the beauty of many passages and individual lines." This fragment remains unchallenged, and despite the splendid vigor of Dryden, the ingenuity of Conington, the plain fidelity of Sir Theodore Martin, Virgil is still unassailed and unassailable in the native fastness of his Latin. Some day perhaps the perfect version will come, and it will come, we think, in the form of colored and harmonious prose.

Throughout his long life Sir Theodore contributed industriously to periodical literature. As readers of this Magazine will remember, and as we are bound in pleasant duty to record, he gave us constant and loyal support. In the pages of "Maga" much may be found of his prose and verse. There he discoursed of the theatre-of Irving's policy at the Lyceum, and of the Meiningen Company, in London. Thither he sent many of the translations which he afterwards gathered into volumes. And whatever he did added to the fulness and vigor of his life. As we look back upon his long career, it is this vigor and this fulness which most greatly astonish us. Any one of his activities would have been enough to fill the years of most men. He controlled them all with an ease and industry which are rarely paralleled.

The practice of the law, which he never renounced, was, as we have said, the main business of his life. His leisure was as the busines of others. And while he was fortunate in the length of years allotted to him, he was still more fortunate because in the sad sense he never grew old. He preached incessantly the gospel of work, which he rightly welcomed as the true preserver of youth. "Frivolous pursuits," said he, on his ninetieth birthday, "base passions unsubdued, narrow selfishness, vacuity of mind, life with sordid aims or no aims at all-these are the things that bring age upon the soul. Healthful tastes, an open eye for

Blackwood's Magazine.

what is beautiful and good in nature and in man, a happy remembrance of youthful pleasures, a mind never without some active interest or pursuitthese are the things that carry on the feelings of youth into old age."There is the secret of his long and active life, a secret which few are permitted to discover. How well he discovered it all will acknowledge who remember the energy of his mind and body, his alert interest in men and things, the keen edge of his criticism, the clearness of his political and literary vision.

He endured one misfortune, inseparable from age. He grew into a world which was not the world of his youth, and with which he was not in sympathy. He witnessed the victory of speed and noise with something like dismay. The motor-omnibuses which destroyed the quietude and amenity of his house in London were for him a source of constant distress, a symbol of growing vulgarity. How should one who remembered the old stage-coach take pleasure in the raucous manner of modern traffic? He fought the ogres in the newspapers and by the processes of law, and he fought in vain. It is idle to oppose the onset of Juggernaut's car, and idle people will still proclaim by horn and rattle that they are leaving a place they have no desire to leave for another which they have no need to visit. In still worse distress Sir Theodore watched the encroachment of the people. He saw politics degenerate into the basest kind of flattery, and it is not strange that he who had seen the more gracious method of other days should deplore the interested recklessness of our spendthrift Government. But he never despaired of the State; he believed devoutly in the reaction which will surely come; and he died as he lived, satisfied with the past, happy in the present, and of good hope for the future.

"The Silver Horde," is a title so perplexing that even those who usually scorn to read the laudatory paragraphs on the paper jacket of a new novel may find themselves looking for it on Mr. Rex Beach's new book. The words refer to the salmon of the Pacific coast rivers and the story relates a man's struggle to make a fortune from them, that he may wed the daughter of a fabulously rich man. He has to struggle not only with the cli mate and his own ignorance, but with a rival suitor, and before he wins he has become indifferent to the prize. The interest of the tale is divided among his work, the hardships peculiar to the region and the efforts to crush him by financial tactics, but although he conquers, his fate is not likely to be foreseen by many readers. The men of the story are good figures; the women are not quite natural; both merit and defect are found in most of Mr. Beach's books, and as his plot is uncommonly good in "The Silver Horde," it must be counted among his best. Harper & Brothers.

The eighth and ninth volumes of the Works of James Buchanan, collected and edited by John Bassett Moore, and published by the J. B. Lippincott Company in a limited de luxe edition, cover the years from 1848 to 1855. These were important years in the public career of Mr. Buchanan. They covered the close of his service in the Department of State, his defeat in the national Democratic convention of 1852, and a considerable part of his service, -down to December, 1855, as Minister to Great Britain. They were still more important years in the life of the nation: great issues were maturing, and a national crisis, greater than could have been foreseen by any one, was

approaching. Mr. Buchanan's letters, speeches, public papers and private correspondence for this period had much to do with these issues, and none of the preceding volumes have exceeded these in the variety of the subjects dealt with or in the disclosures of character and purpose made. The occasional personal letters to his niece, Miss Harriet Lane, and to intimate friends, throw light upon the personality of the man. Altogether, these volumes are a valuable contribution to the political history of the United States.

