tions of a vast bulk of people, as is now clear from a philosophic survey of that period. Scott rendered articulate the sentiments vaguely felt in what we now know as the "Gothic revival," the alliance between man and the hills that overshadow him and the homes that shelter; in Byron the same feeling of pious awe for nature as the arena for heroic exploits or the stern corrector of mean ones is implicit throughout, while Wordsworth himself, in whose work all this is equally inherent, lifts it to another plane by an omission, in general, of any insistence on the purely grandiose elements in men's history (such as battles and the pomps of kingship), insisting on the "natural piety" that creates its own transcendent world from the commonest elements and the lowliest duties. Shelley's faith in the latent possibilities of man led him "to fear himself and love all human kind," and to hail "Earth, Ocean, Air," as one "beloved brotherhood."

The generation that succeeded Wordsworth, undermined by industrialism and evolution, added nothing to our store of beauty as regards any conception of our relation to the universe in which we live. It added enormously in metrical accomplishment, sheer virtuosity reaching its final apotheosis in Swinburne, where the poet, as first holding the hounds of rhyme and alliteration well in leash, is finally dragged clean off his feet by the tugging pair. The poetry of this period is almost wholly the poetry of introspection and self-analysis varied by occasional word-painting of extreme fine

one hand; and on the other is the poetry of nervous sensations, which convey a serious import only to people of tender years, often impelling them to dire lamentation or revolt over a life as yet unseen in focus. Neither category of song conduces to the idea of an apostolate in the singer, since the first insists on our incurable wretchedness and the second insists only on joys that cannot survive a cold in the head or a twinge of neuralgia.

Poetry to win respect from the ordinary man must be by way of an affirmation. Rightly or wrongly to the normal English mind, poetry stands or falls by its effect as a help or hindrance to living, and hence by its insistence on "man's unconquerable mind." "But," the reader may object, "to appraise poetry thus is to mistake and misjudge the whole nature and meaning of æsthetic endeavor." That may or may not be so; we merely notice the phenomenon without gratifying the opinion.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul

is one of the few affirmations of "man's unconquerable mind" made in our own time that has achieved instant and assured popularity. But an age that is seriously asking whether since man is a product of heredity and environment and his thought and conduct necessarily conditioned by these-he can have an "unconquerable mind" has oftener produced a poet "tired of myself and sick of asking"; or another who hopes wistfully

seeking that "escape from life" (which only a modern critic could have proffered as an excuse for art), by retelling old tales that are utterly remote from life as we know it.

If we recall some of the best-known lines of standard English poetry and the strong and noble affirmations lying behind them, such as those to which the following are an index:

The expanse of spirit in a waste of shame

It is not growing like a tree

The Academy.

The glories of our blood and stateWhen I consider how my light is spent

The World is too much with us

we see at once that our past poetry has enshrined an ethical sentiment which has come home to the hearts and bosoms of men without descending to the tameness and obviousness of writers, such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who now usurp the throne and receive the tribute due to the authentic singer. Wilfrid Thorley.

Speaking generally, one would be tempted to say that they have had their day. But we have lately been reminded that one of the most distinguished of modern writers, in a certain peculiar genre, has supplied a curious example of the pseudonym not only carefully preserved from all but a very few intimates, but almost elevated by its inventor into a separate psycholog ical unit, a second literary self. The trivial nom-de-plume, from "Michael Angelo Titmarsh" to "Mark Twain," is, beside this, little more than a loungecoat the author dons in his study. There may be a special charm to certain creative genius in the "projection" of itself into a carefully studied imag inary being such as "Fiona Macleod"; but of ordinary modern writers scarce one in fifty thinks it worth while to don a mask in order to amuse or overawe his readers. The thing when done is usually a dull form or a shallow jest. A "Peter Plymley," even a "Parson Lot," possibly a "Historicus," may have had their serious reasons for adopting a disguise, but nowadays controversy is invited to disport itself in full day

light; publicity, like fresh air, is the fashion, and it is commonly held that no man need write what he is ashamed to sign.

