tions of Napoleon and his Times," while the "Unpublished Letters of Thackeray," which have been printed in the last four numbers, form a literary find of the highest value. ess. The July number of Harper's opens with a very noteworthy article on "A Printed Book," under the general head, “Great American Industries," in which the process of book-making is followed from the setting of the type to the marbling and binding, with illustrations of every proc A glimpse into a life not generally known is given in the well illustrated paper, "Cadet Life at West Point." Charles Dudley Warner's series on "Here and There in the South" is not up in interest to the level of "Their Pilgrimage," except in the matter of illustration. More than a glimpse of African life is given in the richly illustrated article on a central Soudan town. Richard T. Ely, who may be said to be rapidly becoming the leading American writer on social questions, studies in this number "The Future of Corporations," and believes, as do all who think upon the subject, that corporations will be brought into greater subordination to public interest, and that all charters for performing the functions of a natural monopoly will be limited to a brief period, with a reversion of the entire property to municipal, state, or federal government, either without compensation or with compensation at an appraised valuation for actual outlays. The Forum for July has perhaps the most important critique on Mr. George's theories about land which has appeared in any periodical. It is from the pen of Professor W. T. Harris, and shows that Mr. George's proj ect would not enrich at all the laboring-men. Newman Smyth, in retaliation or in reply to the article by Professor Patton, "Is Andover Romanizing?" asks in this number, "Is Princeton Humanizing?" and, as it seems to us, with a sharper satirical blade. Park Benjamin, in considering the infliction of the death penalty, advocates the use of electricity instead of the rope. But about the most interesting, because the most painful, paper in the number is that by the Rev. J. O. S. Huntington on "Tenement House Morality," which shows how impossible it is for the ideal of decent family life, and, therefore, of Christian order, to be realized within the precincts of a tenement house. BOOK NOTICES. HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TOPOGRAPHY. Keats. By SIDNEY COLVIN, in John Morley's English Men of Letters. 12mo, pp. New York: Harper & Brothers. 230. Next to the wonderful boy Chatterton, Keats died the youngest of all the long list of famous poets England has produced, and one of the most lamented. Of humbly respectable birth, orphaned in early youth, with a fair preparatory and medical education, handsome, brilliant, sensitive, pugnacious, yet laughing, laughable, and lovable, Keats was launched upon the world with sufficient inherited income to keep him from poverty, but not enough for independence. There was no recognizable heredity of genius from his ancestry on either side; but his temperament and type of mind, though not manifest in his immediate ancestors, belonged distinctively to his race. The Keats family came from the Cornish coast, where the name, though never eminent, is ancient; and Wales seems to be the original home of the Jennings stock-his mother's line-though it has spread widely. Thus his ancestry was from Celtic roots on both sides, and never was Homer a truer embodiment of the Greek genius, nor Milton of the English, than was Keats of the genius of the Keltic race-the expiring Cornish blood from his father, the ardent, picturesque, and sensuous Kymric-Briton spirit from his mother. Put these elements together into the immature, seven-months first child of a gay, dancing, and consumptive mother, and give him a glimpse of classics and mythology in his education, and then kill him off with an uninspiring, unennobling, yet consuming love, and with consumption, at the early age of twenty-four, and we have all the potential elements for the genesis of Keats, and elements which Mr. Colvin should have brought together into crystallization, as a philosophy and psychology of Keats, but has hardly done so. From this base the very essence of Keats's genius was distilled. The immortal opening sentence of his Endymion crystallizes his whole philosophy of poetry: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Over and over, in both his poems and his letters, Keats proclaimed it the mission of the poet-and so of himself-to be the seer and revealer of beauty to man, and that not, in his ideal, the highest beauty, the beauty of pure, intellectual truth and moral perfection, nor yet the beauty of the affections glorified by communion with the supernatural and infinite, but the sensuous, Celtic conception of beauty, the beauty of the physical man, of physical nature, the physical universe. It is of the very