so that he can pay back the shrewd swindler who has sold him a worthless claim furnishes the outline of the plot, of which the piquant, self-reliant daughter of a frontiersman is the heroine, with a prim and pretty schoolmarm from the East, a 'Frisco actress fallen from "legitimate" to "variety," and a young college graduate seeking his fortune, for minor characters. The writer is lavish with his incidents, but his real strength is in his descriptions of forest, mountain and storm, some of which are really powerful. Little, Brown & Co.

Clayton Sedgwick Cooper's "The Bible and Modern Life" (Funk, Wagnalls Co.) is not an essay in theological exegesis, but a concise and simple explanation of the value of the Bible under modern conditions, with practical suggestions as to up-todate methods of Bible study and the organization and conduct of men's Bible classes. The author is the international secretary for Bible study of the Young Men's Christian Association, and his book is the fruit of years of experience in teaching Bible classes in this country, and of personal observation not only in this country but in Europe and in India and the Far East. People who imagine that Bible study is going out of fashion should be reassured by Mr. Cooper's statistics which show 80,000 college men in eighteen different countries voluntarily enrolled in classes for Bible study,nearly 30,000 of them in the United States. The chief value of this book lies in its practical suggestions, which are well calculated to extend the revived movement for Bible study.

Some of their most popular authors of boys' and girls' books, and some new writers, appear in the list of juvenile stories which A. C. McClurg & Co. will publish this Fall. Byron A. Dunn con

tributes "The Scout of Pea Ridge," which is the second story in the popular "Young Missourian Series." Quincy Scott has taken advantage of the exciting night raids in Kentucky for a story, "The Night Riders of Cave Nob," In "Billy Tomorrow Stands the Test," the third of Mrs. Sarah Pratt Carr's "Billy Tomorrow Series," the little hero of the San Francisco fire enters upon the path of chivalry and first love. Mrs. Edith Ogden Harrison has written another fairy tale, "The Glittering Festival." George Alfred Williams, the artist, and Tudor Jenks, the popular writer for boys, have collaborated in a "What Shall I Be?" series. The first two volumes are "The Fireman" and "The Sailor," and others will be added from time to time. Eight new volumes have been added to the "Life Stories for Young People" which George P. Upton translates from the German every year for appreciative American readers.

From Clarence E. Mulford, author of "Hopalong Cassidy" and "Bar 20," comes "Bar 20 Days," in which many of the characters of the earlier books reappear. These stories of ranch life on the Texas frontier include adventures with Mexican smugglers, shanghaing sailors and Apaches broken loose from the reservation, as well as with barbed-wire fences, stampeding cattle, horse-thieves and rustlers. Rough, vigorous, and full of a reckless daring which sometimes rises to heroism, they are not tales of outlawry, and if one of the most amusing shows Hopalong Cassidy getting the drop on Townsend, the self-appointed marshal,-who has announced himself also town council, mayor, justice and pound-keeper of the town of Rawhide, and whose tyranny is based on his uncanny faculty of anticipating the other man's draw-there is none of intenser interest than that in which the Bar 20 outfit rallies to the

support of Edwards, the marshal fresh from Kansas, bent on breaking up the hand of shiftless malcontents who rendezvous at Harlan's saloon. With an unusual combination of effective narrative, description and dialogue, Mr. Mulford's stories are easily among the best of their kind. A. C. McClurg & Co.

The "problem" which Constance Smedley Armfield presents in her noticeable novel, "The Larger Growth," is not the problem of husband and wife, but the problem of parent and child. "Not an attempt to formulate a theory for the conduct of family relationships, but merely the record of the emergence of a group of individuals from the family chrysalis," the book gives a remarkably realistic picture of middle-class life in an English provincial town, and is of unusual interest as a story, quite apart from any theories suggested. Within the Maddox chrysalis are a serious, hard-working, self-improving father-agnostic by conviction-whose narrowness and rigidity almost neutralize his real devotion to his household; a simple-hearted, affectionate mother, perpetually perplexed by the antagonism between her husband and his growing children; a boy who insists on going up to London instead of taking the place in his father's office for which he has been destined; another son with the artistic temperament and socialist tendencies; and two daughters, who represent the radical and conservative types of modern womanhood. The story is told in booksChildhood, Youth, Adolescence, Upheaval, Education, Light, Freedom-fill

In Dr. Charles Edward Jefferson's "Why We May Believe in Life After Death" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) the old, old question "If a man die shall he live again?" is given an assuring answer, but an answer fully in accord with the progress of modern thought and investigation. The book divides itself into three sections, each of which constituted one in a course of lectures delivered last winter at the Leland Stanford Junior University upon the Raymond P. West Memorial Foundation. The first presents the reasons for a restudy of human destiny in the light of changed conditions and currents of thought, and shows that, though men may talk less than once they did of the problem of immortality the old question is still present in all minds; the second states fully and frankly the argument against immortality, and considers, point by point, its force and significance; the third presents' reasonably, logically and convincingly the argument for immortality. These lectures are free alike from dogmatism and from mere rhetoric; they are charged with a deep human sympathy; and their message is one of comfort and inspiration.

The popularity of Georgian art shows no signs of abating; its perfect refinement and good taste still commend it as highly as ever to all those to whom refinement and good taste are sufficing ideals of life. What, however, is strange about this popularity is that it is accompanied by no signs of interest in the human significance of the style. It never seems to be imagined by its votaries that eighteenth century art, coherent and consistent as it is in all its details, stands for a certain definite philosophy of life, the influence of which was as paramount in the living society of its day as it was in the sphere of art and craftsmanship. needs only to bring the style into contact with the history of the period for history and art mutually to illustrate and support each other. We will endeavor in a minute to establish this connection; but in the first place let us examine the character of the art a little more closely in order that we may be able to recognize those circumstances which have affinity with it.

It

on

The eighteenth century saw the rise, development and decline of what we still think of as our representative' national school of painting. But that school was certainly not nationally representative in the sense in which the Italian, Dutch and Spanish schools were. Italian, Dutch and Spanish painting seem the effect of national consciousness. Nourished the life of the community, they deal with life as a whole and treat with most success, those themes which are of permanent and universal consequence to mankind. But in England how different is the case! Here all life seems to be surveyed from the point of view of one particular class. However much we may admire Sir Joshua and his group,

is it possible to gauge the scope and character of their work without being struck by the narrowness of the limits within which they neved? Lord This, the Countess of That, the Duchess of So-and-so and her children, the Ladies Mary and Betty Something-else -so runs the catalogue of their canvases. How circumscribed, one cannot help feeling, is the area of life from which this art drew its inspiration. Nor were those narrow limits ever overstepped with impunity. Has eighteenth-century art produced a single great religious composition, or any historical or other event of general interest treated adequately? Not one that I know of. More widely instructed than the rest of his circle in the ideas of the Renaissance, it was Sir Joshua's ambition to deal with those ideas with Italian amplitude, and his experiments are of extraordinary interest as showing that it was exactly in proportion as he approached towards or receded from the strictly aristocratic standpoint that his own art acquired or lost power and vitality. His imaginative characters put on reality as they draw on this common source of inspiration. The intuitions or guesses of classic thought and classic myth, so profoundly and humanly significant, failed to reach him of themselves. But let Lady Mary or Lady Betty be his dryad or Diana, and the subject immediately became thrilled and inspired as it developed the patrician charm which was the prevailing test of beauty.

The same bias shows itself in dealing with the most ordinary occurrences of common life. The villagers and peasantry, the cottage interiors and rustic scenes of George Morland, Old Crome and others are conceived out of no endeavors to realize that life as it existed. These sleek cottagers and