A

As to that, of course, one sometimes hears a good deal of nonsense talked. mostly by amateurs in the silly season. The name of a newspaper, the editorial "we," may be said to constitute a pseudonym, but that rather resembles the "firm-name" of a literary corporation. Only the outsider speaks with subtle irony of the editorial plural as merely the pretentious mask for the "views of a single individual." single hand doubtless holds the pen, but without a representative intelligence behind it, it would scarcely be there. But the individual pseudonym, as occasionally employed in fiction by the few who like to keep their own family names separate from the atmosphere of literature or business, scarcely means more than the separate address in the City of an individual whose private life is carried on in the West End, or the seclusion of the country. That a woman should elect to pose as a man, or a man as a woman, can matter very

Was it not here that the great Sandras de Courtilz established the famous memoir-factory, whence he inundated Europe with the products of his all too facile pen? Not names only did he never scruple to invent, nay, but whole biographies of celebrities, dead or living, for which he chanced to recognize a demand not adequately supplied by the author. In the realms of autocracy, political or religious, in France under the "Grand Monarque," the pseudonym becomes almost the hall-mark of honest criticism and original thought.

And when we come to Voltaire, who in his innumerable literary ebullitions appears under many more names than the Great Twin Brethren, the onus lies, as has been well said, upon any entertaining eighteenth-century pamphlet that bears a suspicious name, to prove that it was not written by that greatest of cosmopolitan littérateurs and pamphleteers. His pseudonyms are innocent enough. Why should not a learned German, "Dr. Ralph," have been the author of Candide? At any rate, many another title-page of the seventeenth and eighteenth century presented such veri-similitude that authorities are still left wondering "which was the justice and which was the

thief," and many an undiscovered author like "Junius" (even if his identity be established now) retained for generations a pseudonymous fame. "Junius," by the way (being but a modestly veiled form of "Brutus"-the popular synonym for public rectitude), was a characteristic signature of the stately and classical eighteenth century, when, as Lady Teazle pathetically reflects, there were "letters with Roman signatures in the paper every day, proving that the country is utterly done for; but you gentlemen will never read us anything entertaining." In their diverse literary spheres such titles as "Nimrod," "Ingoldsby," or "Bon Gaultier" (and a partnership may most naturally assume a single firmname) still survives as shades more famous than their long-since-identified substance. But in the old days of savage intolerance and bloody tyranny scarcely any shadow, figment or disguise could be too obscure to protect the indignant critic of injustice in high places from the wrath of an omnipotent censor.

Authorship presumably clings to a name of some sort, and where blank anonymity left suspicion wildly nosing here and there, a pseudonym might throw research on to a definitely wrong scent. Not often perhaps, and more often, we trow, the lingering desire to be in some way identifiable, at least to friends, has served to mark the pamphlet red as one of those "fatal to their authors."

There is a tragic pathos about the queer self-conscious "pseudonym" still confronting us on the title-page of some original outburst that has long since served its turn in the cause of freedom and progress. "One is tempted," writes a fanciful bibliophile, "to knock at the closed door, to cry 'Come out, all is safe now.'" But the literary martyr is long since gone to his account, chronicled in the crowded columns of Bar

bier-"assassinated on the road to Lyons" for divulging Rosicrucian mysteries, or "entrapped and beheaded" by

The Outlook.

some pope whose private life would have made the fortune of twenty modern society papers.

In "The Code of the Spirit," the Rev. Wilford L. Hoopes undertakes an interpretation of the Decalogue in terms of to-day, reading into it and drawing from it lessons especially suited to modern life. His temper is reverent and his purpose helpful. Sherman, French & Co.

That a hitherto unknown writer of verse should introduce himself to the public in an epic poem of nearly five hundred pages argues the possession of courage of a sort verging upon temerity. But Henry R. Gibson does this in "The Ban of Baldurbane" (Sherman, French & Co.) with cheerful confidence; and his verse, though it nowhere reaches a high level, is by no means as bad as it might be. It is difficult to imagine any one reading through a modern 500-page epic, but readers who dip into this volume here and there will find it a tolerably even, though unexciting, performance.

