The Literary World PERIODICALS NEWS AND NOTES FOREIGN NEWS AND NOTES VOL. XXVIII BOSTON 23 JANUARY 1897 No. 2 19 19 29 bought at reduced rates whatever he could THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL.* 19 would disgrace in morals a tenth-rate The one high-minded character in the 20 20 20 21 21 22 22 23 23 Music Hall, and which yet are clever Of the episodes, "Aucassin and Nicol- 26 27 come to 27 timately tender and personal is the note it book, Father Sturt, could do little or nothing for his degraded parishoners, and the surgeon in conversation with him said: "Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding as only rats can; and we say it is hell. On high moral grounds we uphold the right of rats to multiply their thousands. Sometimes we catch a rat. And we keep it a little while, nourish it carefully, and put it back into the nest to propagate its kind." Father Sturt answered him by saying: "You are right of course, but who'll listen if you shout from the housetops." After years of patient self-sacrificing work in the slums of London, this is the depressstrikes. This episode redeems the flip-ing outlook which this writer presents: pancy and coarseness of many of the Is there a child in all this place that wouldn't 27 earlier passages of the Quest, even as in be better dead - still better unborn? OUT-OF-DOOR SKETCHES; Dragons and Cherry-Blossoms 28 A CHILD OF THE JAGO.† Mr. Arthur Morrison showed his skill as a writer and his artistic power in his earlier sketches. As a study of local conditions, this work is remarkable; but it is a study in charcoal with no white lights. The sun does sometimes shine even in the Jago, and the sentiments of tender love from mother to child, and of human pity and sympathy, are not wholly foreign to life in the most degraded quarters of East London. There is some beauty, some gleam of God's sunshine, in the Jago, but Mr. Morun-rison has failed to see it. Had he the poet's eye, or even a little more faith in either God or humanity, he might rank with our very best writers of fiction. But although forcible and virile, he is horribly depressing and pessimistic, and he makes life seem unnecessarily black and drear. E must credit Arthur Morrison, author 29 29 NEW EDITIONS: Captain Marryat Mark Twain. 29 The "child of the Jago" was brought up WALT WHITMAN. WO recent sketches of Walt Whitman, while widely different in scope and aim, round out a more complete picture of Whitman than the public has heretofore possessed. To lovers of Whitman's poems Mr. I 29 in an atmosphere of crime, and when old Burroughs's book will be much the more 29 29 24 The Quest of the Golden Girl. By Richard Le Gallienne. John Lane. $1.50. ↑ A Child of the Jago. By Arthur Morrison. Herbert 25 S. Stone & Co. $1.25. I Whitman: a Study. By John Burroughs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. $1.25. Man, and makes no attempt to criticise or classify his work. Mr. Donaldson was a faithful Boswell to "the good, gray poet," and, as he says, "for many years I took notes of familiar chats and interviews which marked my relations with Mr. Whitman." So painstaking a biogra pher is seldom found in these busy days, and the result of Mr. Donaldson's care is of Walt Whitman. He tells us that Mr. Whitman didn't eat with his knife, that he used a napkin to wipe his mouth before drinking, and other details of his table manners, which doubtless will be a comfort to fastidious friends. Also he sets down that during the autopsy performed on Whitman always throw new light on the inner mean- its note of revolt, or the largeness of hope THE END OF THE BEGINNING.* Now, this noble fragment, Gaston de Latour, has compass and variety and IT is quite beyond us to understand why largeness of aim, its quality is fine and Τ a new anonymous novel called The End of the Beginning, which relates the three true to the best spirit in art and life; and to read such a well-constructed, to give us an accurate photographic view love affairs of a young New England girl, choicely worded romance, even in its should have, as its secondary title, the present unfinished condition, is an inspiwords "Life is Love and Love is Eternity." ration. It has a distinct value like a Amoret, as the heroine of this tale of the sketch of one of the great masters. continuity of love is most appropriately In Marius we had the Greek spirit called, is a well-drawn character, but the versus the Christian spirit in the early charm of the book lies in the personality struggle between Paganism, or self-indulof her old grandfather, the bookseller, and gence and Christianity taken as meaning his great life work "The Philosophy of Life." self-sacrifice. In Gaston we have the This volume reminds us of Richard same conflict of spiritual forces, only Feverel's father's book of aphorisms, but the scene is shifted to another age of we must say we prefer the old bookseller's transition, when the old fabric of belief production to "The Pilgrim's Script." One or two of the sentences in "The Philosophy problem of man's destiny and his relawas again breaking up, and the vexed of Life" are exceedingly clever. We quote tion to the unseen was again undergoing a few at random to show the quality of the thought: in the back parlor, I detected the odor of a fearful pipe. It might have been from the street, and it might not have been. Mr. Whitman was not smoking, I was sure. Other details of a like repulsive and trivial nature are inserted in this book at haphazard with really