enlightened theism, nothing is now necessary but to philosophize that very scientific method which agnosticism barbarously misunderstands and misuses." All readers of Mr. Abbot's earlier work, "Scientific Theism" and they must be many, since it has reached its third edition-will recognize this new work as its natural successor, and will be glad to learn that both are only preliminary to a more complete exposition, "the ground-plan of which is already thoroughly matured," although its literary execution is still incomplete.

It is certainly greatly to be hoped that leisure and years will be granted Mr. Abbot in which to develop, to his own satisfaction, the momentous and severe enterprise which has been slowly taking shape as the result of thirty years of cogitation by our chief American philosopher. In the mean time, it is much that we have a book so well-fitted to rescue Evolution from the opprobrium with which it is regarded in some quarters; one which proclaims that "the self-contradictory conjunction of Evolution and Agnosticism, in the so-called philosophy of the nineteenth century, is a mere freak of the hour. . The philosophy of the future, founded upon the scientific method, must be organic through and through, and built upon the known organic constitution of the noumenal universe as the assured result of science itself."

ANNA B. McMAHAN.

PATER'S "APPRECIATIONS.” *

It is with very pleasurable anticipation that any lover of literature for its own sake takes up a new book by the author of those delightful papers upon "The Renaissance," of "Marius the Epicurean," and of the "Imaginary Portraits." With his earliest volume Mr. Pater made his mark, and assumed his place well up in the ranks of the writers whose each successive issue the critic welcomes, and girds himself to deal with. Here was plainly a man of pith and likelihood who would be heard from again, who had something to say to us in prose that had a distinction of its own, an aroma as peculiar as that of a Tangierine orange or of patchouli. He felt and understood art, and could make his thoughts and emotions intelligible. There were few contemporary authors from whom we could venture to hope for as much in the line of pure literature.

APPRECIATIONS. With an Essay on Style. By Walter Pater. New York: Macmillan & Co.

It is a pity that such pleasant expectations, based upon successive experiences, should ever fail to be justified by the result. Why should not a man who has done well once, twice, and thrice, do as well, or better, always? There is no denying, however, that the present volume measurably disappoints us. The "Imaginary Portraits" was hardly up to the level of the "Marius" or the "Renaissance," and "Appreciations" falls definitely below it. It is made up of disconnected papers upon Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Sir Thomas Browne, upon several of Shakespeare's plays, upon æsthetic poetry, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There is a preliminary disquisition upon Style, and a postscript upon the classical and romantic elements in literature. tic elements in literature. The papers range, in time, from an article begun in 1865 to an article completed in 1889. They should reveal to us, therefore, something of their author's progress and development in letters. They have their interest in that regard, but it is a perplexing interest. If the substance of the thinking in Mr. Pater's latest work has gained in philosophic depth, if it is of more solid grain and fibre than in his earlier essays, none the less his peculiar excellence, the fine edge of his style, is dulled and blunted. It is not from carelessness, from the riper man's absorption in his theme and consequent neglect of the channels of expression. That might be a healthy token, giving promise of more mature and perfect work eventually.

But it is impossible to interpret the failure in that genial fashion. The trouble is in quite another direction. Mr. Pater has overworked a native vein. He has lost something of his first crispness and freshness and vivacity. His style, once so apt and choice and dainty, has grown pedantic, has become entangled and intricate. He plays tricks with language until we resent his artifice. The muse forgives whimsicalness, but is intolerant of the tweezers applied to her downy cheek or the apparatus of the manicure upon her taper fingers. Mr. Pater sins by over-elaboration. He weakens the texture of his material by carving his

"Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere." He would do better with less pains. We grow impatient over his tortuous movements, and are ready to say to him, Most dainty sir, let your sentences sway and undulate, but do not insist that they should writhe. Over-conscious graces in life or literature repel us. We do not care about all this ingenuity, this tampering with constructions, this dexterous interweaving of

