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best of all knowledge, the perfectly useless. It is from one of these books that Kent learns that Philip Melancthon was brother to the great grandmother of Nicholas Mercator, maker of the maps that look as if they had gone under a garden roller. Also he reads of him who wrote "Farewell rewards and fairies" quoted again and again in Puck of Pook's Hill. It was Bishop Corbet of Oxford and Norwich and he wrote it in 1612, Pocahontas's year to the good American. Kent is reading and occasionally travelling, and pleasantly wasting his days he is unconsciously, but very evidently to the reader, playing the part of lover in a pretty little drama and when he is made aware of his state, the book ends with the quaintest chapter in modern fiction. This is not a story to take from a circulating library. It is a book to keep and read; perhaps even to use as a bed book when many readings have made it familiar. The Macmillan Co.

In Mr. Gordon Home's opinion, the Riviera is not properly appreciated by Englishmen, inasmuch as it is their habit to neglect everything East of Alassio, and in his "Along the Rivieras of France and Italy" he describes all the places along the coast from Marseilles to Pisa, omitting only a few towns near Genoa, made uninteresting by factories. Dividing his three hundred octavo pages into three sections, The Côte D'Azur, The Italian Riviera di Polente, and the Italian Riviera di Levante, he selects the most interesting parts of the history of each and the most attractive legends, but chooses the subjects for his paintings and sketches chiefly with reference to their natural beauty, and even in his views of noble buildings or picturesque towns, subordinating their man-made attractiveness to wide sweeps of land

scape. He is careful, almost at the outset, to remind the reader that the sunshine is not always brilliant on the Rivieras and that there are days in which the prevalent grayness is duller than any effect to be found on Scottish shores, and thus he prevents the disappointment that might fall upon travellers unwarned that there are exceptions to the brilliant coloring of his pictures, of which twentyfive are reproduced in color, an equal number of text pictures in black and white showing places and objects of minor importance.

This volume is the first of a new series intended to perform the same office for countries and districts which the "Mediæval Towns" series has performed for cities, and will be followed later by others describing Greece, Palestine and Egypt. The second volume issued almost simultaneously with the first, is entitled "Venetia and Northern Italy," and is written by Mr. Cecil Headlam, to whom Mr. Home dedicates his own book. The pictures in the second volume are his but nearly all the subjects are architectural or urban, and their subjects were evidently chosen by Mr. Headlam. The covered bridge at Pisa; the Ponte Lungo and the Towers at Bologna; Milan Cathedral; St. Mark's, Venice and the Piazza dei Cavalli, Piacenza; San Marino and the Campanile and Baptistry at Parma are among the pictures. Mr. Headlam, struck by the strong individuality of the Northern Italian cities has described a large number in the text, considerably abbreviating the space used by Mr. Home for each one, but not omitting the romantic stories of the Visconti, the Sforza and similar worthies, or the great artists to whom Italy owes so much, and his book, although diverse, harmonizes well with his friend's. The Macmillan Co.

It is three hundred years this winter since John Harvard was born in the charming half-timbered house at Stratford-on-Avon from which he set forth to the new colony of Massachusetts. Twenty-nine years later he gave over to certain of the leading colonists his library of four hundred books, together with a sum of one thousand pounds, the nucleus of Harvard College in the little village of Cambridge across the river from Boston. The almost mythical character of Harvard himself has become a symbol of the high seriousness, the idealism, the insatiable desire for freedom and truth which distinguished the founders of the Commonwealth, and which are enshrined in the arms of the great University of to-day-a simple shield bearing the word "Veritas" with the motto "Christo et Ecclesiae."

For two hundred and fifty years in round numbers, Harvard College was 'the centre of New England life, the centre to which, as a matter of course, the people of quality in most of the original colonies of the North sent their sons to gain common ideals of brotherhood and citizenship. Cotton Mather, President John Adams, President John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, George Bancroft, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Phillips Brooks, John Lothrop Motleyare some of the great names which represent the Harvard College of two centuries and a half.

