Portuguese (1850) which enshrine a romance as beautifully as that romance was beautiful. Here are the Bells and Pomgranates and Balaustion's Adventure, given by Robert Browning to his wife, and the Prometheus Bound, which went to Mary Robinson "From her affectionate Ba." Another presentation volume of equal interest is not far off: the Vanity Fair which "William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all," sent to his friend Macready, the actor. Swinburne's Rosemund is the one he sent, autographed, to Rossetti; while from the library of Ruskin has come a copy of Wilde's Happy Princess, "with the regard and admiration of the author."

In his Dickensiana Mr. Widener has been fortunate enough to embrace a number of items, each properly held as sui generis. There is, for instance, the petty cash-book that the future historian of Carton and Chuzzlewit kept as a lad of sixteen in the law office of Edward Blackmore, in Gray's Inn. Some two dozen of the pages are in his own immature hand, each week bringing the entry: "C. Dickens, salary; 13 shillings, 6 pence.” Here is certainly the oldest known autograph of Dickens. The agreements between Macrone, the original publisher of the Sketches by Boz, and the author, illustrate the meteoric rise of that prodigiously talented young man. On January 5th, 1836, he parted with the copyright for a hundred pounds, while six months later almost to a day we find him giving Macrone twenty times as much for a complete release from the earlier obligation. Pickwick had come to the world, meanwhile, and those Posthumous Papers had spelt immense popularity, so, to forestall a reissue of the Sketches with no profit to himself, he bought back all rights. In this same collection, with its intimate memories of "The Shakespeare of the Common People," are the sheets of the parody upon Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard in Dickens holograph; thirty pages of corrected proof for the original issue of David Copperfield; and a presentation copy of the rare Village Coquettes, that ill-fated comic opera which was dedicated to J. P. Harley in the famous "Pickwick" year.

When one comes to the first editions such a wealth of

material offers itself to the chronicling that it is difficult to know where to begin or close. The four tall Shakespeare folios are, of course, the most valuable; magnificently perfect copies all. There are, too, "firsts" of the Shakespeare Sonnets (1609), the Faerie Queene (1590-'06) and Colin Clout's Come Home Again of "fire-winged Spenser," Raphael Holinshed's curious Chronicles (1577), Ben Jonson's dramas, Burton's quaintly learned Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the splendid HopeEdwards copy; Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (1667 and 1671), the former the first issue of the first title-page of the first edition; Herrick's charming Hesperides (1646), Swift's Gulliver (1726-27), and Tale of a Tub (1704), Defoe's Crusoe (1719), Gray's Elegy and the Odes, as well as the beautiful Strawberry Hill issue of the last named; the pleasant Fables of John Gay (1727) and the Vicar of Wakefield of "Pretty Poll" Goldsmith (1766), Shelley's Address to the Irish People, and Alastor (1816), and that paper-covered Omar Khayyam (1858) which by happy chance brought undying fame to Edward Fitzgerald and a masterpiece of translation to a grateful world.

Mr. Widener's collection of Stevenson books and manuscripts was by far the most complete ever brought together. It included all the extremely rare pamphlets as well as all the "Private Issues," The Master of Ballantrae and Kidnapped, for instance, but more than any of these, more, indeed, than all combined, was its manuscript beginning of the autobiography. Report had it for a time that this was on the person of the owner when he sailed on the "Titantic," but rumor was wrong. The manuscript here referred to is entitled Memoirs of Himself, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Book I: Childhood. Written in San Francisco, in the January of 1880, it is included in a quarto blank-book and covers twenty-two pages, on one side only. On the cover beneath the title is inscribed: "Given to Isabel Stewart Strong, the amanuensis, for future use when the underwriter is dead. With love, R. L. S." Here in his own inimitable manner, he starts to lay bare many intimate details of his early years. It may be not inapt to quote, in closing, the paragraphs which compose page one :

"I have the more interest in beginning these memoirs where and how I do, because I am living absolutely alone in San Francisco, and because from two years of anxiety and, according to the doctors, a touch of malaria, I may say I am altogether changed into another character. After weeks in this city, I know only a few neighboring streets; I seem to be cured of all my adventurous whims and even of curiosity; and am content to sit here by the fire and await the course of fortune. Indeed, I know myself no longer; and as I am changed in heart, I hope I have the same choice to look back impartially on all that has come and gone heretofore.