dependent clauses. Let Pegasus cease to curvet and sidle. A good roadster goes a steady pace for the most part, and needs neither spur nor rein. It is well to study style, and be able adroitly to discourse of style; and then it is well to lose sight of style, and not remind your reader too perpetually of the medium through which he perceives your thought. Mr. Pater seems to have forgotten the charm of a light touch and a careless attitude. He has become Latinized. He has grown fond of the "longcontending victoriously intricate sentence "; and the victory sometimes goes the other way. The construction is sometimes clumsy with contortion. There are passages in the essay on "Style" where an intelligent listener, when they are read aloud, may fail to catch the sense, nor be quite sure of it even on a second hearing. The fault is in a perverse theory. When, in the paper on Coleridge, Mr. Pater describes the artist as "moving slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest tone and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancy move at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness," it is difficult for the gentlest reader not to grow restless and cry out with Keats,

who also was an artist,

"O sweet Fancy, let her loose,

Everything is spoilt by use,'

by this meddlesome handling and fussy premeditation. Calculated tenderness is fatal to spontaneous sweetness; curves too much restrained grow hard and mechanical; and this gradually enforcing flaccid spaces-whatever that may mean-is apt to strain the original outline. Better meagreness than dropsical puffiness. Better unoccupied roominess than a dense and jostling crowd of artfully compacted phrases.

One hates to say all this; it is only because Mr. Pater can be so delightful, that we are vexed at his perversities and pedantries. It would be unfair to let this be our last word

worth, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. Even the well-worn thoroughfares of Shakespeare are traversed with a fresh and ringing step. "The ideal aspects of common things" are revealed to us. You feel that you are in the company of one who has read much and gazed upon much and meditated much, who loves the best in art and letters and life, and has a discriminative sense of values. You would like to turn over with him the pages of any famous author or any unfledged aspirant to authorship. You are sure that his interest would be alert, his sympathy inclusive, his taste catholic, his views luminous, his judgment sober and sound. You only wish no one had ever told him there is a magic in nicely articulated prose. You long to have him talk right on, "plunge soulforward," without too curiously picking his phrases, restraining the curves of his paragraphs, or enforcing too persistently "flaccid " in his speech. spaces C. A. L. RICHARDS.

"OLD COUNTRY LIFE."*

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"Old Country Life" takes us into the atmosphere of the good old times" before the fever of socialism, materialism, atheism, naturalism, and all the other isms of this modern age, had invaded and taken possession of the world. This age of subtle analyses, of infinite desires and boundless irresponsibility, of wants increased by intelligence, and of passions instead of instincts, is for the nonce forgotten. We smell lavender, we have visions of old

châteaux, stately dames in brocades and snufftaking gentlemen in powdered wigs, quaint dreams, with sunny walks protected by vineold terraced gardens, paradises of roses and mignonette, and boxwood hedges. We read grown walls, stiff parterres, hollyhocks, phlox, first about the old country families, how they rose and flourished, and how they have in many instances vanished from the face of the earth.

their finical title, "Appreciations," are genuinely appreciative. Mr. Pater knows his subjects, and discusses them with true insight and sensitive sympathy. The essential elements of style are well defined, however faultily illustrated. The distinction between the classic and romantic schools in literature, and especially in French literature, is admirably stated. There is very much that is just and well put, if nothing very novel, in the treatment of Words

"The country gentry in those days were not very wealthy. They lived very much on the produce of the home farm, and their younger sons went into trade, and their daughters, without any sense of degradation, married yeomen."

It seems that even to marry a blacksmith was not considered very terrible for a young woman of quality, as a daughter of the house of Glan

* OLD COUNTRY LIFE. By S. Baring-Gould, M.A. With Illustrations by W. Parkenson, F. D. Bedford, and F. Masy. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.

"It

ville was allowed to marry a Tavistock blacksmith, and he was entered as "faber" in the pedigree they enrolled with the heralds. was quite another matter when one of the sons or daughters was guilty of misconduct; then he or she was struck out of the pedigree." The English aristocracy of to-day might copy their ancestors in this respect with profit.

Mr. Gould proceeds to draw attention to the fact that

"The occasion of that irruption of false pride relative to soiling the hands' with trade was the great change that ensued after Queen Anne's reign. Vast numbers of estates changed hands, passed away from the old aristocracy into the possession of men who had amassed fortunes in trade, and it was among the children of these rich retired tradesmen that there sprang up such a contempt for whatever savoured of the shop and the counting-house."