To any one familiar with American life those names strike a common note, the note of New England, the note of a provinciality not less distinct because it is philosophic and in a sense widely cultured. It may be said that so long as America had one perfectly definite national point of view, it was the pro

vincial point of view of New England. The growth of imperialism in America, the rapid development of new states and new cities, often composed largely of ill-educated foreigners, has made it almost impossible as yet to define the common point of view of America. The influence of New England is dying out; the fine, intense provincialism no longer moves American politics and society, and something wider and more cosmopolitan, something still indistinct in its outlines, is gradually taking possession of all the states.

Harvard College ceased to be provincial when provincialism ceased to be the controlling element in American society. By carefully adapting its curriculum to the economic needs of the time, and by enrolling among its professors men of widely different sections of the country, the possession, along with these tributes to progress, of the very soul of American tradition has easily kept for it the leading place among American universities. President Roosevelt, for example, who represents the extreme qualities of ultramodern America, is a Harvard man.

This adaptation, which can be roughly defined as the evolution of a university out of a college, in accordance with the evolution of Americanism out of New Englandism, is the work of the present head of Harvard, President Charles W. Eliot. With much of the simplicity and quality of the earlier New England, President Eliot combines the practical efficiency and the somewhat harsh materialism of the Roosevelt type. His policy has been to cut away the ties of sentiment with old New England, to link Harvard with as many phases of American life and as many sections of the country as possible, and in general to sacrifice culture to efficiency. He has been an

uncompromising realist ever since the day, now all but forty years ago, when as a young man and an assistant professor of chemistry, he was chosen President of the University, an unprecedented honor for a professor not of the humanities, but of science.

It is interesting to compare a few figures, in order to indicate the change in size which this evolution represents. In 1881 the whole body of teachers was 182; in 1906, 643. In 1881 the students numbered 1,364; in 1906, 3,945. The Summer School, in which in 1881 forty-four students were enrolled, in 1906 numbered 1,076. During the last five years the figures have fluctuated, so that the growth seems to have reached a very normal temporary stopping-place, rather fortunate, considering the inadequate funds and buildings for accommodating such numbers. Many reasons are given for this pause in growth; among them the increasingly high standard of admission and the refusal of Harvard until last year to accept uniform entrance examinations with other universities, the activity of the Greek-letter fraternities elsewhere in making freshmen promptly welcome, the extreme indifference and ill-success of Harvard in most athletic matters, and the somewhat exclusive club-system. The attractiveness of the small college is increased in the eyes of many boys by the certificate method of gaining admission commonly in vogue, but never accepted by Harvard, which obviates the dreadful ordeal of entrance examinations. Although in one sense all the arguments in favor of the small college, as a Harvard man once said, are for the purpose of making it larger, there are arguments in favor of the small college whose only drawback is that they have that effect, for in America there is no institution which, like Oxford, unites the intimate, corporate, personal quality of the college

with the cosmopolitan, broadening quality of the university, Princeton being the only great American university which may be said to have made any considerable progress towards this ideal. The work of President Eliot, so admirable from the standpoint of practical efficiency, tends to withdraw the influence of Harvard over the personal relations of the students, to withdraw any guidance whatever except a purely intellectual guidance. The result is that we see at Harvard-distinct from the professional schools, most of whose students are mature men, who require for the most part none but purely intellectual training in some special department— the anomaly of a college of younger men numbering above two thousand, all under the control of a single system of official machinery and endeavoring to retain the unity of a college of three or four hundred. Furthermore, the "elective" system now in vogue. by which a student is required for his degree only to pass a certain number of courses, among which he is allowed to choose entirely at his own discretion, has forced undergraduate social life to split up into purely arbitrary groups based entirely on personal tastes. Thus there is nothing which forces the attention of a literary student upon an athletic student, or of any two men from temperamentally opposed sections of the country upon each other. As it is safe to say that in no country in the world are there states and sections more temperamentally opposed than in America, this serves to intensify sectional distastes as well as personal tendencies toward one or another form of activity often already too harshly opposed. The effect is an individualism more marked at Harvard than at any other American university in all those tendencies which do not depend, as in athletics and social economics, upon co-operation. Nowhere,