"There is, after all, no truer sort of writing than what is to be found in autobiographies, and certainly none more entertaining. As if any, it is fiction of the higher class which is the quintessence and last word both of veracity and entertainment. A man is perhaps not very sure of his taste in matters that concern him so nearly as the facts of his own career; he is not perhaps in a position to expand or broider: but where can he have so fine an opportunity of condensation? I shall try here to be very dense and only to touch on what concerned me very deeply; for, as I am after all a man, that must be to some degree the concern of mankind."

WARWICK JAMES PRICE

Philadelphia, Pa.

THE NEW HELLENISM OF OSCAR WILDE

In Act II of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance the following dialogue occurs :

Mrs. Allonby: The American girl has been giving us a lecture.

Lord Illingworth: Really? All Americans lecture, I believe. I suppose it is something in their climate. What did she lecture about?

Mrs. Allonby: Oh, Puritanism, of course.

Eventually, however, the young Puritan accepts the woman of no importance as her mother-in-law.

In this paper we shall give Wilde an American lecture on his false Hellenism; but accept him, in part, in spite of his theory. "The fact of a man's being a prisoner is nothing against his style," says Wilde in Pen, Pencil, and Poison. The fact of Wilde's being Hellenistic is not everything against his Hellenism, but it is something.

Moreover, Wilde lectured himself.

When he was in condition

he defended Art for Art's Sake, the New Hellenism, and the New Individualism with all the conviction of England's chief advocate of those tenets. When he was discouraged, or recovering from excesses, or languishing in prison, or when the true artist in him suddenly saw the false, he cried out against himself and his theories with a fervor like unto Bunyan's in Grace Abounding. Wilde's poetry is his record of disillusion. Once he cries (in Humanitad):

But we are Learning's changelings, know by rote
The clarion watchword of each Grecian school
And follow none, the flawless sword that smote
The pagan Hydra is an effete tool

Which we ourselves have blunted, what man now

Shall scale the august ancient heights and to old
Reverence bow?

Not Wilde, surely, as he confesses in the same poem:
And yet I cannot tread the portico

And live without desire, fear, and pain,
Or nurture that wise calm which long ago
The grave Athenian master taught to men,
Self-poised, self-centred, and self-comforted,
To watch the world's vain phantasies go by
with unbowed head.

Rather he yielded himself to the full flood of unrestraint and let himself drift on the uncharted seas, that wind and sun and storm might blow and warm and wrack him and leave their mark upon him:

For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die,-

he sings in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

In Helas!, his prologue

to the Poems of 1881, he wavers momentarily :

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,

Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?

But at once he is off again on his mad quest of Beauty, Liberty, Life, and Pleasure. "I amused myself," he says in De Profundis, "with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a certain joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths."

In The Picture of Dorian Gray Lord Henry declares that if one man were to realize himself completely the world would so gain in joy as to blot out mediævalism and attain to the Hellenic ideal,-"to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be." This advance over Hellenism, even, Wilde calls the New Hellenism. He uses the term in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but sets forth his conception more clearly in L'Envoi and in The English Renaissance. In the former he points out that Ruskin's æsthetic system is ethical always; whereas "we who are no longer with him" have passed on into that "serene House of Beauty" where "the rule of art is the rule of beauty," -wherein dwells "the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but the absorption, of all passion." In The English Renaissance he defines his New Hellenism still more specifically, by synthesizing those hard-won analytical terms, Classical and Romantic. "It is really from the union of Hellenism," says he, "in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventitive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of