It is very curious to notice the evolution in houses since the fourteenth century. That they were more picturesque than cheerful or comfortable, we should imagine from the description of the original manor-house of the Arundels :

"This house consisted of three courts; one is a mere garden court, through which access was had to the main entrance; through this passed the way into the principal quadrangle. The third court was for stables and cattle-sheds. Now this house has but a single window in it looking outwards, and that is the great hall window; all the rest look inwards into the tiny quadrangle, which is almost like a well, never illumined by the sun, so small is it."

Mr. Gould also speaks of an old English house, Upcott by name, which shows how extremely primitive customs were in England, even at a comparatively late date :

"This house has or had but a single bedroom,

in which slept the unmarried ladies of the family and the maid servants, and where was the nursery for the babies. All the men of the family, gentle and serving, slept in the hall about the fire, on the straw and fern and broom that littered the pavement."

With the Tudor monarchs came in the era of broad wide windows, stately staircases, and the fine carved oak furniture of the German Renaissance. Marquetry became the fashion under William and Mary; and under Louis XIV. Monsieur André Buhl fashioned the exquisite cabinets, adorned with a marquetry of tortoise-shell and brass, which are known as Buhl cabinets to this day. With Louis XV. came the reign of rococo. White and gold walls, decorated panels and brilliant colors, took the place of the oak panels and demi-tints of Elizabethan times. Then came Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton, then "the deluge." As Mr. Gould pertly says,

first thirty years of this century, when it violated all true principles of construction, and manifested neither invention nor taste in design.'

Mr. Gould next gives us a charming chapter on "The Old Garden," in which he mourns the fast disappearing ones of Rome. Whoever has loitered in the Ludovisi gardens on a sunny afternoon, or picked violets in the green alleys of the Borghese or Rospigliosi palaces, must join in these lamentations. There is a melancholy charm about these old gardens which a new one, however beautiful, cannot possess. The romance of centuries, the spell of the mysterious, is there. Men and women have come and gone, leaving no visible trace, but the tragedies and comedies of human life pulsate in the very air we breathe. The gold-dust of sunbeams, the concentrated perfume of a thousand flowers, float about us.

Mr. Gould makes a plea for the graceful and dignified minuets and measures of our forefathers. He says that "the dance as a fine art is extinct among us. It has been expelled by

the intrusive waltz." He would wish to substitute "Sweet Kate," "Bobbing Joan," or "The Triumph."

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Our author gives us some very curious and interesting facts in regard to heredity, in his chapter on Family Portraits." By calculation, he imparts to us the astounding and confusing information that "in the reign of Henry III. there were over a million independent individuals, walking, talking, eating, marrying, whose united blood was to be, in 1889, blended in your veins." No wonder that Schopenhauer defined a human being as the "possibility of many contradictions."

In the reign of Elizabeth, music was brought to great perfection. At that time, every gentleman was expected to be able to play or sing at sight, and wherever men and women met part-songs were sung. The Elizabethan poets were so permeated with this spirit of music that in their poems we feel the music between the lines. With the idealism, the burning note of passion and of love, the glowing imageries imprisoned in rhyme, the intensity, the freshness, the spontaneity, of the poetry of the Elizabethan age, is always combined the lyrical element. Some of these poems almost sing themselves. Even the serving-maids, we read in Pepys' "Diary," entertained their masters and mistresses with music of various kinds. In those days, however, very few persons kept servants, and they were often taken from among their own relatives. Pepys took his own sister

to be servant in his house, and afterward two young ladies, acquaintances of his wife's brother, as his sister's temper proved unsatisfactory. "Our forefathers do not seem at one time to have thought that domestic service was derogatory to gentility." Menial, Mr. Gould points out, simply means within walls, from the Latin intra-moenia, which, by the way, he erroneously writes intra-menia. Menial service thus simply meant in-door work, and involved no social degradation. When we read how Pepys and his wife amused themselves by spending their evenings with their servants, listening to pretty Mary Mercer sing, or Mary Ashewell play on the harpsicon, we ask if that was not in those times more true social equality than is found in the boasted democracy of to-day.

Mr. Gould is perhaps too much inclined to retrospective optimism, but this tendency is fully compensated by the thoroughly sympathetic way in which it enables him to treat his subject. His book is quaintly illustrated, and the publishers' work is exceptionally well done. GENEVIEVE GRANT.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS.

