Recent Literature

WE asked a friend, out of that constant doubt we have of the taste of any one generation, whether the poem, Rose Aylmer (in those Cameos which Messrs. Stedman and Aldrich have selected with so much judgment from the works of Landor), did not probably affect Charles Lamb through his own or his contemporaries' mood, and perhaps by some charm of melody or movement, rather than by the appeal of any veritable poetic substance in it; for otherwise we did not understand his extravagant admiration of it. When our friend answered, No, he did not think so, — he but confirmed our first impression and quite undermined our good opinion of him. It is with the belief that no reader of ours will deal himself a like fatal blow, that we give the poem here.

Pretty, very; very delicate, very graceful, very sweet; but upon the stainless conscience of a book-noticer, nothing more. Yet on this slender diet the good Lamb professes (to be sure, in a letter to the author) to have lived for days ; and an emulous American essayist of like stomach declares to the editors of the Cameos that he did exactly the same thing. In these cases, however, as in those anomalous instances of people subsisting for a long time upon nothing at all, we should like to make sure that some sort of nourishment was not covertly taken ; say that this American essayist had not sustained fainting nature with secret draughts from the Helicon of Percival or of George P. Morris. For in this poem of Rose Aylmer, we do not find even the attenuated nutriment of suggestion; but for the fact given by Landor’s biographer that it refers to a lady of Lord Aylmer’s family, whom he regarded with a very tender sentiment, and who died very young, how could this melodious trifle move one? There are many other fancies in the present book, quite as slight, which have the real poetic life and root; this seems at best but a tuberose blossom skillfully wired for a bouquet. Compare it, coinciding reader, with certain bits of Tennyson or Emerson ; or with such expressions of pure feeling as Longfellow’s Aftermath, and Changed; and its lack appears. Here, we foresee that the lovers of Rose Aylmer, who have been waiting to disable us, will come out with “ Obtuse ! ” and “ Dull-witted ! ” Whereupon we retort that the danger of liking a poet not generally liked is that you fall into willfulness and affectation, and like everything he has done, simply because other people do not. The world, after all, is a wise old head, and does not overlook its good things. It knows which are its most interesting cities and finest mountains; its noblest statues, churches ; its most beautiful pictures ; it also knows which are its truest and greatest poets. Possibly, then, if Landor has been the least enjoyed of his contemporaries, he is really the least of them in genius, and the present fashion of crying out, “ Oh, Landor, — yes, indeed ! ” is only a fashion, after all.

We should say of the present collection, so full of exquisite colors and precious forms, that the value was never so much in the quality of the thought, as in the skill with which it is wrought; and we doubt if any reader coming newly to these gems here, without prejudice in favor of their author, will receive a lasting impression from them. A vague pleasure will remain in his mind, a memory of intellectual delight, a sense of graceful attitudes and gleams of color; but his heart will not have been deeply stirred or often touched, though his fancy will have been constantly charmed, not his imagination, — these little, lovely things are always, we believe, fanciful, and never quite imaginative. The limpid rill of rhyme runs on and presently sparkles into a bewitching conceit, or glows with some brilliant image; but it does not diffuse any strong influence, or haunt the mind afterward with any very fertile thought. One might say indeed that these Cameos were mostly only a more exquisite kind of vers de société some of them hardly rise above the ordinary vers de société; but it must be understood that such verses are of the most difficult to write well. Take this, for example : —

This is deliciously playful and freakish, but it is not more ; and Under the Lindens, which every one knows and loves, is scarcely more. Here is another trifle, elegant, perfect, so finely cut and subtly tinted that it seems the furthest art can go in its way, — which is the way of nearly all the others : —

The opening picture in this is heavenly fair; the closing image is happy enough for a while to lure back one’s youth; but the whole thing is merely a graceful fancy, and all these Cameos—with the exception of some such fine painting as An Evening Picture, and some personal tributes, to Browning, to Julius Hare, to Lamb and others — are conceits, neither more nor less. This gives a certain monotony to the collection, which is relieved by the variety of mood expressed in them, though the mood is hardly ever entirely serious. It is most serious, we should say, in this, which is perhaps less than any other a conceit: —

It is most winningly tender in this hinted drama of passion in a young girl’s heart: —

But an arch gayety is the temper in which most of the pieces are conceived, and with that their touches of melancholy and regret do not discord, of course.