To the "Art of Life Series" of which Edward Howard Griggs is the editor and B. W. Huebsch the publisher, Rev. Charles F. Dole contributes a volume on "The Burden of Poverty." In it he essays a study of the nature and causes of poverty, as it exists to-day, and of its possible amelioration and relief. In particular, he seeks for practical, workable principles on which it may be possible to grapple with the problem. This is a large subject to deal with in the compass of a little more than a hundred pages; but Mr. Dole approaches the problem in a warmly sympathetic spirit; and even

readers who do not follow him in all of his conclusions will find the book stimulating and suggestive.

"A Plaything of the Gods" by Carl Gray is a novel of pioneer days in California with a Mexican outlaw as hero. The local color is extremely interesting and some of the characterization is clever. The book, however, woefully lacks plot structure, deals too baldlythat is, for a writer without a masterly understanding of them-with the more elemental passions, and is not even shaped to point effectively the fatalism indicated by the title. The story has crude strength, and in the hands of a well-trained writer would have made a really great book. Sherman, French & Co.

Of "Anthropology," that absorbing and all-embracing study, R. R. Marett writes a lively and profound account in the Home University Library with that word for a title. He endeavors to present "one kind of history, with the same evolutionary principle running right through it, for all men, savage and civilized, present and past." The method of study is comparative and the writer attempts to solve the secrets of dim primordial days by reference to the actual barbaric life existing on earth to-day, doing so cautiously and with reservations. The result is a most interesting monograph. Henry Holt & Company.

William McDougall realizes from the start the difficulty of his subject and does all in his power to smooth the road

before the feet of his followers. All the more because he studies philosophical rather than laboratory psychology, this is necessary. By the use of many simple illustrations, all cleverly chosen, he illuminates his subject. His method too of starting in with the province and the structure of the mind, before going on to the study of animal behavior, the study of the child, the individual, the abnormal person, and then working out his theory of "Social Psychology," helps the reader to follow after him along high altitudes. Henry Holt and Company.

John Gray Kendrick contributes to the Home University Library a small volume on "The Principles of Physiology." The author is a modern of the moderns and is quite sure that the principles of life, death, and generation rest on a "tripod of three sciencesAnatomy, Chemistry, and Physics." He does grudgingly admit that there are a few phenomena which can not be So accounted for and concedes that "feeling, willing, thinking, and other mental states or processes" are probably not the results of "any purely physical or chemical action." The very strength of these convictions makes for simplicity and clarity in this admirable handbook. Henry Holt and Company.

As thrilling as an adventure story of the very latest sort is "The Cable Game" by Stanley Washburn (Sherman, French & Co.). Mr. Washburn, the correspondent of a Chicago newspaper, was ordered post haste from the end of the Russian-Japanese war to the Black Sea and the rebellion there in progress. He begins at the start, tells of his rush across the continent, and his inability to go forward by the regular means of transport. In the face of the fiercest December storms that that most wild of all land-locked seas had known for many years, he set forth in

a small steam tug, with a band of ignorant Greeks and one unusually clever and amusing American negro. Across seas of incredible fury, back and forth along a hostile coast, meeting everywhere stupidity and unwillingness to allow him to see the true state of affairs, Mr. Washburn, for two weeks, cruised here and there, sending constantly messages of importance to his editors. His style is graphic newspaperese, slangy and loosely constructed; but always amusing and vibrant with emotion.

An anonymous book of singular power, whether truth or fiction, is "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." The writer claims to be-perhaps isthe son, of an octoroon sewing-girl by her mistress's college-boy son. After the birth of the author, on the approach of his father's marriage to a white woman, the pair, mother and son, were sent North and landed in a small town in Connecticut where, because of his whiteness, the boy grew to a considerable age without suspecting that he was of negro parentage. His father seems to have been mindful of him and for a long time remitted checks with regularity; but after the mother's death, he was thrown upon his own resources and led a wandering, exciting life, rather over-full of dramatic incidents for one ordinary existence, and landed at last in New York, travelled, educated. Here, after seeing a negroburning in the South, he decided to pose as an Anglo-Saxon, married a white girl, after confessing to her, and now lives the prosaic life of a successful Caucasian business-man in New York. The writer is self-evidently a negro, or intimately connected with that race, and the picture of what a negro feels and is becomes vivid and touching. The book is graphically written and in clever English. Sherman, French & Co.