whose relief De Quincey found in opiumeating; and how he at times indulged in the drug for its pleasurable effects, "but struggled against this fascinating enthrallment with a religious zeal

and

untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain." Then follow nightmare experiences, with a certain Malay who reappeared to trouble him from time to time, in the opium dreams; and also with a young woman, Ann, whom he had known in his London life. But the story's chief fascination lies in its gorgeous and ecstatic visions or experiences of some transcendental sort, while under the influence of the drug; the record of Titanic struggles to get free from it, and the pathetic details of sufferings that counterbalanced its delights.

The Confessions of an English OpiumEater' is one of the most brilliant books in literature. As an English critic has said, "It is not opium in De Quincey, but De Quincey in opium, that wrote the 'Suspiria and the Confessions.>>> All the essays are filled with the most unexpected inventions, the most gorgeous imagery, and, strange to say, with a certain insistent good sense. As a rhetorician De Quincey stands unrivaled.

contain an account of his life down to his mother's death, and give a thrilling picture of the career of a profligate and an idolater who was to become a Father of the Church. We have in them the story of his childhood, and the evil bent of his nature even then; of his youth and its uncontrollable passions and vices; of his first fall at the age of sixteen, his subsequent struggle and relapses, and the untiring efforts of his mother, Saint Monica, to save him. Side by side with the pictures he paints of his childhood (the little frivolities of which he regards as crimes), and of his wayward youth and manhood, we have his variations of belief and his attempts to find an anchor for his faith among the Manichæans and Neo-Platonists, and in other systems that at first fascinated and then repelled him, until the supreme moment of his life arrived,his conversion at the age of thirty-two. There are many noble but painful pictures of these inward wrestlings, in the eighth and ninth books. The narrative is intermingled with prayers (for the Confessions are addressed to God), with meditations and instructions, several of which have entered into the liturgies of every section of the Christian Church. The last three books treat of questions that have little connection with the life of the author: of the opening chapters of Genesis, of prime matter, and the mysterles of the First Trinity. They are, in fact, an allegorical explanation of the Mosaic account of the Creation. According to St. Augustine, the establishment of his Church, and the sanctification of man, is the aim and end God has proposed to himself in the creation.

Fathers, The Christian: A COLLECTION

OF THE WORKS OF, PRIOR TO 325 A. D., by Drs. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson. (24 vols., 1867-72.) A work giv

are very valuable. They give 'Apostolic Fathers' (A. D. 95–180); ‹Fathers of the Third Century' (180-325); Post-Nicene Greek Fathers' (325-750); 'Post-Nicene Latin Fathers' (325-590). To supplement the 'Ante-Nicene Library,' Dr. Philip Schaff edited a 'Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,' 14 vols., beginning with Augustine and ending with Chrysostom. This covers some of the most important, and is of great value. A second series of 14 vols., beginning with the historians Eusebius and Socrates, and ending with Ephraem Syrus, is in course of publication.

Hippocrates, The Genuine Works of.

(English Translation, 1849. Best complete edition, with French Translation of Littré, 10 vols., 1839-61.) The most celebrated physician of antiquity, known as the Father of Medicine, was born 460 B. C., of the family of Priestphysicians, claiming descent from Æsculapius. He has the great distinction of having been the first to put aside the traditions of early ignorance and superstition, and to base the practice of medicine on the study of nature. He maintained, against the universal religious view, that diseases must be treated as subject to natural laws; and his observations on the natural history of disease, as presented in the living subject, show him to have been a master of clinical research. His accounts of phenomena show great power of graphic description. In treating disease he gave chief attention to diet and regimen, expecting nature to do the larger part. His ideas of the very great influence of climate, both on the body and the mind, were a profound anticipation of modern knowledge. He reflected in medicine the enlightenment of the great age in Greece of the philosophers and dramatists.

the leading Christian authors for three centuries after Christ. It includes apocryphal gospels, liturgies, apologies, or defenses, homilies, commentaries, and a variety of theological treatises; and is of great value for learning what Christian life and thought and custom were, from the time of the Apostles to the Council of Nicæa. The collection is appropriately called The Ante-Nicene Library.' For a concise popular account, the four small volumes by Rev. G. A. Jackson, under the title of Christian Literature Primers,'

D. (Best modern edition by C. G. Kühn, 20 vols., 1821-33.) Galen's position and influence in medicine date from exceptionally brilliant practice, largely at Rome, in the years 170-200 A. D. For the time in which he lived he was a great scientific physician. He practiced dissection (not of the human body, but of lower animals), and not only made observations with patient skill, but gave clear and accurate expositions. He brought into a well-studied system all the medical knowledge of the time, with