Mr. Eugene Coleman Savidge's "The American in Paris," of which a third edition now appears, is the story of an American's experience during the Franco-Prussian war and the resultant disasters to the French capital. The hero permits himself to be enslaved by a worthless court beauty of the Second Empire, and is not very heroic, but the author makes the men of the time speak in their own words, and presents his historical theme impressively and without dwelling strongly on flame, blood and slaughter. J. B. Lippincott Company.

too

Whether or not Mr. Robert Herrick's latest novel, "A Life for a Life," achieves immediate popularity, it is fairly safe to prophesy that it will in time take its place among the books that have influenced national thought and sentiment. It deals with the conditions under which the mastery of American wealth and its sources-giving to a few finite beings almost infinite power-has neutralized the efficacy of wise statutes, paralyzed the working of economic laws, and disintegrated many parts of the social structure. Very plainly Mr. Herrick exhibits the nature of the golden gods with which the pilgrims in this modern wilderness have corrupted themselves, and he has small mercy upon the Aarons who have made and set them up. The central figure of his story is a foundling who aspires, with no capital but health, to rise in the world of high finance. secretly cherishing the hope of marrying its chief magistrate's daughter. Descriptions of labor prosecuted under ugly conditions, of hopeless toil, and of other forms of suffering caused by

narrative, but they are treated with none of the exaggerations sometimes called strength. Mr. Herrick has been able to effect his purpose without incentive and without passion, and he has made a perfectly wholesome, though profoundly tragic, book. The Macmillan Company.

"George Meek, Bath Chair-man," for whose autobiography Mr. H. G. Wells stands sponsor, is now forty-two years of age and scarcely richer than he was at birth, although he has not been wilfully idle and has lived on wages small beyond the imagination of an American of his own class. Handicapped from the beginning by the loss of an eye, never very strong, and having no trade, the wonder seems to be that he should have escaped becoming a pauper, but he lived, married, and, having in the frequent enforced leisure of his life read a motley array of books, became a socialist, a promoter of socialist organizations, a socialist speaker, and a writer for socialist papers. Like many men of his sort, he writes with clearness, and having been bidden by Mr Wells to tell the truth about himself he tells it sparing no ugly detail. Naturally, the poor little chronicle is dull as a story, but as a revelation of human nature it is full of interest, especially in the early passages, upon which the writer so evidently sets little value that they show him precisely as he is. Later, as a Bath Chair-man intent upon pointing out the peculiar wrongs and oppressions to which the Bath Chair-man is exposed, he falls into the set phrase of the labor agitator, and in treating of other matters he misses all delicate shades of meaning in words. and would become laughable if it were possible to forget by what toil he has come to the smallest acquaintance with any vocabulary more ample than the British workman's. The value of Mr.

Meek's book does not, however, depend upon his style, the validity of his reasoning, or the justice of his premises but upon the completeness of his selfrevelation, and he seems to have left no conscious thought or feeling unindicated. As far as he knows himself, he is in this book. E. P. Dutton & Co.

"They are so unnatural," pleads the young girl when refusing to read the stories of Hannah More or of Harriet Martineau on the recommendation of her grandmother, and then devotes herself to the chronicles of Raffles or some other veracious record; but this year brings the biography of one who lived a story which either Hannah or Harriet would have been delighted to write, Mary Lyon of Mount Holyoke. Even at school, mastering a text book in a few hours and delivering its substance in a single recitation; memorizing a Latin grammar, by virtue of making the discovery, denied to more than one in a hundred pupils, that it is as easy to learn all the declensions or all the conjugations at once, as to master each paradigm separately; pursuing the house builder in order to learn about bricks; absorbing information from every source, she was as edifying an example as their lively imaginations could have devised. Most heartily would they have envied Miss Beth Bradford Gilchrist the opportunity to write about her, but Miss Gilchrist would not have resigned her task to either of those ladies, deemed rather vivacious by their contemporaries, but austerity itself to the present generation. She is deeply in love with her subject in her early days at home, at school, in her years of toiling for an education, in her eager, laborious, career as a teacher; in the time when she began to be recognized both as rare instructor and as the possessor of almost incredible executive faculty, and in the more intimate realm of high morality

and lowly piety. Miss Gilchrist finds her as lovable as exemplary. Therefore it is a sympathetic little bool which calls itself "The Life of Mary Lyon,” and happily it is so written that it nnot possibly offend the religious sensitiveness of any reader, and may, as it should, stand on the library shelves not only of every girls' school, but of every club, circle, and society intended to exercise formative influence on girlish character. The portraits included in the volume are extremely interesting, especially that in which Miss Lyon wears a turban and scarf, and the illustrative photographs by Ann Kinney are clear and well chosen. Houghton Mifflin Company.