THE reader of Dr. Brinton's "Essays of an Americanist" (Porter & Coates) can hardly fail to catch some of the author's enthusiasm for the department of study in which he is our most noted specialist. The work is a collection of twenty-eight essays, most of which have been first read as papers before various learned societies, and are here grouped into four general classes: Ethnologic and Archæologic; Mythology and Folk-Lore; Graphic Systems and Literature; Linguistic. Dr. Brinton's scholarly and original researches in these fields have brought him to some conclusions considerably different from the commonly accepted ones, all tending to give the American race a higher psychologie place than has heretofore been granted. At the outset, the author dismisses as trivial all attempts to connect the American race genealogically with any other, or to trace the typical culture of this continent to the historic forms of the Old World. Accepting the theory that man as a species spread from one primal centre, and that each of the great continental areas moulded this plastic primitive man into a race subtly correlated with its environment, he considers that the earliest Americans came here as immigrants; that the racial type of the American Indian was developed on its own soil, and constitutes as true and distinct a sub-species as do the African or the White races. At what period the process began he does not undertake to determine in the present state of geologic knowledge; but certainly at a much more distant time than has been commonly fixed.

as

long ago as during or just after the glacial epoch. Theories based on alleged affinities between the Mongolian and American races he regards as unsupported, either by linguistics, the history of culture, or physical resemblances. He rejects the current notion of a Toltec race and a Toltec em

pire as a baseless fable. Tula was merely one of the towns built and occupied by that tribe of the Nahuas known as Azteca or Mexica, who finally settled at the present City of Mexico. Its inhabitants were called Toltecs, but there was never any such distinct tribe or nationality. They enjoyed no supremacy, either in power or in the arts, and what gave them their singular fame in later legend was the tendency of the human mind to glorify the "good old times," and to merge ancestors into divinities. As Americans by adoption, Dr. Brinton urges upon American scholars the duty and the interest of studying a race so unique and so absolutely autochthonous in its culture. A century more, and scarcely a native of pure blood will be found; the tribes and languages of to-day will have been extinguished or corrupted. Every day the progress of civilization, ruthless of the monuments of bar

barism, is destroying the feeble vestiges of the ancient race; mounds are levelled, embankments disappear, the stones of temples are built into factories, the holy places desecrated; the opportunity of recovering something from this wreck of a race and its monuments is one which will never again present itself in such fulness. Certainly we should all be grateful for such labors, if they can yield such interesting fruits as those contained in Dr. Brinton's chapters on Native American Poetry" or "American Languages, and Why We Should Study Them." In these we learn that a well-developed American tongue, such as the Aztec or the Algonquin, is for most uses quite equal to the French or English ; that not only are almost all savage tribes passionate lovers of music and verse, of measure and song, but that the Eskimo the boreal, blubber-eating, ice-bound Eskimo-hold the verse-making power in such esteem that genuine tourneys of song, not unlike those in fair Provence in the days of la gaye science, occur in the long winter nights, between the champions of villages. The more one becomes acquainted with works like the present volume, the more one recognizes the importance of Locke's position for which Cousin was so angry with himthat no study of psychology can afford to do without examination of mind as it is manifested by the uncivilized and savage.

A SPECIALLY dainty volume containing the "Dramatic Opinions" of that sterling English actress, Mrs. Kendal, is issued by Little, Brown, & Co. The "Opinions" were first published in "Murray's Magazine," and as they were taken viva voce, they partake of the nature of an " Interview." It will be readily agreed that Mrs. Kendal's views on things histrionic are entitled to consideration. Few have had greater experience in the matters whereof she

speaks. Her ancestors like those of Mr. Vincent Crummles's pony-were all "in the profession"; and