valuable and characteristic observations. One thing amused us: Mr. Donaldson reports a most ridiculous "fake interview" with Whitman which the reporter sent to Whitman with an apology, saying he hadn't had time to call and interview Whitman, so he had quoted one or two things Whitman had said to him in the past. This interview Whitman had kept and indorsed: "Altitudinous and Himalayan gall." In strong contrast to the realism of Mr. Donaldson's book, John Burroughs's account of Whitman is full of enthusiasm and poetry. His whole volume glows with warmth and with a beautiful appreciation of his friend. Although almost a eulogy, Mr. Burroughs's study is one which will be of great use to all Whitman students. We can best convey the flavor of this book by a few quotations: I believe he [Whitman] supplies in fuller measure that pristine element, something akin to the unbreathed air of mountain and shore, which makes the arterial blood of poetry and literature, than any other modern writer. ... We can make little of Whitman unless we allow him to be a law unto himself, and seek him through the clews which he himself brings. . . The poet turns his face to earth and not to heaven; he finds the miraculous, the spiritual, in the things about him, and gods and goddesses in the men and women he meets. He effaces the old distinctions; he establishes a sort of universal suffrage in spiritual matters; there are no select circles, no privileged per sons. Carried out in practice, this democratic religion will not beget priests, or churches, or creeds, or rituals, but a life cheerful and full on all sides, helpful, loving, unworldly, tolerant, open-souled, temperate, fearless, free, and contemplating with pleasure rather than alarm "the exquisite transition of death." Both of these books are valuable, for the mere outward actions of as strong and original a personality as Whitman's are indicative of character, while so sympathetic an admirer as Mr. Burroughs can 2 Walt Whitman: the Man. By Thomas Donaldson. Francis P. Harper. $1.75. Mere self-sacrifice God never asks; why, then, do Christians stick pins into themselves for his greater glory? There is such a thing as carrying good sense To have hated him was a religious education. continue. a transformation. The interest of the story centers around a young priest, educated amid mediæval influences and then suddenly brought into contact with the powerful revolutionary spirit of the Renaissance, embodied, so to speak, in the strange, fascinating spirit of the wise and witty Montaigne. What Moreland, the critic, who in the beginning a vivid portrait Mr. Pater gives us of is admirably delineated, fails in the end in the great French essayist! "Naturally the most puerile and unnatural manner. eloquent, expressive with a mind like a There is nothing in his fastidiousness and rich collection of the choice things of all cold-blooded selfishness to denote a mur-time," Gaston, the young provincial priest, derer, and to make him fall into that partic-found himself compelled to learn from him ular sin "in intention" is absolutely false and inartistic as well as unnecessary. As a whole the book, with many faults of construction, and occasional wastes of dullness, is an original one. GASTON DE LATOUR.† Stone issues," and to those of us PIRITS are not finely touched but who were among the first to discover and Few romances have been written in the *The End of the Beginning. Little, Brown & Co. $1.25. Co. $1.50. and sit speechless under the spell of his influence, all his old creeds and old feelings undergoing a violent change. In those earlier days of the Renaissance a whole generation had been exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself: An older ideal, moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature actually in posses sion still haunted humanity, at the very mondge of the past to enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own capacities. In the society of Montaigne, "this indefixed outlines seemed to vanish away." fatigable analyst of act and motive, all The refined, open-minded youth, under the influence of the brilliant egoist, lost his old bearings completely, and cut aloof, at first wholly, from the past. Unfortunately this has cast off his old faith and before he has fragmentary sketch leaves Gaston after he assimilated the spirit of the new learning. The time surely would come in his experience when he would find that there was something in life far higher than anything Montaigne could bring him. We need the final uncompleted chapters to show us Gaston after he had come to a sense "of the Spiritual unity of the world," of the interdependence of all things with one another, with which belief must have come the been no better comment on what Duruy calls for months. youth's ultimate salvation. In the sketch of Giordano Bruno, which originally appeared in a Fortnightly Review for 1889, there is an interesting and profound analysis of the "Higher Pantheism." If a book has what Mr. Pater calls "something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place in the great structure of human life," then, he says, it is "Good Art." Surely Marius and Gaston de Latour do fulfill these conditions, and certainly they appeal in both form and contents to the highest and purest sentiments. Mr. Pater's style is the perfection of prose style, and he throws a certain delicate atmosphere of beauty around his characters which adds a distinct charm to both his romances. Thus far nothing that Pater has written has had the popularity it deserved, but the best in life and literature has to patiently await the judgment of a fair-minded posterity. DURUY'S HISTORY OF FRANCE.