The object which Professor J. L. Myres of Oxford had in view in the volume on "The Dawn of History" which he contributes to the "Home University Library" is, as he explains in his Introduction, to answer the question how, when and where each of the peoples whose doings have most affected the course of human history made its first historical appearance, and also, so far as may be, to explain the reason why they made their appearance in this particular way. This, certainly, is a fascinating inquiry; and the author pursues it with a thoroughness and records its results with a clearness and comprehensiveness which, a priori, would have seemed impossible in a book of such modest proportions. Henry Holt & Co.

A crude phrase now and then may prejudice a novel reader against an unfamiliar author but he who lays aside Miss Kate Trimble Sharber's "At the Age of Eve" for such a reason will deprive himself of much enjoyment. The heroine's journal reveals her heart and history to the reader in a manner very well simulating youthful artlessness and tells the simple story of her first real love with pleasing simplicity. Like Eve, she marries the man for whom she was made, and leaves the man for whom she was not made lamenting as is eminently proper. The tale is eminently well adapted for the reading of girls "at the age of Eve." The BobbsMerrill Co.

Two hundred and fifty pieces, more or less, are included in the volume of verse "Through Dust to Light" by Robert Valantine Heckscher (Sherman, French & Co.); and these, the author tells us in his prefatory note, comprise only about one-third of the poems of his "apprenticeship," during its first three years. What may happen, at

this rate, when his apprenticeship is concluded, it would be idle to predict; but it cannot be thought unkind if one commends to him the wisdom of practising the virtue of self-restraint. Many worthy and elevating thoughts find expression in this volume; and here and there are traces of real lyric grace and beauty, but there is much that is commonplace and much that is strained, and he would have been a good friend to the author who could have persuaded him to go through his work with a relentless pen and erase a considerable part of this verse before publication.

Miss Mary Roberts Rinehart has so keen a sense of the humorous trivialities lying in wait for mortal man that, even when writing a story full of mystery, and with no small element of the supernatural among its constituents, she often so presents her personages that many of her readers imagine themselves to be perusing comic fiction. Her latest book, "The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carbery," abounds in excellent examples of this characteristic. It tells of a hospital patient's apparently disappearing from the mortuary table where he has been laid to await preparation for burial, and of a consequent series of grisly incidents bringing confusion and fright to all the inmates of the hospital. from the head nurse to the humblest patient. The two other stories, "The Three Pirates of Penzance," and "That Awful Night," included in the volume are actually farcical in their innocent fun. It is noteworthy that the amazing adventures are represented as having but few spectators, a detail which greatly lessens the feeling of shamefaced regret too often aroused by reading of absurd mishaps occurring in the presence of witnesses. The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Mr. Bonar Law has achieved his new office under the fairest of political auspices. A party which last summer appeared to be in the depths of disintegration and despair, is now looking forward with confidence to a day not very far distant when it will assume the reins of Imperial Office. The event

has, indeed, falsified the predictions of those palæolithic prophets who have declared for years unnumbered, with a reiteration which grew positively painful, that the retirement of Mr. Balfour spelt the end of any confidence which the country could feel in Conservatism. On the contrary, the party, now free from the well-intentioned and metaphysical blight which the ideas of Hatfield dispersed over the whole length and breadth of the United Kingdom, is showing a buoyancy and almost youthful determination which has long been foreign to its character as an Opposition. Unionism has at last given the view hallo at the sight of its predestined prey.

It would be absurd to attribute such a phenomenon to any one fact. The collocation of circumstances which have produced this single result are compounded with many contributory items-the retirement of the ex-leader, the commanding powers exhibited by his successor, the sudden growth of anti-Ministerialist feeling, the dissensions in the Cabinet, old party promissory notes which must now at last be paid in full, and last, but not least, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's complete loss of nerve and self-control.

