sometimes inapt use of the adjective populous and the frequent employment of the phrase "edge of the world." But underneath all there is real merit and originality, and we should be mistaken in setting the whole thing down as tricks. Considering the violence of Mr. Miller's thoughts and rhymes and vocabulary, his versification is smooth and correct. It would be easy to select passages which, while very characteristic, cause him to be generally under-rated.

Carry all through the populous day some drug that smells loud
As you pass on your way or make way through the crowd "

P. 104.

"What comfort to rest as you lie thrown at length

*

All night and alone with your fists full of strength."

P. 106.

Two passages in Il Capucin will show how he leaps from vulgar trifling into real earnestness—

But his figures are not always extravagant or vulgar; for instance, what happier phrase for Venice than in these lines :

"But a day from this town

Of marble, that sits to its waist in the sea,
A moon-white mountain of snow looks down
On a thousand glories of old Italy.”

P. 180.

And in the poem entitled Alone, on page 97, there is an exqui

site description of the moon :

"I am alone as lost winds on the height;

Alone as yonder beaming moon at night,

That climbs like some such noiseless-footed nun

Far up against the steep and starry height,

As if on holy mission."

And finally, as a specimen of his best, this stanza from the entitled After All, p: 124:

"Sit down in the darkness with me

On the edge of the world. So, love lies dead!

And the earth and the sky and the sea

Seem shutting together as a book that is read."

poem

Many who are in the habit of making a butt of Mr. Miller, will have to retract when they have read this volume attentively. His dialogue is as full of abruptness and non sequiturs as Browning's, and he has quite as much grotesqueness, but he is not always violent, and, taken as a whole, none but a poet could have written these Songs of Italy. The first stanza of Cavalier v. Cavalier, p. 131, shows how he can fall into a vein like Browning's:

No, no whit jealous of him was I:

I had sat at his table, tasted his wine,
Broken his bread as he had mine-

And I would to heaven I had broken his head!

I had shot at him once and let him try

His hand meantime ten paces at me.

He missed his mark, while I you see

At the last years' carnival down at Rome,
Troubled his seconds to carry him home."

We cannot read the productions of men who would play upon human passion as upon a pipe, without wondering just how far their utterances are personal. That they are largely so is probable, but just where to draw the line between the writer's own sentiments and experience and the flight of his imagination is very difficult to tell. Such an inquiry is not, however, immaterial. Merely descriptive poetry we may read with very little thought of the personality of the author, but not so wails of remorse, litanies, love songs and screams of vengeance. They interest us in him, and we wonder what must have been the special experiences which produced such a temper, and just how far his utterances are autobiographical. If Mr. Miller's are so to any large degree, he would not make a very agreeable or instructive acquaintance, nor be entitled to much respect. Taken literally, he has written himself down an unsatisfied man, big with thoughts about himself, and travelling over the world to find something he has not got, probably a woman: in the mean time twitting the past for being over, the present for not staying and the future for not having come. These unhealthy sentiments he

has the genius to express in very vigorous verse.

But the temper

is bad, and the increasing appetite for such sentiment greatly to be deplored; because, while only a few can attain honor and office as public railers, a great many actually do cultivate this peppery thought and language to the great detriment of their worldly calling and comfort.

NEW BOOKS.

A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Edited by Henry A. Beers, Assistant Professor of English Literature in Yale College. Pp. xxviii. 407. I 2mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

READING BOOK OF ENGLISH CLASSICS FOR YOUNG PUPILS. Selections from the standard literature of England and America. By C. W. Leffingwell, D. D. Pp. xvi. 403.

These two selections are each excellent in their way. The object of the first is to give American readers some notion of the literary work done in America during the first century of independence, by presenting good specimens of all those authors who are no longer living. We think this last an unhappy restriction, as not a single first-class author, except Irving, Poe, and the very greatest, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has "gone to the majority." Our best poets, novelists, and essayists are still living, and the exclusion of their works makes the exhibit of our century in literature much more meagre than the truth. An American literature with no Lowell, no Whittier, no Holmes, no Longfellow, no Henry James, no Whipple, no Emerson, is not the literature which represents our mental growth.

The selections seem to be all well made, and suitable for the purpose. Of course, they leave room for a difference of judgment. From Cooper, for instance," An Indian Elopement" is taken, leaving out the masterly account of the escape of The Spy. William Wirt's description of the blind preacher, Waddell, is a classic passage in our literature, but nothing from his pen is given. Weems's biographies of Penn, Franklin, Marion and Washington, and his humorous pamphlets, exerted no ordinary influence on the minds of our people, and should have been illustrated by an extract. Whether or not they belong to that "literature of instruction," which Mr. Beers aims at excluding, his biographies are certainly part of that literature of fiction which he admits. Many of Franklin's amusing papers fall within the post-revolution era, but none are given. Our author might, however, claim that to do full justice to the field, he must have made a much larger book.