* MRS. summary of French history for school use, The Andover girls were "this marvelous and terrible epic history," chaperoned only by their ideals of prothan the following paragraph: priety. They had all that American freeDisasters fell upon two victims; but there dom which causes the foreigner so much were two culprits, the Emperor and France; of amazement, but the freedom was never established the old régime under new forms, and whom the one after ten years of revolution, re abused. The simple intellectual life which ruined himself utterly, because he would place Mrs. Ward describes is a life which is no restraint upon either his ambition or his American in the truest sense of the word. genius; while the other had deserved her misfortunes, by throwing herself like a lost child It represents what is highest and best into the arms of a young and glorious general, in the life of our republic. If it is passand to escape the burden of governing herself, ing away, what can ever replace it? had restored what she had just overthrown. The writer has only space to touch with brevity the many events he attempts to describe, but he stimulates our appetite, and makes us eager to go ourselves to the sources from which he has taken his material. We commend the two volumes, and heart Besides Mrs. Ward's personal memoirs of her girlhood and the college life, there are a number of very amusing anecdotes in the book; anecdotes well worth quoting if we had more space. Mrs. Ward has touched with irresistible humor some of the peculiar vagaries of the theological ily agree with Andrew D. White, who de- students, who at their weekly prayer meetclares "Duruy's to be the best of all short ing "in quavering voice besought their prosummaries of French history." The por-fessors to grow in grace, and admonished traits make it especially interesting for young the faculty to repent." people. CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.* There are in the book, too, pleasant recollections of famous contemporaries - Em Sill. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS tells crson, Phillips Brooks, Dr. Holmes, Lydia pardonable sin." The sine qua non of an autobiography is that it shall be interesting, and shall present to us some fresh phase of individ We are given an insight into the literary struggles of Mrs. Ward, and are told how the story of Gates Ajar came to be. There was no long heart-breaking struggle with magazine editors for the "firstlings of her muse," and her first tale met with immediate approval. But the fact that the mother of Mrs. Ward was a well-known authoress and that her father was a professor of rhetoric gave her rare opportuni A short concise history is usually a dull uality or some new series of experiences. ties for learning her craft. one, a mere colorless statement of facts. cause it is typical of what is finest in our An inside view of the life of an interest ing woman must make an interesting book. Of course these are only a few chaptersfrom her life—and there are many big gaps which are left unfilled. We want the more But Duruy has done for France what Greene has done so admirably for England, and has given us a quick succession of graphic pictures of the different reigns. His first volume begins "in the begin-its aristocracy of the intellect make the personal experiences of her intimate home refuge. ning," with the early migrations of the life, but we respect the writer all the more for her reserves. Those who admire Gates Ajar and A Singular Life will eagerly seize upon this charming autobiographical fragment; but those who do not care for Mrs. Ward's fiction will find in these recollections much pleasant reading. They are simple and sincere, and free from degrading personalities. The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a little different from the lives of other girls. . . . As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were all one of a neighborhood that did not feel superficially in certain higher directions, When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all intelligent young people ask sooner Towards the end of the volume Mrs. or later, we found ourselves in a village of three institutions and their dependencies, committed Ward gives us her "creed." She begins to the pursuit of an ideal of education for which it with her belief in the "Life Everlastno amount of later, or what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than ing" and ends it with a protest against Christian. vivisection, and adds that in therapeutics she is homœopathic. There are six articles There had never been so earnest a desire for information of all sorts, or such boldness in venturing beyond the beaten tracks, as was exhibited in this century. Men had long consoled themselves for abuses by an epigram, and for crimes by a song. But now the public mind was becoming more serious, and consequently more formidable. In the presence of a royalty which took pleasure in degrading itself, of nobles "who seemed to be only the ghosts of their ancestors," and were unable any longer to produce generals, of a clergy among whom were no longer found even among boys and girls, were pure in her "creed," of which one is that she either Bossuets or Fenelons, privileges were ques- standards; a furtive kiss given by an believes in the advancement of woman, tioned, the titles of these powers formerly reand another that she believes that women an Andover girl was spected were investigated. academy boy to enough of a crime against the social need to reform their methods of dress. In all the long series of books written upon code to upset the equilibrium of the town This "creed," if intended to be taken seriNapoleon during the last few years there has *A History of France. By Victor Duruy. Translated by Mrs. M. Carey. T. Y. Crowell & Co. $3.00. The standards of conduct in Andover, Chapters from a Life. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. ously, is positively ludicrous, and it somehow suggests a lack of balance and proportion in its author's mind. But after all, who expects good judgment from a country recognized the Confederates as bel-tures which link England's ecclesiastical writer of fiction? WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD.* MR. The Broads district lies between the sea ligerents and the latter was clamorous for present with her past, nor the fine old Mexico. Whoever reads this Life will bet- types of mediæval architecture and life ter understand the diplomatic questions that along the shores of Normandy and Britoverlaid and underlaid the conduct of the tany, as at Mont St. Michel and Dives, R. SEWARD'S life was intimately war, which the biographer's legal training but a unique and rather unfrequented connected with forty years of the dip- enables him to mass and present with preci- corner in the East of England, which in lomatic history of our country in the days sion and fairness. Much might have been many ways looks like, and for substance of the anti-slavery agitation and of the Civil omitted if he had not wished to present the is, a bit of Holland cut off and set over War. He was cruelly misjudged by those times as the setting for his portraiture of on the hither side of the Channel. who see only one side of a question, and not the man, who was alike Governor of New until Thornton Kirkland Lothrop, a gentle- York, United States Senator, and Secretary beaches of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, the grainman of leisure and scholarly research, be- of State. The salient features and the mi- fields of Wroxham, and the crowded rivercame his biographer, have the difficulties Here are the plains nor tangles of diplomatic situations have wharves of Norwich. which beset his career been thoroughly ex-been studied and solved. Seward was anx-Yare, and the Waveney. Before losing themand valleys through which flow the Bure, the ious to avoid bloodshed until Lincoln's gov-selves irrevocably in the sea, these rivers turn aside, as it were, now and then, from their way, to frolic in a series of wild lakes and more serious duty of providing a watery highmeres. These limpid waterways have been barges; for generations also it has been an used for generations by the homely Norfolk open secret to sportsmen and anglers that in summer the Broads are an angler's paradise, and that in winter the wild duck are almost as numerous as thrushes in August._In time the secret was whispered abroad. Following in the footsteps of the men of the rod and now, as one may see during the whole of came others with palette hooked on thumb, the long summer, the sails between the meadows are almost as thick as cabs in Piccadilly. hibited. His first appearance in court was in de-ernment was established and believed that fense of a thief, indicted for the larceny of a with his advent peace would be restored. quilted holder and a piece of calico. He He labored to preserve the Union, believing proved that the holder was sewed and that the that with that lost all would be lost. He it calico was jean, and the man was acquitted. was who advocated the blockade and justiLater he defended a negro murderer on the fied it finally to the English. ground of insanity and was roundly abused Mr. Lothrop's own cautious mind united for it. After the man's death an examination to a steady grasp of thought and comprehenof his brain proved that Seward was right. sive patriotism have enabled him to trace From that time till the attempt to assassinate the harmony between the reconstruction him in his own house, even after that till policy of Johnson and the constant burden his death in 1872, he was always the defender of Seward's dispatches of State. To the of the Union, bearing with dignity the atsecretary, more than to any other diplomat, tacks made upon him in speech, working was due the constant presentment of the enormously and trusting in an overruling Union as intact in spite of secession. He Providence. Glad are his admirers to recol-often secured as principle what would have lect that his journey round the world in 1865 been lost if practical details were first considmust have convinced him of the final honor ered, as when he secured the admission of with which he was everywhere regarded. the principle of arbitration in the settlement Mr. Seward carried out his intense con- of our claims for losses incurred in the war. victions with steadfast courage. To his far-sighted diplomacy do we owe also a consistent Whig throughout his life, al- the purchase of Alaska. ways hostile to slavery, yet an advocate of compensated and gradual emancipation, for he realized more keenly than the antislavery men the blow to industry and prosperity which any sudden freedom of the negro would entail. Mr. Lothrop well says that Seward's "political controversies never degenerated into personalities." Honest minded and fair dealing himself, he had to bear the mistakes which others He was Though this biography may not meet with full approval among men, impatient with slow methods, its vindication of Seward's integrity and patriotism cannot fail to be maintained, while all will acknowledge the grouping of facts as impartial. An unusually full index adds to the value of the book. ON THE BROADS.