essence of this concept of the beautiful that it is impatient of moral ideals and purposes. It is the outcrop of the ancient nature-worshiping Keltic genius, as shown from all the past in the Gaul, the Briton, the Kymri, the Gael, all saturated with the spirit of that anti-Semitic, anti-Teutonic, earth-and-sense instinct, and æsthetics which are latent in a strain of human blood which has given to the world fighting clans and songsinging bards, battle-painting, ditties and dancing, but to which-in profound unlikeness to the Hebrew and the Germanic races-ethics is constitutionally abominable. Of that deep, and wide-spread, and ancient Keltic root Keats is, for the English-speaking peoples, the final and consummate flower-or, rather, a flower that promised to be consummate could it have matured to perfection. Great poetry can only be read with a large and deep intelligence by the aid of history, ethnology, and religion, as well as that of native sympathetic imagination and cultured taste. The poetry of a nation is the blossoming forth of its inmost life, and not merely of the life of the individual poet. Mr. Colvin would have grasped the ethereal and elusive genius of Keats better had he first used this wider net to catch him in. He has given us a thorough and elaborate biography of the person of Keats, and full sketches of the incidental origin, development, and publication of his poems. He has, indeed, overwrought, as we think, his research among the older and the contemporary English poets for the germs and models of Keats's imitation—as though two poets, like two wild-wood birds, could not warble similar strains without being imitators of each other! All this historical part of Mr. Colvin's Keats is well done, though the style is never vivacious, and some sentences are structurally obscure, and must be read twice to get their meaning. The only real failure of the book is in the last chapter, on the "Character and Genius" of Keats. The character is well sketched, and the reader gets a clear mental image of that. Of the genius he gets none at all, only a nebulous shape "If shape it might be called that shape had none But if Mr. Colvin fails in his attempt to grasp the genius of Keats as an abstract whole, he does not fail to show good analyses of its working in his sketches of the several leading poems as they come along. In fact, these analyses are excellent-the best parts of the book. It is not easy to form a clear and just conception, as a whole, of a genius so airy, and so early blighted, as that of Keats. The profound and luxurious sensuous beauty and express antipathy to all ethical purpose which pervades all his work, makes it, to a great degree, alien to the deeply ethical and Christian Anglo-Saxon mind; and these traits seem almost to justify the application to his whole work of Wordsworth's curt remark concerning his hymn to Pan, in the first book of Endymion: "A pretty piece of paganism!" What would he have said of the "roundelay" on the triumphal progress of young Bacchus through the Oriental world, in the fourth book? But even here, in this unethical and even anti-ethical spirit of Keats's work, is one of the proofs of his power. The dominant spirit in the momentarily fashionable poetry of to-day is this same unethical and anti-ethical spirit—a semi-pagan spirit, the sensuous and untheistic spirit of Keats, though with scarce a tithe of his æsthetic and imaginative power. But it is characteristic of all imitators to copy the copyable—that is, the lowest and weakest features of an original, and never has this principle been more forcibly illustrated than by the thin and sloppy modern Keatsism. But let the imitators of Keats bear in mind the last and highest stage of his moral growth, which Mr. Colvin seems but poorly qualified to understand or interpret. During the last and ever-wonderful two years' development of his ripening genius Keats began to be profoundly cloyed with his own engorgement of sensuous beauty, and to see and often vaguely utter glimpses of the vast ethical mission of art and genius-glimpses that foreshadowed a coming fundamental revolution in his philosophy of poetry. It was a late moral development, characteristic of the moral infancy of his race-stock. But had he lived to ripe maturity, he seems likely to have developed an ethical purpose in his work as profound as that of Milton and Spenser, his chief masters, or that of Tennyson, whose youthful work shows so plainly the tutelage of Keats. As it was, he only lived to give those fragmentary premonitions of the coming revolu tion of his moral and spiritual being which appear in his letters and in some brief poetical passages, and to prove its present reality by making Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying almost the one book of his last months and days before death. Would that our modern Keatses and Keatsism might