The "lady of my own," made by Dame Nature, undoubtedly exists but too often those who attempt her portraiture succeed only in showing that she has received no training from any other hand, and produce a figure anything but attractive. Mr. George Cary Eggleston is more skilful and the chief figure of his "Irene of the Mountains" is unselfish, amiable, gentle, eager to learn, sedulously careful to use whatsoever knowledge she may acquire, and a lover of the beautiful. Taken from her native mountains and placed among Virginians to whom formality is second nature and courtesy an instinct she deliberately schools herself to imitation and to the still more difficult task of restraining speech and action until observation has taught her which way propriety lies. If Mr. Eggleston be somewhat minute in his description of the surroundings and the process, it is because the Virginia of the middle of the last century is even more remote from the feelings and ideals of the modern American of the West and North than the Colonial period. Mr. John S. Wise very well called the story of his boyhood in the days of John Brown and the Civil War

"The End of an Era." Mr. Eggleston's personages are the men and women of that era. His heroine would have been a rare creature in any environment, but the Virginia of her day was especially favorable to her and also to the fantastically gallant lover whom Mr. Eggleston gives her. The mountaineers and the politics of the mountains are novelties differing from Charles Egbert Craddock's and from Major De Forest's in descent and in history and consequently in character and they furnish as good comedy as any Jonathan or Leatherstocking of the North. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

If there be a happier earthly life than that of a scholar to whom Oxford is home, and the atmosphere of Oxford vital air, it is not easy to imagine it, especially while reading such a volume as "Essays of Poets and Poetry," by Dr. T. Herbert Warren, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and President of Magdalen. The volume was published in England last year, but each of its nine essays, issued, one in 1895, and the others at irregular intervals up to 1906, had been thoroughly discussed by the world of letters, and their new appearance, although an excellent reason for reading them once more, was no revelation of his style, or of his opinions. His subjects, Arnold, Dante, Virgil, Tennyson, Gray, are compared and combined in many ways in the various papers and none of them is far from his mind when he is writing of any one of them. Through his work one seems to see the crowd of great shades ever in motion about Oxford; great names come naturally to every page, and at frequent intervals a whole galaxy blazes together for an instant, summoned to bear witness to some phase of Oxford feeling or endeavor. As yet, no American university sends forth work seeming to come from seclusion, but from a wise seclusion, capable of analyzing, summariz

ing, judging the worthiness of the unwalled and uncloistered outer world. Compared with a book from Oxford; "from," not "about" Oxford, they are as the blossoms from those unhappy suburban gardens left unfenced to the feræ naturæ, the cat and the boy, to the perfect rose of some guarded ducal domain. The very appearance of the book sets it apart from anything which would have been published here. Rather small books, artistically printed and unexceptionably bound are the rule with American dons. Dr. Warren's volume is the large octavo which one associates with biographies and travels, and its three hundred pages are twice as thick as America would make them. But the book is feather light, not clumsy in spite of its size, and its large type is attractive, even if one be fond of agate and pearl. One does not want American imitations of it, any more than one would have wished Norton or Shaler or Newcomb to wear the robes of Oxford, but the original is an agreeable novelty. No one more strongly sets forth the value of both the ancient and the modern classics than Dr. Warren, and his address on the subject, although brief, should firmly ground the reader in the conviction that he cannot come too near to knowing all the real literature written in English wheresoever actually published. After reading "In Memoriam Fifty Years After," he will feel that he could not wish that the author had read less in any literature.

It is not usual to recommend criticism for school reading, but this book, like Arnold's "Essays in Criticism," should lie open for consultation to all young students of English and Greek. They will be quite useless to those who wait to be ordered to read them, but those who would desire them should not need to ask twice. They would make a greedy reader of any impressionable girl or boy. E. P. Dutton & Co.