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IR EDWIN ARNOLD has cast into the form of a play in four acts, entitled Adzuma; or, The Japanese Wife, a story of old Japan that is thoroughly characteristic and extremely charming. Adzuma is the Japanese Griselda-the ideal wife of the Japan of feudal times, if not of the race itself. Loving her lord with a devotion as intense as it is ideal, she is nevertheless ensnared in the meshes of a disappointed lover -a very exact counterpart of lago-so hopelessly, as she believes, that the only clear way of proving to her husband her unswerving fidelity is to seal it with her life. Accordingly, when, through the devilish machinations of Sakamune, the fiery Morito, passionately in love with her, is led to believe his passion shared, and her own mother deems her compromised, she simulates acquiescence in Morito's design of slaying her husband, but contrives that he shall slay her instead. When the tragedy of errors is exposed both the husband and lover quit the world for the same monastery-a typical Japanese touch.

This story-of which the foregoing is the baldest of outlines-has been treated by Sir Edwin Arnold with the most sensitive sympathy. His Adzuma is a lovely figure, as winning and poetic as a Japanese himself could desire. The play is saturated with iocal color, and better even than anything its author has heretofore written, attests the completeness with which the Japanese ideal has been assimilated by him. It is besides an exceedingly skilful and effectively constructed drama, considered simply in itself. One may read it with absorbed interest without a thought of its being a dramatized Japanese story-just as one reads an entertainment from the Arabian Nights." It deals with universal as well as national ideas and emotions. For the most part it is in prose that has an Elizabethan color, but there are many passages and long in charming verse, and some of the interspersed lyrics are exquisite. Both for its poetic and for its dramatic quality, in diction as well as in plot, it is a noteworthy piece of literature. [Scribners, 12mo, $1.50.]

A new edition, uniform in size with his volumes of essays, appears of William Winter's poems, under the title of Wanderers. The author explains the title by saying: "Most of my poems have drifted into life: they came; they were not compelled; and therefore, and because their existence seems frail and their fate dubious, I have called them Wanderers." Mr. Winter's latest as well as many of his

earliest poems are included in this new collection, which, if not definitive, contains the bulk of the verse upon which his reputation as a singer must rest. The frontispiece of the little volume is a portrait, which we reproduce on this page of THE BOOK BUYER. [Macmillan, 16m0, 75 cents.]

In his preface to Miss Edna Dean Proctor's Song of the Ancient People, John Fiske says of the poem that "as a rendering of MouquiZuñi thought it is a contribution of great and permanent value to American literature." In his comments on the poem F. H. Cushing charancient in spirit and feeling and acterizes it as true to the thought and lore of the people it speaks for," and as "giving vivid glimpses of the teeming mythic forms of ancient Pueblo

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ISS JEANIE DRAKE has seen fit to allow a certain Miles Ashley Vanderlyn to relate her novel, In Old St. Stephen's. The scene is laid in South Carolina during the last century. In spite of certain defects of style-for the book would furnish a number of sentences for a class in grammar to correct-there is the unmistakable "something" in the manner of suggesting character and putting in the surroundings that is decidedly promising in a new writer. A certain humorous conception of the different situations adds much to the pleasure of the story. The fascination of the book lies not so much in the tale told as in the successful manner in which the author has surrounded it with the delightful atmosphere of a departed phase of American life. [Appleton, 12mo, $1.00.]

Edmund Gosse's first essay in fiction, The Secret of Narcisse, is a story of a romantic pair of lovers in the Middle Ages. An unfounded charge of witchcraft is brought against Narcisse, who is a sculptor; and, unhappily, it is preferred in secret by his promised bride,

Rosalie, through jealousy. The story is told with much daintiness, and the character studies are clear and well drawn. The tragic fate of the sculptor is singularly appropriate to a sixteenth-century romance. [Tait, Sons & Co., 12m0, $1.00.]

A book that the children will enjoy is a collection of short illustrated stories by Edward H. House, The Midnight Warning and Other Stories (Harpers, 12m0, $1.25). Among them is a tale of the civil war, and also one about a conjurer and his black art. There is another telling how a little girl saved a street Arab from becoming a thief, and still another with a bull terrier for its hero, but none is more interesting than "A Friend in Need." The same publishers have a novel of the oldfashioned kind, In Summer Shade, by Mary E. Mann (paper, 50 cents). Sweethearts and lovers' quarrels, tears and reconciliations-all of these will combine to make the romantic maiden declare it "perfectly lovely."

The third volume in the new Dryburgh edition of Scott's novels, The Antiquary (Macmillan, 8vo, $1.25), has ten illustrations engraved by J. D. Cooper from drawings by Paul Hardy.

which Balzac's originality of style found full play.Bulwer's What Will He Do with It? (Little, Brown & Co., 3 vols., $4.50) completes the publication of the first group, the Caxton Novels, of the new edition of his works. Each volume has an etched frontispiece from drawings by E. H. Garrett. Bulwer's Novels of Life and Manners will be published next. These will consist of sixteen volumes. Then will follow the Romances in five volumes and then the Historical Romances in ten volumes.

Maori chief, who is separated from her child through her own misconduct.

In The Last Confession (Tait, Sons & Co., 12mo, $1.00) the author, Hall Caine, attempts to solve a moral problem through the medium of an English physician travelling in North Africa and a priest, who acts as his confessor. To those who like a touch of crime in their reading the book will be interesting. This may also be said of Hanging Moss, by Paul Lindau (Appleton, 12mo, $1.00).

From "What will He Do with It?" "No,-THE OTHER, WITH THE DARK EYES."

