mous denizens,is told from the time when the Templars built a great house and church on a meadow sloping down to the Thames. Of architecture Mr. Loftie writes from abundant knowledge, yet not in a style too technical for the general reader. There is reason in his feeling regarding the modern Gothic, which he would term Vandalic, of certain "restorations," and it is to be desired that his earnest plea for the strengthening, not rebuilding, of some things now in peril may not be without its effect on those in authority. Old European Jewries, by David Philipson, D. D. (The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia.) After sketching in outline the condition of the Jews in Europe before the epoch of the Crusades, which may be said to be the beginning of the era of persecution, Dr. Philipson, with some detail, describes the life of the inhabitants of the Ghetto during the centuries of suffering and degradation which followed. He writes with feeling, but with perfect self-restraint, even in discussing the Russian Pale of Settlement, the only remaining Ghetto, whose recent history might well excuse any vehemence of language. He protests earnestly against the formation of "voluntary Ghettos" in our large cities, and depicts in no uncertain language the evils and dangers sure to result therefrom. The volume fitly concludes with an interesting, though too brief study of the Ghetto in literature.

Religion. Selected Essays of James Darmesteter. The translation from the French by Helen B. Jastrow; edited, with an Introductory Memoir, by Morris Jastrow, Jr. (Houghton.) The portrait which faces this volume presents a face of singular intellectual sensitiveness, and the Memoir intimates something of the physical disability which attended Darmesteter's short, brilliant career. The personality which thus introduces the group of essays breathes also in their pages. The passionate cry for religious unity based upon the verities of the great Hebrew prophets is noble and pathetic. It is in the utterances of such a man that one learns to feel most keenly the imperfect manifestation of a church which has not yet met the needs of a spirit like Darmesteter's, and also to recognize a fundamental unity which suggests great possibilities of human relationship in religion. Modern Missions in the East, their Methods, Successes, and Limitations, by Edward A. Lawrence, D. D.

The

(Harpers.) Believing that there is a "science of missions," and hoping to advance it, Dr. Lawrence spent nearly two years in studying the evangelizing work of the Christian church in the Orient. He went alone, at his own expense, carrying letters of recommendation from half a dozen Protestant mission boards and from Roman Catholic functionaries. He watched the everyday work of all the leading denominations, including the Greek and Roman churches, and of several different nationalities. most important results he embodied in lectures delivered at Andover and New Haven, and now gathered into a volume which shows remarkable clearness and breadth of view, and which bristles with interesting facts and pregnant suggestions. - More distinctly historical is Rev. Dr. A. C. Thompson's Protestant Missions, their Rise and Early Progress (Scribners), which contains eleven lectures that were delivered at the Hartford Theological Seminary. About half the book is devoted to the efforts of English, Danish, and Moravian missionaries in North America. The Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia) have brought out in a neat brochure Emanuel Deutsch's essay on The Talmud, which, when first published in The Quarterly Review in 1867, made its author, then one of the under - librarians at the British Museum, famous, and still remains an admirable short study.

Education and Works of Scholarship. L'Espurgatoire Seint Patriz of Marie de France, by Thomas Atkinson Jenkins. (Alfred J. Ferris, Philadelphia.) This is a dissertation presented by the author for his degree of Ph. D. at the Johns Hopkins University, and contains an Introduction, in which he treats of the legend in literature, the Latin original, the date of the poem, and other subjects connected with Marie's work; an essay on the language and dialect; the text with variant footnotes; and finally, a body of annotations at the close. It is a satisfaction to know that the younger scholars are devoting themselves to such thorough critical work.—The Hamilton Declamation Quarterly, Vol. I. No. 1 (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse), takes its name from the fact that its two editors, Oren Root and Brainard G. Smith, are professors in Hamilton College. Its distinctive feature, besides a fearful and wonderful marking of one piece to intimate the

expression, is the introduction of selections in both prose and verse representative of contemporaneous declamation. Four Years of Novel Reading, an Account of an Experiment in popularizing the Study of Fiction, edited, with an Introduction, by Richard G. Moulton. (Heath.) Mr. Moulton enforces the doctrine that as fiction is not only a high form of literary art, but the most comprehensive and insistent, it should be the subject of serious study. Then an account is given of an experiment in such study in a University Extension class, and some specimens of criticism are given. We cannot say that these specimens are altogether encouraging as to the results to be reached, though we believe thoroughly in the doctrine.