* In this water-fowl country, reached by ant party lose themselves for a season, and way of Norwich, Mrs. Dodd and her pleasher seventeen chapters, with Mr. Pennell's tone of gentle comedy the story of their accompanying thirty drawings, tell in a haps and mishaps as they voyage up and down and in and out their intricate network of inland passageways. In form, the book is really a story with the Broads for a background, a design which, while it may relieve the prosaic severity of mere description, is a literary composite difficult of execution. But Mrs. Dodd has succeeded with it so well before that the temptation was certainly great to adopt it again in handling her present theme. For ourselves, conscious of having a greater interest in landscape and the experience of seeing it in novel ways, than in people Imade in his interests. Because he thought man Dodd's previous books, Cathedral for whose action and dialogue it is simply But it best for his country that he should remain in Johnson's Cabinet he was called a Days and especially Three Normandy Inns, the stage, we find them a little too much traitor. Unfortunately reformers and mor- will seize with avidity this new work from in the foreground, and sometimes wish alists have little idea of expediency, and her facile pen, and open its handsome they would stand aside and cease their would devastate a nation or a reputation pages with definite expectations. In a chatter and let us enjoy the scene. rather than delay action or examine details. large degree, if not to the point of per- for others who care more for human kind Mr. Lothrop gives far too little of the per- fection, they will find what they expect; and their interplay than for horizons, exsonnel of the man or of his home life. What namely, an interesting and picturesque panses, and sunsets, for talk than for proshe has written is an inner history of the topic of the outside world treated in a pects, for society than for nature, this early Compromise Resolutions, of Fill-lively, artistic, original way, with sympa- element will be a distinct attraction. more's administration, of the Kansas strug.thetic interpretation of what is attractive At any rate the book is an inviting vegles, of the Republican Convention of 1860, in form and striking in color, and with hicle in which to take a delightful excurof Lincoln's Cabinet, of the rendition of a kindly feeling for the intermingling of sion into an unknown country, for we Mason and Slidell, etc. Next to Lincoln in quaint and curious phases of human fancy that few Americans have as yet this interior history, Seward averted war with England and France, when the former *American Statesmen. William Henry Seward. By Thornton Kirkland Lothrop. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. $1.25. nature. Mrs. Dodd's subject in this book is no longer the venerable and magnificent struc *On the Broads. By Anna Bowman Dodd. Illustrated by Joseph Pennell. The Macmillan Co. $3.00. found their way to the Norfolk Broads, and many readers of Mrs. Dodd will be certain to go see it for themselves the next time they are in England. A more charming region for house-boating, under more favorable conditions, it would be WE JOSEPH THOMSON.* E remember as if it were yesterday the impression made on our mind in 1881 by the publication of Joseph Thomson's To the Central African Lakes and Back, and again, later, in 1885, by his Through Masai Land, that here we had an African explorer of the first class, a man whose moral nature matched his mental and his physical, whose combination of parts was equal to any strain the Dark Continent could put upon him, and that should his life be spared he was destined to work a service of incalculable value for the opening up and the lighting up and the leveling up of one of the four great quarters of the globe. Not Moffat, not Stanley, not even Livingstone achieved more than Joseph Thomson gave promise of achieving. But alas his life was not spared. God took him, perhaps to conquer other worlds. It is well that his biography should be prepared, as it has been, by the hand of his brother, the Rev. J. B. Thomson of Greenock Scotland, and published, as it is, by Samp son Low, Marston & Co. of London in a compactly printed, closely trimmed duodecimo of 353 pages; a solid addition to the best biography of the present decade of years, a valuable addition to the literature of African discovery. It is and beautifully moulded figures, dark brown hair, peachy complexions, and big, soft, velvety brown eyes, full of latent fire that requires very little to become a living flame. The men are tall, well-formed and graceful in figure, with bronzed features, dark, long moustaches, and big dark eyes. Both sexes have particularly small hands and feet, daintily rounded wrists and ankles, and very luxuriant hair. The peasant girls generally go about bare-headed and bare-footed, except on Sundays or Saints' days. by the loftiest spirit. It is a life which no NOT A GIRL'S WANDERINGS IN HUNGARY.