In the introduction, which sketches the colonial period, our author repeats the common mistake of speaking of the Familists as a sect which troubled New England. It is true that the opponents of Mrs. Hutchinson sought to fasten this most odious of sectarian names on her and her friends. But she was no more than a Calvinist who had pushed Calvinism to the verge of antinomianism. In mentioning Jonathan Edwards he might have referred to the high estimate formed of his writings by such English critics as F. D. Maurice, F. W. Robertson, and Leslie Stephens. The first describes the Treatise on the Will as the very greatest of American books.

Dr. Leffingwell's Reading Book is about the best selection for school reading that we have seen. The range from which the choice has been made is much larger than usual, and we believe that the book is well calculated to foster a taste for literature in the classes in which it is used. It is not, indeed, up to our ideal of an English reader. For that we need an English Wakernagel, with the learning needed to cover the whole field from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson, and to exhibit the generic growth of our language in all the successive stages, not merely in the central literary dialect, but in those minor branches, such as the old Northumbrian and modern Scotch and Lancashire.

A few of the selections do not approve themselves to our taste and judgment. It is difficult to make selections from Dickens for such a work, and the description of the shipwreck in David Copperfield, or some similar passage, would have been better than the description of Mr. Squeers, or the Cricket on the Hearth. The grotesque in literature is not the form of it which is most intelligible to young people, nor is it that which exerts the best influence on their taste. We also think that the selections from American authors are out of proportion to the extent of the book.

DRESS. By Mrs. Oliphant. (Art at Home Series.) Pp. 103. Philadelphia, Porter & Coates.

Mrs. Margaret Oliphant has a large range of intellectual interest. She can write with equal fervor on St. Francis of Assisi, who reduced dress to a minimum and wedded himself to poverty, and on the habits of vesture which waste the money and the time of our civilized society. So religious a writer we might have expected to put on her title page, " Or why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies." On the contrary, she honestly confesses to a profane interest in her subject and a liking for dress, just as though she had never heard of St. Francis.

We need not tell any reader of Mrs. Oliphant's that she manages to make a very readable and suggestive book out of her subject. She begins by noting the revolution which has swept

away the colors and forms of dress which were in vogue thirty years ago, and has clothed modern women in the neutral shades which artists desire for their pictures. Without at all condemning the change, she deprecates the excesses and affectations which have accompanied the movement. She does not believe in making art the dictator in this or any other sphere of common life, for she holds that artistic fitness is only one of the many considerations which should guide the judgment.

"

As to the philosophy of dress, she refers her readers to Sartor Resartus and the Book of Genesis. As a sound Presbyterian, though of broad church tendencies, she prefers the Mosaic account of the matter," a theory of our nature which is high as the heavens above any other. Our best fancies are poor by the side of it." She proceeds to show how the poets have depicted dress, and finds the fullest information in Chaucer, Spenser and Herrick, while the myriad-minded Shakspere" is found to have hardly touched on this large side of human life. Following the proper history of dress, she shows, with ultra-feminine malice, that the chief fools have been of "the nobler sex." "the nobler sex." She gloats over trunk hose and bag wigs, and pursues the tale down to our own times, where it closes with a swallow-tail coat and the chimney-pot hat. Having cleared the ground by this anticipation of masculine sneers, she turns to the lighter list of woman's vestmental offences,horned head dresses, hooped skirts, and all the rest.

Her closing chapter discusses the great question: "What is to be done? It is needless to say that a lady of such fine culture and good taste is neither a dress-reformer on the one hand, nor a defender of the follies of fashion on the other. She believes that the present style of dress, especially the shape known as the Princess, only needs to be reformed in some respects to be made exactly what is needed. It is altogether too tight as now worn; the poet had right in speaking of "two shy knees tied in a single trouser." But by introducing an additional width, and abolishing the artistic ornamentation now made to run around its dimensions instead of lengthwise, and substituting conventional patterns in one color for naturalistic in several, a great reform might be effected. She hopes that art will also aid in getting honest material from the manufacturer. "Manufacture is always apt to degenerate when left to the famous modern maxim of buying (or making) at the cheapest and selling at the dearest possible rate. This is what turns broad-cloth into shoddy, makes cotton little more than a mass of starch, and silk a coagulated dye." We fear that Mrs. Margaret Oliphant is not a sound Free Trader!

JUST ONE DAY. New York. Geo. R. Lockwood, 1879.

This clever little jeu d' esprit puts, in a capital way, the old question of, Which has the harder lot, the mother who stays at