Science. Sea and Land, Features of Coasts and Oceans, with Special Reference to the Life of Man, by N. S. Shaler. (Scribners.) The geology which Professor Shaler gives us in this interesting book is the science of the earth, not as it was made thousands of years ago, but as it is making itself to-day. There are two chapters on the shores of the sea, beaches, cliffs, sanddunes, marshes, surf, etc., a chapter on the depths of the sea, one on icebergs, and three on harbors, their formation and preservation, their influence on civilization. This introduction of a human and practical interest into the study of geology will open to many readers a new field of observation for vacation days at the seashore. In a book of this kind illustrations are almost indispensable, and those which are presented here are so interesting that one readily forgives the ugliness of the cover. -The Siouan Tribes of the East, by James Mooney; Archeologic Investigations in James and Potomac Valleys, by Gerard Fowke; and Chinook Texts, by Franz Boas, ure publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and, like other issues of the Bureau, are distinct contributions to science, though not altogether to popular science. (Government Printing Office, Washington.)

- A new edition has appeared of Th. Ribot's The Diseases of Personality. (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago.) The author has taken occasion to refer to the

publications on the subject which have appeared in the ten years succeeding the first issue of his work. - The Source and Mode of Solar Energy throughout the Universe, by I. W. Heysinger. (Lippincott.) It seems that electricity not only good naturedly keeps the trolley cars in motion, but is such a general conductor and motorman of the universe that Emerson builded better than he knew when he told us to hitch our wagon to a star. - The Eye in its Relation to Health, by Chalmer Prentice, M. D. (McClurg.) It is common knowledge that a mechanical correction of abnormal vision removes the near cause of nervous disorders; but Dr. Prentice makes a further claim, in this interesting little book, to a connection of the eye with some of the phenomena of hypnotism.

Literature and Bibliography. The sixth volume of Defoe's Romances and Narratives, edited by George A. Aitken, and illustrated by J. B. Yeats (Dent, London; Macmillan, New York), is The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton. In the absence of such gentlemen from the activities of the world to-day, the reader may settle himself comfortably to the perusal of this matter-of-fact romance; but we confess to finding the adventures of Captain Horn, on the whole, more entertaining. A new edition, apparently, is preparing of Thomas Hardy's writings. At any rate, Far from the Madding Crowd comes to us with an etching by H. Macbeth-Raeburn, a map of "Wessex," and a new preface by Hardy. The page is fairly good, but the book is not very well planned for a beautiful library edition. (Harpers.) - Mr. W. M. Griswold, who is his own publisher, and his own speller we may add, has prepared two pamphlets in addition to his other services to bibliography, entitled respectively A Descriptiv List of Novels and Tales dealing with the History of North America, and A Descriptiv List of Novels and Tales dealing with Ancient History. He has arranged his lists in chronological order of subjects, so that one can follow down the ages or the centuries with his fictitious reading. The notes, critical and explanatory, are taken from good authorities. (Cambridge, Mass.)

Two Heroes.

IN a densely populated district of one of our large cities, a dramatic club has been formed in connection with the work of a college settlement. The cast of one of the first plays presented comprised four boys of American or Irish parentage, and one small negro boy, familiarly known as "Honey." Despite his color, it was soon found that Honey's qualities had won him a place as the leader of them all.

The rehearsals had been faithfully attended, and the night of the performance came. The boys were gathered in the improvised dressing-room, talking of the play with suppressed excitement. Snatches of conversation drifted through the swaying curtains from the crowded room in front, and there was all the delicious expectancy of a professional first night.

I had chosen a simple play dealing with a war incident, as this seemed to appeal strongly to the martial spirit of the cast. While this selection was entirely satisfactory to the players, I had found it was not easy to secure the necessary uniforms to be worn by my miniature soldiery. These difficulties had been overcome, however, and all was in readiness.

A few minutes before the hour fixed for the rising of the curtain Honey appeared, his eyes dancing and his ebony face wreathed in smiles. It did not take long to discover the cause of his glee, for over his ragged clothes he wore a military coat of extraordinary grandeur. The sleeves entirely hid his little black fists, and the gorgeous tails swept the floor as he walked proudly about.

The coat, we found, had been borrowed for the occasion from "the feller who leads the band," and it quite eclipsed any which my ingenuity had contrived for the remainder of the cast. I scented trouble at once. Even to civilian eyes this wonderful coat seemed a bit elaborate for a character which, even by the mysterious evolution of the modern drama, rose only from a village ne'erdo-well to the ranks of a sergeant in the service. I decided, however, to have Honey wear it rather than disappoint him, and I set to work to reduce its ample proportions as much as possible.

ter.