* [OT many travelers, even in these days, get to Hungary. To Transylvania we have been before in the company of one good book, and into Galicia with another, but it has remained for H. Ellen Browning, the Joseph Thomson was born only as re- English "girl" of the volume before us, to cently as 1858, and died in 1895 at the conduct us by way of Vienna to Budaearly age of thirty-seven, and was barely Pesth, and then to take us not only through halfway through his twenty-first year when the interior but into the interior of the whole he set out on his first expedition to the inte- of this outlying corner of Eastern Europe, rior of Africa. He was but a beardless boy, which with Russia comes next to the barbabut he went with the mental and spiritual rism of the lands lying beyond, and gives outfit of a man. Never did man set forth the visitor as novel an experience as he is upon a trial of his strength with a manlier likely to find anywhere upon the continent purpose or in a manlier way, and the per- of Europe. Miss Browning is an independformance of this his first experiment was all ent young woman, and as frank as she is that the most brilliant success could be. independent, saying: Those readers who had the privilege of keeping him company knew from the outset that they were with that noblest of the crea tions of God, a true man, and he had their confidence from the beginning. The story of the whole of Thomson's achievements is one of the remarkable chapters of African history. It is well told here. It was well that it should be told by another than himself. Boastfulness was not one of his traits. And what a brother speaks in his praise is spoken deservedly. It is a well-woven and fitting wreath of green which is here laid upon his early grave. We cannot, in our limited space, enter into the particulars of this life, which, short as it was, was crowded with detail and animated Joseph Thomson, African Explorer. A Biography by his Brother. With Contributions by Friends. Maps and Illustrations. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. New York: Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50. I never could see why a well brought up girl should not be allowed exactly the same liberty of action that is accorded to her brothers-in fact to every young man in every grade of life. So in the exercise of this constitutional liberty off she went. I took the matter into my own hands. The family finance minister easily decided that there for two. I had plenty of courage. Through a friend I could get introductions to some people in Hungary; so to Hungary I would go. were funds for one to go a-travelling, but not Such was the "Girl," and you can guess what were her "Wanderings." It is a vivacious and entertaining story from the first, bringing you as it does almost at once face to face with such pictures as this: These Magyar women are generally of medium height; they have broad, rather square shoulders A Girl's Wanderings in Hungary. By H. Ellen Browning. With Illustrations and a Map. Longmans, Green & Co., London, New York, and Bombay. kindness. The resources of the household and You are welcomed anywhere and everywhere by total strangers with the greatest warmth and the neighborhood are marshalled out for your You are made to feel comfort and amusement. by your entertainers that your presence among them is a genuine piece of good luck which they cannot fail to appreciate. Except in the towns, hotels or even good inns are few and far between, but you do not miss them. When you desire to visit any particular part of the country, you have only to make that desire known and a letter of introduction is obtained for you from some of your friends' friends, or possibly a distant connection of somebody known to your latest hosts; either to a noble's family, or, failing that, to an estate agent, a country squire, a doctor, a lawyer, a parson, or the head peasant of a village, and you either put in an appearance at their residence with these credentials in your hand, or send them on before, and receive by return of post a pressing invitation to go to them of your arrival at the nearest railway station, whenever you like, and to wire the probable hour where you will find a conveyance awaiting you, "How nice," the reader will exclaim, “a convenient country to travel in!" And so Miss Browning found it, first making readily her way to and her entrance into a pleasan country house near Nyek for a beginning of her acquaintance with the Hungarians at home, and extending it afterward to festas in Buda-Pesth, to the forests and farms of Transylvania, to bear-baiting in the Carpa thian Mountains, to village life among the Wallachians, to excursions on the Danube to gipsey funerals and cobalt mines, to way side inns and mountain climbing. It is altogether a spirited and graphic book full of novel scenes, customs, experiences, and people, marked by individuality, fresh and well flavored, and so pictorial in its style and effect that its few woodcuts are hardly needed. Miss Brown ing is to be congrat ulated on the pluck and courage with which she made her visit, and on the literary success which she has made out of her story of it. There is, we are pleased to say, a map of the country visited. -The Fleming H. Revell Co. announce the Autobiography of Julian M. Sturtevant, late president of Illinois College. The work will be of considerable historical interest, touching personally as it does on the early Western and interior settlements, Congregationalist growth, and English public opinion during our Civil War. |