Two books by Fergus Hume, published by Tait, Sons & Co., have the alluring titles, When I Lived in Bohemia (12mo, illustrated. $1.25) and The Fever of Life (12mo, $1.00). It is doubtful whether the experiences of Mr. Hume's hero will cause a longing desire on the part of the reader to exploit that region where, it is said, artists of all professions do love to congregate. In the second story a strong character study is given in the daughter of a

The author has a considerable knowledge of life in Berlin, although the experiment of making a faithless wife out of the heroine of a tale is more often dangerous than commendable.

A new story by Blanche Willis Howard is always welcome. A Battle and a Boy (Tait, Sons & Co., 12m0, $1.00) furnishes the author with another opportunity to describe the people and their adventures in the countries she has learned to know so well. Many will for the first time make the acquaintance of a "childmarket." The little Tyrolean hero, Franzl, sells himself to a Suabian peasant for fifty marks a year, and as Franzl is a youth full of surprises, all that happens to him during that year of apprenticeship is interesting to adult readers as well as to younger folk.

If Mabel Collins's previous writings have created the impression that she looked favorably upon theosophy, that impression will be removed on reading Morial the Mahatma. The individual who gives the name to this story is represented as a seer, or magician, or adept who has dwelt for centuries in a marvellously beautiful and almost inaccessible fastness in Thibet, and who has always worked his will through the mysterious powers possessed or claimed by him. He attempts to establish a lamasery in London and nearly succeeds; but his wish is thwarted by a wealthy young woman who, although she feels his influence, refuses to lend herself to the trickery which she is able to see through. The destruction of the Mahatma is at length brought about through her defiance and denunciation of him. [Lovell, Gesterfeld & Co., $1.25.]

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RANCIS H. UNDERWOOD, who until recently has been for many years United States Consul at Glasgow, and who is the author of several biographies of New England literary men, has signalized his return to his native country by publishing a book called Quabbin. This is a series of studies and pictures of the intellectual, religious, social and political life of a typical Massachusetts farming village as it appeared sixty years ago. In the preparation of these sketches of the people and their ways, their peculiarities of dialect as well as their modes of thought, Mr. Underwood is undoubtedly drawing upon his recollection of the New England village as he knew it; and his experience abroad enables him to make some suggestive comparisons and hypotheses as to the origin of some of the Yankee customs. He thinks that the New England drawl and nasal tone, instead of being due to the climate, "were probably derived originally from the meeting-house and the prayer-meetings; both defects became fixed by habit, and of course have been greatly heightened by climatic conditions." Some of the changes that have taken place in the manners and morals of Quabbin in sixty years are thus noted: "The returned native may notice these and other things which are not agreeable subjects of meditation; such as flippancy, unknown in earlier times, a disposition to treat sacred themes with a familiar irreverence, a boastful defiance of parents, a derision of the maxims of the elders, a self-sufficiency wholly in contrast with the modesty or humility of the old time, and a chuckling approval of successful sharpness." [Lee & Shepard, 12m0,$1.75.]

The Higher Criticism of the Bible is a phrase that conveys a vague meaning to most minds, if not an erroneous one, although it has come to be so familiar. Professor Briggs is largely responsible for the wide currency it has had in this country, and in his latest volume, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch, he makes clear just what is to be understood by it. The five books of Moses with the book of Joshua form a whole, from a critical point of view, and it is chiefly this part of the Bible over which the battle of the critics has been waged. The problem which Professor Briggs sets before himself in this volume is to inquire, by means of the literary examination of this group, as distinguished from the verbal or textual investigation of it, into the integrity, authenticity, literary form and credibility of the Hexateuch on the same lines of evidence that

were relied upon in the study of classical literature long before biblical critics began to employ them in the study of the Bible. The publication of this volume has a close connection with the recent ecclesiastical trial to which the author was subjected, and it has special significance on that account, as well as from his acknowledged pre-eminence in this field. [Scribners, crown 8vo, $1.75.]

Those who desire to read or to study the elaborate argument which secured his acquittal of the charge of heresy will find it in The Defence of Professor Briggs before the Presbytery of New York. [Scribners, paper, crown 8vo, 50 cents net.]

The great Ice Age and its relation to the antiquity of the human race is one of the most recent questions that has come up in the history of the earth and its inhabitants. It was pretty fully discussed by Professor G. Frederick Wright in a former very widely read volume on the Ice Age in North America." His new work, which is included in the International Science Series, is of wider scope. It is entitled Man and the Glacial Period, and covers the entire subject of glacial action at the present time, the ancient glaciers, their cause and date, and the relics of man in the Glacial Period. The volume is written in an unusually clear and graphic style, and is entirely within the comprehension of the most unscientific reader, while it in no sense departs from strict scientific methods. It is illustrated by more than a hundred maps and engravings. As a popular exposition of a scientific subject it is worthy of the highest praise. [Appletons, 12m0, $1.75.]

The Rev. John Wright's Early Bibles of America has an interest not only for the student of the development of religion in this country, but, to a certain extent, for the bibliophile. The author says that his title is to be understood in a restricted sense. He writes concerning "Bibles that were printed during the existence of the British-American colonies, and others that appeared after the colonies became the United States." The Eliot, the Saur, the Aitken, and other early American Bibles are clearly and simply described, and the story of their production briefly told. The book contains fac-similes of the title-pages of these Bibles, and much valuable information concerning the subject is to be found in the appendices. [Whittaker, 12m0, $1.50.]

An exquisite example of book-making is The Desire of Beauty, by the late Theodore Child; and it is no small praise to the author to say