This done, I was about to go on with the play, when trouble came from another quarThe boy who was to play the part of the hero, and whose chief duty it was to appear as the proud victor in the last act, flatly refused to go on. Here was a predicament. The jealous streak in his Celtic nature showed itself, and he would play only on his own terms, that he should wear the coat. Argument made him ugly, and the only answer to my entreaties was a dogged "I can very well stop your show. I won't go on." Unfortunately I was in the boy's power, and he knew it. I appealed to his pride and to his sense of honor; I threatened and cajoled in vain. Meanwhile the audience waited, impatient at the delay.

Finally I was compelled to recognize defeat. I laid the case before Honey, and asked his help. The suggestion staggered him. Upon hearing it, his eyes filled with tears and his voice shook. He had been strutting about in all his borrowed glory, the picture of pride and happiness. I told him our dilemma, and left him, a grotesque little figure of woe. The gaudy coat covered a true heart, and in it a fierce combat was being waged. He was battling with a boy's natural selfishness strengthened by his intense negro love of finery.

The battle was soon over. He came to me denuded of his gold lace, and with tearstained face surrendered the coat. Whatever the performance may have seemed from the stage, it was a tragedy behind the

scenes.

The sulky hero eagerly accepted the sacrifice, and appeared in all the splendor with which Honey had hoped to dazzle his friends. The play progressed, and I watched Honey closely. There was not a trace of resentment in his manner, and he played his part in a way which won him a second triumph. My interest in the stage hero flagged. The high-sounding sentiments which he uttered did not seem quite his own after the little scene in the dressing-room.

Though the applause was long and loud when the play was over, I could not help feeling that the real hero was the little negro who stood unnoticed at the back of the stage, and smiled at his friend's success.

Yes!

-It is one singular advantage of our modern tongues over Latin, to which they all owe so much, that we have plain affirmative and negative particles of answer. The Latin ita, the only word Rome had for "yes," or anything like "yes," seems to have been rather a vulgarism, like "that's so." In fact, the Romans borrowed the Greek affirmative, and wrote it ne, so that it must have sounded amazingly negative, just as it does now to hear a modern Greek assent to you by what sounds precisely like nay, nay." In some Romance languages, the affirmative is still the word for "so," with a stronger accent, just as our negative is the adjective "no " with a stronger accent. But oui, ja, yes, are themselves, and nothing else. Sir Thomas More indeed distinguishes "yea " and "yes as equivalent to oui and si. "Yea," be it remarked, has become "yay" rather lately. The Shaker pronunciation, noted by Mr. Scudder as "yee," is only antique, not wrong.

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Now, when English has such a crisp, plain, definite word as "yes," why do so many people clip or annihilate it? I am not speaking of the gamin's "yep" or the dude's "yaas," which have become commonplace. But, dear reader, who of course never say anything but "yes," how many of your friends do? Run them over mentally; how many accept your proposals with the dictionary word? Is there not rather an infinity of corrupt substitutes? I have it from a very eminent schoolmaster that his revered predecessor and master, one of the four or five "Arnolds of America," never said anything but "cha." A former secretary of a very important religious organization says “yuss.” An eminent business and society man in our city, I am told, says "hess," with a strong effusion of breath.

When poor Queen Caroline came to England, absolutely ignorant of English, the question was raised in society what one word should be taught her to begin with. Most persons were for "yes," but one very accomplished lady advised "no," on the ground that it often stood for “yes.” If the English court did not speak with better articulation a hundred years ago than we do now, "no" might be recommended as much more likely to be recognized. Monsieur de Ferdinand de Lesseps was not Lesseps. a man of great intellectual calibre. He originated no new idea; he was

not even an engineer; he was simply a promoter, though a promoter of the first order, and his services as such terminated in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal. All that he did afterwards either might have been done by anybody else, or should not have been done at all. Nevertheless he was a remarkable man, and as an eye-witness of the rise and fall of the Panama Canal Company I shall not soon forget that thick-set, corpulent figure, the piercing eye and ample forehead redeeming a flabby face, those snowy locks, that confident tone, that persuasive voice. In a crowd you would have singled him out, and have asked who he was. I was present, in 1879, at the so-called Congress of Engineers and Geographers, a transparent farce got up to ratify a foregone conclusion, at which the Panama scheme was launched; as also at the successive meetings of the company till its collapse in 1888.