she tells us that her blood "burns with enthusiasm when speaking of our long line of descent from aetors of old." Mrs. Kendal seems to have made an early début as Eva, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." "I was put," she says, "in a kind of machine, something was put round my waist, and I went up in a sort of apotheosis." Later, she became leading lady in a Hull theatre, where she "played everything from Lady Macbeth to Papillonnetta. Papillonnetta was a lady with wings, in a burlesque of Mr. Brough's. The wings were invented by Mr. Brough, and they used to wind up and flap for about ten minutes, and you then had to run off and be wound up again." Lack of space forbids us tracing Mrs. Kendal's career, the phases of which she portrays with great vivacity. As is implied in its title, her book is largely made up of criticism; and her judgments are marked by good sense, good-nature, and frankness. She does not fully approve of the present tendency of prominent stage professionals to seek society. "If you are a bitterly conscientious person, and act up to the hilt, I defy you night after night to go out, after your work, or even two or three times a week." We commend the following to a certain class of commentators: "It would be impossible for any ordinary persons, if they were to live to be hundreds of years old, and thought only of cultivating their minds, to tell you, from their own small range of thought, what Shakespeare meant." The following incident in Mrs. Kendal's career we believe to have been a rare one: "A man came into the stalls rather late, and looked about a good deal, and yawned so markedly, one could not help noticing him. It was very trying, but at the end of the second act he went out altogether, and didn't return. This little episode made me cry for about three days." We trust this paragraph may meet the eyes of the yawning gentleman-and others of his kind. "Dramatic Opinions" is a bright and amusing book, and may be taken, perhaps, as an earnest of what the author means to give us some day in the way of a serious addition to stage literature.

FEW poets live long enough to see the indifference or scorn, which seems to be their almost invariable reception at the hands of contemporaries, transformed into sympathetic and responsive appreciation. Robert Browning was more fortunate than most men in this respect, although indeed his happiness must have been much qualified by the large amount of empty and undiscriminating applause which, to a sensitive soul, cannot fail to be more distasteful than even scorn or indifference. This latter class were noisy and numerous enough to create a new "fad" around the Browning name, and thus to make genuine Browning-lovers shy of confessing their real feelings. These are now breaking through their reserve, and under the stress of a severe sense of loss no longer hesitate to lay on the grave the

66

wreath or flower that might have seemed too humble to offer to the man living. Such are the volumes Browning Memorial" (University Press, Cambridge) and Browning Personalia" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)-two of the daintiest and most beautiful books that have come to hand for many a day. The "Memorial" is in white paper covers, silken-tied, and contains, besides the addresses, letters, songs, and hymns which made up the Boston Browning Society's programme at its Memorial Service, pictures of the exterior and interior of King's Chapel where the services were held, January 28, 1890, and a portrait of Browning in his later years. The other volume is by Edmund Gosse, and contains his valuable story of "The Early Career of Robert Browning," written in 1881 and printed in the "Century" for December of that year; also Gosse's "Personal Impressions" as given in the issue of "The New Review" following Browning's death. ing's death. As the neighbor and close friend of Browning for twelve years, Mr. Gosse had special opportunity for intimacy with the poet, and, indeed, wrote the first paper under his personal supervision. Therefore, it is well to have a reprint of these magazine articles in a book not only so beautiful to the eye, but so satisfying to the common and not unworthy desire of mankind to know something of the daily life of those who by their writings have given us some part of their own vision into the "infinite in things," and thus transformed our own lives forever after.

1

It is satisfactory to be able at last to say that there is a compendious history in English of the territories ruled over by the Austrian princes. Mrs. Birkbeck Hill's translation of Professor Louis Leger's "Histoire de l' Autriche-Hongrie" begins badly in mangling the very title into "A History of Austro-Hungary" (Putnam), and yet the book is better than its translation. The choice of Edward A. Freeman to write a preface to the translation was not a happy one, as that distinguished historian can never write calmly about his pet aversion, the Austrian dynasty. But, getting beyond translator and prolocutor, we find a most serviceable volume of 650 pages. The author has done well to devote nearly half his space to the times since the accession of Maria Theresa, for he is far best where the partial unification of the composite realm of the Hapsburgs makes possible a single continuous narrative. Where, in the earlier pages, the author attempts to deal separately with the narratives of Austria, Bɔhemia, and Hungary, he fails to produce satisfactory work. His chapters are sketchy, and barren of human interest. We believe that a historian like Freeman or Green could have here grasped the unity in the midst of apparent segregation, and would have given us a living and glowing narrative. We miss in this first portion any adequate account of what is so large a part of earlier mediaval history-the institutions of a people. Especially is the earlier history of the arch-duchy neglected.