It is not easy to express the immense confidence and enthusiasm which Mr. Bonar Law's accession to power has generated in the minds of his followers. It has found the less open expression because those public men or publicists who supported one or other

As a

of the rival candidates for the office had not cared to express their appreciation of Mr. Law's inaugural moves lest they should be suspected of sycophancy or of turning to the rising sun. The motive is an honorable one, if it has been liable to misconstruction. matter of fact, the whole party is today perfectly satisfied that Mr. Law. under the most difficult and delicate of conditions, has made no mistake and no single false move, either as regards the internal position of the party or in his relations to the Ministerial Front Bench. The speech at Leeds was admirable. That great annual meeting of all the Unionist associations of the country was, by the accident of events, thrust on the new leader before he had had a moment to turn round or to take any broad survey of the situation.

Under the circumstances, it would have been pardonable if a man with the new leader's lack of official experience and distinguished oratorical powers had taken refuge either in a timid repetition of well-worn shibboleths, or in a flamboyant rhetoric designed to mark the opening of a new epoch. The new leader did neither. He was quiet. lucid, and extraordinarily determined without use of that offensive language which in women denotes hysteria and in Mr. Lloyd George the feeling that things are going badly. He indicated to his audience and to the country that he was one of those men who are quietest when they really mean business. The truth of the matter is that his Majesty's Ministers have traded too long on Mr. Balfour's profound moderation and innate dislike to civil disturbance, whether that disturbance be in a gagged House of Commons or in a country deprived of its constitutional rights. They have come to believe that any outrage could be passed off

under cover of the constitutional good humor of the leader of the Opposition. That happy epoch has come to an end. In Mr. Law Ministers have struck a man of a grim and invincible determination, the quietude of whose external demeanor is only a mask for the forces which exist within; the longer, however, that Ministers prefer to believe the contrary, the better for the fortunes of the Unionist party.

It is, indeed, to his Majesty's Ministers that our greatest gratitude is due. The turn of the tide was bound to come anyway, but they have antedated that turn. In this their action has been dictated, partly by pure folly, and partly by the inexorable logic of events. The fact of the matter is that Lloyd Georgism is not Liberalism, and that the Chancellor is not a Liberal. Liberalism in our day has stood firmly for Disestablishment, waveringly for Home Rule, persistently for a reversal of the Education Act of 1902, and venomously for the punishment of peers and publicans alike. This is the policy for which Mr. Asquith stood and stands, and everyone knows it. It was this orthodox programme, this echo of disastrous Newcastle, that Ministers began to produce after 1906. The proceeding left the country cold. This was not the dénouement to which the country imagined the delirious transports of that election were to lead. Within eighteen months by-election after by-election began to indicate that the country was no more Liberal in Mr. Asquith's sense than it was in 1895.

The writing was on the wall, and it is a bold man who will attempt to blot out Mene Tekel. At this point the Chancellor came to the rescue with a policy, which, whatever its merits or defects, had no connection whatever with the Liberalism of the Prime Minister or Mr. Gladstone. Probably neither side understood fully for what

stakes they were playing on the Budget issue; neither believed that the other side really meant grim business. As a result, the Conservatives lost the Constitution (a heavy penalty enough, but not, as events are shaping, an irreparable one); while the Liberals lost a hundred seats, and, in reality, their own independence of every separate force which ever joined to make them a Ministry. Verily the whirligig of Limehouse has brought its revenges. That speech excluded Unionism from office at a time when it was utterly unfit to possess it, while it brought back on the Chancellor with one tremendous rebound the whole of the Newcastle programme.

What have been the topics which have agitated Parliament and the country since the Lords, Newcastle; Home Rule, Newcastle; Disestablishment, Newcastle; the Chancellor has, indeed, striven heroically against Fate; knowing well that all these policies have long been relegated to the limbo of the pre-historic, he attempted in the cramped time left at his disposal to carry an Insurance Bill which should distract attention from the unpopularity of the older creeds of Liberalism.

Let us review for a moment the Chancellor's gyrations since the last election. The moment that it became clear that the Parliament Bill would pass, it became certain that all postobits on the Lords issued by Ministers would have to be met in full, and promptly. Mr. Redmond and the Welsh would wait no longer; Mr. Redmond was master of the situation, while since practically every Radical member in Wales was either a knight or a baronet, the resources of civilization for postponing Welsh Disestablishment were pretty well exhausted. Indeed, if Welsh and Irish measures were to have any real chance of passing the postponing powers of the Lords