Death, especially when preceded by three years of senility and by a conviction for fraud without possibility of self-defense, almost disarms criticism, yet psychology cannot afford to overlook a man memorable for a splendid success and a monster failure. It is, moreover, but fair to the French to testify that they did not follow Lesseps with the infatuation excited one hundred and sixty years earlier by Law in Paris, and by the South Sea Company in London. No, the scheme dragged from the very outset, all the more so as this time there was no Anglophobe stimulus, and as America simply adopted a cold neutrality. The first subscription fell through, for Lesseps, presuming too much on the halo of Suez, had offered no bonuses to financiers or journalists. On a second attempt, liberally subsidizing both, the subscription was not much more than covered, though the prospectus led people to think that the work was actually contracted for at $125,000,000, a figure arbitrarily adopted by Lesseps as being a trifle over the Suez outlay of $120,000,000, albeit even at the Congress the Panama advocates had estimated the cost at $200,000,000. He emphatically declared that the canal would be easier to make and keep up than Suez, and he talked glibly of "disemboweling the Cordilleras up to their summits" as cheaper and better than tunneling through them. When $60,000,000 had been subscribed, he started for the isthmus, which as yet he had never

seen; and he returned with glowing reports of the geniality of a climate which had permitted him to camp out for weeks, while the Paris newspapers went into (well-paid-for) raptures on the juvenility of the wonderful septuagenarian.

The work then commenced, and the climate speedily vindicated its old reputation by levying blackmail on European lives; as for the mortality among the navvies, it passed unnoticed. The $60,000,000 was soon exhausted, for an eighth of it had gone

in preliminary expenses, that is to say,

in bonuses to promoters, sanctioned by the shareholders at their first meeting without explanation or objection; and the shares, according to a common French practice, bore interest from date of issue, without waiting for the completion of the canal. A loan of $60,000,000, which should have sufficed for that completion, was likewise absorbed, and loan followed loan at steadily increasing rates of interest; but the estimate of traffic increased as regularly as the outlay, and the shareholders were assured that as both had been alike underrated, their prospects were unaffected. But in spite of enormous commissions to bankers and lavish payments to journalists, a profound secret at the time, the French public were becoming distrustful, and lottery prizes were used to bait the fish-hook. Yet Lesseps, to all appearance, was as confident as ever. He paid two more visits to the isthmus, on the first of which he was deluded, as has since been divulged, by a spurt of activity, while on the second he succeeded in satisfying foreign delegates as well as himself that great progress had been made. He protested that the canal would be finished by 1889, and he even threatened to prosecute those who, on the faith of American newspapers, asserted that the work had scarcely been more than begun. Little could now be done in Paris-but this was not known at the time beyond giving hush - money to unscrupulous financiers, and gambling by the company in its own shares to keep up quotations; but the provinces were almost stormed into taking the debentures. This was the period at which Lesseps went the round of the large towns, accompanied by one of his youngest children, whom he installed on the platform, and to whom he pointed as he appealed to the audience whether he was likely to put his invest

ments for his large family into a rotten concern. This hit never failed to draw down the house. Once, at least, moreover, a telegram from Paris reached him at the very close of the meeting, to announce that the loan had been already covered, whereupon there was a rush of subscribers who discerned a chance of selling out immediately at a premium. Next morning they discovered that they had misunderstood the telegram, and that the subscription lagged. In Paris, too, Lesseps would be waited upon by an interviewer. After discussing things in general he would press a button, and his secretary would appear. "Have I any engagement to-night?" "Yes, you have to start for Bordeaux, for a meeting there tomorrow." "Then telephone to my wife to have dinner punctually at seven, that I may catch the train at nine." The chat was then resumed. Presently Lesseps would pull out his watch. "Excuse my breaking

off the conversation, but I am due at the Academy of Sciences at four o'clock to hear a long paper by M. Bertrand." The interviewer- whether he was in the secret or not who shall say? went back to his office and wrote a glowing account of an octogenarian (for Lesseps was eighty in 1885) who, just before starting on an allnight journey, spent a couple of hours at the Academy, as a sandwich between a day's desk-work and dinner, who after a night in the cars was to address a great meeting, and who was to spend a second night on the railroad in returning to Paris. This also was the period when a young American in Paris would be offered $500 a year if he would merely promise to sing some doggerel verses in praise of Panama at social gatherings of American residents, and when another American would be offered double that sum to write up Panama in transatlantic journals. Lesseps had not the active support of the French government, as in the case of Suez, when the Empress Eugénie showed herself a true cousin by her stanch support; but though two cabinet ministers - one of them died before the exposure, the other is now expiating his offense -demanded bribes for their consent to lottery loans, he was sent to Berlin in 1887, to invest the French ambassador with the Legion of Honor, and was thus enabled, almost indeed invited, to attempt a Panama propaganda in Germany.