In the series of "Biographies of Leading Americans," Dr. William Morton Payne's "Leading American Essayists" will probably hold the first place as a chronicle of geniality, for three of the four authors chosen for position in its pages were almost as conspicuous for their rare quality as for their literary gifts. Thoreau, it is true, was at times as crusty as Christopher's self could have been, although even he was deemed sunny of spirit by those whom he loved, but Irving, Emerson, and Curtis would have been extraordinary even in a land in which at least the appearance of good will is a matter upon which public opinion is insistent. Perhaps if those who fancy that good manners began with the Saxe-Coburg dynasty, or certainly no earlier than the jubilee of the last Hanoverian sovereign, were to study the fine placidity of spirit characterizing these three me they would modify their opinius. Certainly, even with Thoreau taid the group could not show a am of envy, malice and all uncharitaeness which would not be surpassed by the plain chronicle of a single season in a ward politician's career. Yet were they no weaklings, these four, as each

showed when life brought them to its tests, misfortune, political stress or opposition to principle. Mr. Payne equally divides the hundred pages allotted to each of the biographies between the man and his books, and his volume would make a fair substitute for the six or eight of the official biographies. The "Introduction" is a critical summary of American work in the field of the essay, beginning with Franklin and including Hopkinson, Trumbull, Paulding, Dana, the poet, Willis, Calvert, Tuckerman, Alcott, Ripley, William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Whipple, Colonel Higginson, Norton, Ik Marvel, Charles Dudley Warner, Dr. Holland, Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Mabie, Mr. Howells and Lafcadio Hearn who was born Irish and carefully avoided dying American, but can hardly be omitted from such a list. Henry Holt & Co.

Of inventing Scottish dialects, inventing either in the English or in the Latin sense, there is no end, and either Mr. M. Little has been kind to his poor Saxon readers, or fate has set his feet in easy ways, for the Glasgow dialect in his "At the Sign of the Burning Bush" has no novelties to puzzle the seasoned wanderer in the kailyard except the substitution of "your ones," "our ones" and "their ones" for "your family," "our family," and "their family," and the transformation of the "dinna" and "didna" of other days into "disnie and "didnie." The effect is sometimes distracting to the conservative, but if Glasgow folk really say "disnie," let it not be concealed. Besides, Mr. Little's story is an elaborate study of the Scottish divinity student and the Scottish ministry, and is written with such wealth of detail that one is forced to accept it as probably quite faithful to truth, al

though sometimes startling both in its personages and in its incidents. If, however, one can accept the statement made in the first pages of the book that to most of Scottish divinity students the Westminster Confession and the catechism are mere jest books, and damnation an elaborate and antiquated joke, one need not be over scrupulous as to details. The divinity student's real problem, it seems, is to decide whether or not there is a God at all, and in his life, as set forth, even this problem seems of less consequence than the question of finding a church able to support him and his family. Scotland certainly does not stand where it did, if Mr. Little be accurate in his delineation, but it is noteworthy that he does not seem in love with the state of affairs which he describes. His hero not only falls into sin, but, after the briefest possible space of repentance, becomes perfectly contented and self-complacent, and wonders whether or not his sin were really a fault, whether it was not rather a bit of good luck, and his world seems to be in perfect accord with him. The author makes no comment: the reader is left to judge whether it be the vine or the thorn, the fig-tree or the thistle, which bears such fruit. Certainly, these poor United States, accused of laxity of every species, can present no case any uglier than that of Ian MacKenzie, prosperous minister. many and varied characters and the sharply differentiated families present the reader with many varieties of humor and the story should not only be read but should be reserved for consultation a few years hence, when the works of MacKenzie and his compeers may be visible even to observers on this side of the Atlantic. Henry Holt & Co.

The

Who looked at me with tender human eyes.

Only a smile, perhaps a word-a tear

A trick of manner infinitely dear,
A foolish jest, by others soon forgot,
Just as it chanced they loved-or loved
me not!

birds combine

Beyond an open porch to hymn the day

And swell the burdening sweetness with their lay;

When self, oblation free, is rendered

up

And deep essential joy flows from the Cup;

When, in His balance, God shall rise

and weigh

is low

"Tis then we live and breathe, we feel

-we know!