“It seems to us,” say the editors, “ that precisely the amount of benefit which a familiarity with the antique models can render to a modern poet is discernible in the greater portion of our selections. Their clearness and terseness are of the classic mold, but the language, thought, emotion, are Landorian and English.” This is reasonable, and we think all refined readers will be glad of the proof of it in this very fortunate little selection. But a poet, sick and poor, comparatively little learned, and dying very young, could be more Greek in what is worth having, as well as more English, than the rich, well-born, erudite student who died rather obscure at eighty years of age: nearly every line that Keats wrote has affected English poetry since, and we are anxious not to lose a word of his; Landor may be said not to have affected it at all, and we gladly forget whole epics that he wrote. Such trifles as these Cameos will perhaps constitute hereafter Landor’s chief claim to remembrance amongst English poets. He had a real poetic genius, no doubt, but his temperament undid him; he could not or would not see himself in his real relation to things.

Turguénieff wisely says that nothing great is accomplished outside of nationality, that one is great only as one is of one’s own country ; and he might have gone further and said that a man achieves little who refuses to be his own contemporary. Landor was not content to be an English poet of the nineteenth century; he was a dreamer, as great poets never are; he would be a Greek of the polite time of Aspasia and Pericles ; consequently he has not yet found a secure place in the English heart, and the Athenians, besides not knowing English, have been dead so long that they cannot conveniently receive him into theirs.

— The tendency of modern liberalism to ignore the chief of the fallen angels has been one of the most painful spectacles which conservative theologians have had to contemplate; and but for the consoling reflection that these liberals were destined to be very much astonished at the last day, their behavior would have been well-nigh insupportable. Flattered out of all semblance to himself the Evil One has been in his most distinctive characteristics; but it is not merely a question of little personal traits; the horns and the hoofs went long ago, and even that unmistakable evidence of identity, the forked tail, is no more to be found in the demons of our time, than the like appendage which, in our own race, marked a stage of progress from the Ascidian (if the impostor so lately convicted of wearing its dorsal cord in front may be cited in this connection) to the free religionist, is now to be found in people of culture. It is a question of far greater importance, a question of the very existence of the power which had so long frightened mankind into being good, and must thus have been largely instrumental in bringing us to our present millennial condition. This power has been gradually stripped of its attributes ; its force as an active principle has been taken away; and it has been reduced to a purely negative state, relegated to its primordial jelly, its original diabolic nitro-glycerine, as it were. It is in this forlorn situation that Mr. Cranch finds the common Enemy, whom he attempts to rehabilitate to the imagination in his little poem, or libretto, called Satan. The poem is in dramatic or operatic form, and after the overture we hear a chorus of World-Spirits who witness the spectacle of creation and the fall of man, and whom the angel Raphael tells that these events took place in the remote past, and only now reach them

These passages, in which the thought of the poem culminates, present a conception of evil which is perhaps not quite new. All the liberal sects, no doubt, would claim some part of it, and it represents most of the benevolent desire on the subject which moves the world now. New or not, or true or not. it is here very adequately uttered, and will doubtless please people who fancy themselves in no need of a Prince of the Powers of the Air, an arch-enemy and rival of God, a conscious and sentient tempter of men’s souls. It is not our office to pronounce them right or wrong, but only to recognize the artistic success of Mr. Crunch in embodying their opinions. In the minor virtues of musical verse and fine diction, the poem is not less fortunate; though it seems to us that a nobler close would have been in Satan’s closing words, if it could have been contrived to have him appear after and not before most of the dialoguing and chorusing. It might be said for those who consider Satan necessary to the scheme of creation, that even in Mr. Cranch’s rehabilitated figure, there is fearfulness enough, and that whether we call him Devil or call him Disorder, we still have the old serpent among us for all practical purposes,

— H. H. has considerably increased in a new edition the volume of her Verses, noticed in these pages some years ago, and has brought into stronger relief, by the greater number of the pieces, a characteristic which was prominent enough in the smaller collection. There are now about a hundred and forty poems in the book, all of which, save some half dozen, are allegories, parables, or downright riddles. The allowance is large even for a people who like one gravy and a hundred religions. We imagine that the highest office of poetry is to give an elevated pleasure, and sometimes H. H’s verses do this; oftener we suspect ourselves of receiving the elevation without the pleasure. Though a thing may be very wholesome and nutritious, we do not like to be guessing so much what we are eating, and H. H., with her continual allegorizing and parnbling is too apt to say to her reader, —

Wise — that is well enough ; but not all the time, please. Nobody wants an intellectual Sunday every day in the week.