realize the same ennobling evolution from an infantile and semi-pagan anti-ethicism to the ethical manhood of Christianity and moral obligation! But, studied apart from the ethical want and hunger of man's moral nature-if it is possible to so study any serious literary creation-Keats, with all his early crudities, is the most gifted seer and prophet of natural beauty in English, perhaps in all, literature. Next to the two volume work of Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, revised edition 1867, and the Aldine Keats's Works, edited by the same gifted author, 1876, Mr. Colvin has no doubt given us here the best view of Keats that we have, and one indispensable to a mastery of its theme. The Appendix is useful. The Harpers' part of the work, as publishers, needs no praise. The Captain of the Janizaries. A Story of the Times of Scanderbeg and the Fall of Constantinople. By JAMES M. LUDLOW. 12mo, pp. 400. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1887. Whatever pertains to the "Eastern Question" is "live" matter. This work is an historical romance, of the same general class with those of Jane Porter (Thaddeus of Warsaw and Scottish Chiefs) and Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, etc.), but it is more strictly historical than these, and shedding light upon the livest question of Europe to-day. It is not often that a reviewer has time to read through a work of fiction, but we have read every page of this book, and some of it twice. It is, however, very near to a mistake to call such a work" fiction." The great historical events and characters with which the book deals are too well known, and have been and still are too potential in shaping the world, to be regarded in a fictitious light. The period is the early and middle part of that fifteenth century which closed with the discovery of America. The scene is the wizard realm of all Europe, its south-eastern frontier, where the Old World joins the New, and all lights and shadows blend and dance together. Next in importance to the gift of a new continent to Europe was the loss of what stood for the "Old World," in the fall of Constantinople before the conquering Ottoman Turks, in A. D. 1453. That was the death of antiquity, an event which shook Europe and civilization. It was not, however, the beginning of the Turks' onset on Europe, but far from it. The Turk had conquered almost all south-eastern Europe already. His capital had been at Adrianople eighty-seven years, and the Greek empire, reduced to only Constantinople and its suburbs, was merely an island of Christianity in an ocean of Mohammedan barbarism that rolled from India to Vienna, until at last the surge swept over the island too, and from the Danube to the Ganges all was Islam. Amid the swirl of this inundation lies the story of weird little Albania, standing on her mountains like their crags themselves, and dashing back the ever-rising tide of Moslem invasion for a generation. Even in the soberest history it is a marvelous tale. George Castriot, an hereditary prince of Albania, as a boy, is a hostage at the Turkish court at Adrianople. In violation of hostage law he is made a captive, forced into the corps of the Janizaries (all captive Christian youth), and trained in Mohammedanism, and in all the art of war as practiced by that renowned body that stands in history with the Roman Prætorian Guards, the Egyptian Mamelukes (who were Circassians), and the Russian Strelitzes (shooters), as the four great autonymous military organizations that have ruled great empires. Of this famous ten thousand Castriot becomes the most famous personal soldier, the most sagacious and invincible commander, it ever had; and he is justly ranked by Sir William Temple as one of the seven greatest uncrowned men of history. From his height, as the hero and pillar of the Ottoman empire, the conqueror of every great warrior of his age, recognized even by the Hungarian, John Hunniades, as his master and the peerless soldier of the world, the Albanian patriot and the childhood Christian overmaster the Janizary and the Moslem in him. Then he obeys the call of Albania, quits his last battle-field for the Turk, and flies to his Albanian mountains, there to rule his native rocks, and like them to dash back the myriad hordes of the Moslem, though Constantinople falls and the crescent and scimeter flash to the center of Europe. The Lord Alexander (Iskander-beg, or bey), the name given him by the admiring sultan, is to the Turk, to this day, "a name to conjure with;" the most marvelous name for valor, military genius, and soldierly honor known in Turkish story, despite his treason, as they viewed it. He defeated the Turks in twenty-two pitched battles, always against superior numbers, often four to one, and was never beaten in battle except by his own planning in his last fight for the Turks-that with |