There are two little poems in H. H.’s book worth all its lessons, and one of the two is this — we are not sure whether it is the better of the two: —

Here are first a lovely picture and a fine emotion, then a very subtle poetic thought, springing from a freshly noted and intimate yet universal fact of human experience. This fulfills the office of poetry; but to preach is not poetry’s office. The other poem which we like so much better than all the sermons is one that is more purely sensuous than this ; one may say that it is hardly more than picture and emotion : —

Yet this is something more than picture and emotion ; the true imagination is in it, for the thought of summer stealing back for one more song and dance appeals to something deeper than fancy in us; and by the way, in Poppies on the Wheat, there is in a little space a very pretty exemplification of fancy and imagination.

That is fancy.

That is imagination.

H. H. could not do better than make a study of the fortunate qualities and forms of these exquisite poems.

— In the memoir of his father, Dr. John Warren, Dr. Edward Warren has not only gracefully discharged a filial duty, he has also collected a mass of material with regard to the hardships of the Revolution and the confusions of the succeeding years, which it is always well to have brought up clearly before the minds of the present generation. John Warren was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, July 27, 1753, the youngest of four sons. His father was a prosperous farmer, who died when John Warren was a child; his mother, who seems to have combined all those qualities which now it is customary to call old-fashioned, had the care of bringing him up. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1771, and soon devoted himself, with such meagre aid as he could get, to the study of medicine. In order to practice his profession he went to Salem. The Revolutionary War soon broke out; he saw indeed its very beginnings at Lexington and Concord, and he heard the roar of the cannon at the battle of Bunker Hill. Soon afterwards he offered his services to the government, and was given the charge of the hospital at Cambridge. With the army he went to New York and into New Jersey in the darkest days of the war. In 1777 he was married to a daughter of John Collins, the governor of Rhode Island, and returned to Boston to take charge of a hospital. In this city he remained until his death in 1815, during which time he acquired a large practice, and occupied several positions of honor. The reader derives from the book a pleasing, if not over vivid, impression of the man. After the war came all the confusion about the new molding of society ; everything had to start afresh ; those times were by no means the easy-going days when there was nothing extant but virtue, as we are often told; and we have a good view of much of this turmoil in this volume. Dr. Warren’s claims to notice for his professional success are well known ; in his day, medicine could be studied only with great difficulties, and he was one of the first to help form the present admirable system.

— Most non-believers in Christianity, and a great many professors of it, sneer at foreign missions, — the former because heathen or Moslem nations have not in one day been transformed, the latter perhaps because they do not want to give to them, and so quiet their consciences by saying that “ there is missionary work enough to he done at home.” Neither of these classes of persons s likely to read Dr. Jessup’s book about the Women of the Arabs, but it is a pity that they should not do so. Here we see women at about the point at which they were originally found by Christ, and those who will compare the position of women in heathen and Moslem countries with that which they occupy in Christian, and particularly in Protestant nations, will find it impossible to admit that the civilization and elevation of that sex, as far even as they have gone, are fundamentally due to any other influence than that of Christianity.

To such a comparison the book before us is an excellent help. As regards the social estimation in which women are held in Syria, it is almost sufficient to state that, when a girl is horn, it is the custom for the female acquaintance of the mother to come in and weep and condole with her over her great misfortune, and that “ in most parts of Syria to-day, the murder of women and girls is an act so insignificant as hardly to deserve notice.” The Koran holds out the reward of Paradise to obedient wives, but it declares the superiority of men to women, and commands husbands “ to chide those whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear . . . . and scourge them.” This last injunction, says Dr. Jessup, is “ carried out with terrible severity. The scourging and beating of wives is one of the worst features of Moslem domestic life,” and women are often kicked and beaten to death and " no outsider knows the cause.” The women of the wealthier classes are sometimes taught to read the Koran, but that is the limit of their instruction, Moslem men in general being bitterly opposed to the education of women, and contemptuously skeptical as to their mental capacity, or the possibility of their moral elevation.

Nearly fifty years ago, the first attempts to teach the women and girls of Syria were made in Beirûth by Mrs. Bird and Mrs. Goodell, the wives of American missionaries. These schools were interrupted, and Mrs. Sarah S. L, Smith began the work all over again in 1834, with four scholars. In a letter of hers dated February, 1836, she gives, as Dr. Jessup says, “ a vivid description of the ‘ average woman ’ of Syria of her time, and the description holds true of nine tenths of the women of the present.” But “great changes have come over Syria since that description was written. Not less than twelve high schools for girls have been established since then in Syria and Palestine, and not far from forty common schools, exclusively for girls, under the different missionary societies,” — English, Irish, Scotch, Prussian, Jesuit, and Amer ican. Dr. Jessup gives a list of twenty three girls’ schools, “now or formerly connected with the Syria Mission ” of the American Board. In the British Syrian schools alone there are over fifteen hundred girls. Public opinion in the towns of Syria is undergoing a great change with regard to the value and necessity of educating girls, and one or two Arab women are themselves most eloquently pleading their own cause in this direction.

With so much of exceeding interest and value as there is in this book of Dr. Jessup’s, it is to be regretted that in compiling it he did not more remember that hookmaking is an art also. The middle third of the volume is taken up with tedious extracts from missionary journals, in which dates and places and persons " cross over and figure in ” in the most bewildering manner. Nor can stories of Calvinistic conversions edify those large bodies of Christians who are not Calvinists. To inaugurate a system of education among a wholly degraded and ignorant population is a momentous thing. We confess to a shudder at a course of study for these ignorant daughters of poor and densely ignorant parents which, beside the usual elements, and a knowledge of the principal personages and events in the Old and New Testaments, requires also all the dates belonging to these latter, and verbatim recitations of the Westminster Assembly’s longer and shorter Catechisms, and, for the advanced classes, " Watts on the Mind,” “an abridged work in Moral Philosophy,” and “ the whole of D’Auhigné’s History of the Reformation,” read aloud! What undigested masses must these remain in the intellectual system of the Syrian girls! The Bible, a simple but consecutive history of mankind in narrative form, needle-work, drawing, and singing, and, if possible, some idea of the literature of one language beside their own, should be the superstructure of the “three R’s” for any first generation of educated youths and girls. For their children let the abstractions of theology, philosophy, and mathematics he reserved. Surely, above all men, the foreign missionary should study the German Art of Pedagogy.

— The catalogue of Harvard University, which has just appeared for the second year in its enlarged and improved form, gives the reader a very complete history of what has been done during the year 1872-73, as well as of what is doing in the present. As a manual of information it leaves nothing to be desired ; under the head of the Courses of Instruction, it gives an outline of the work in each department, and in the list of examinations at the end of the book there is set before the reader the means of testing more thoroughly what is required of the students. It would not be easy to find a better method to enable outsiders to get a complete comprehension of the work of the university. Visiting committees do much better in theory than in practice ; they are unable to determine how much the success of a recitation at which they are present is due to the glibness of some few who are unabashed by new faces, or its failure to the embarrassment of the students. The examinations give a fairer test on the whole, and there will he more care given to the preparation of papers when it is known that they are to he exhibited to the public. To get a complete notion, the answers of the students should also be seen, but the public will of course have neither the desire nor the means of taking so much trouble.

There are certain changes in the way of advance in the academical department, hut it is to the law and medical schools that one looks with the greatest interest, for it is in them that the most important improvements have been made. The numbers of the students, one hundred and thirty-eight and one hundred and seventy-five, respectively, are encouraging, and we can be sure that the changes which have been introduced into these two well-known schools will have, before long, the result of modifying for the better the conduct of other professional schools throughout the country.

Graduates of the college will see with interest the modifications made with regard to fhe master’s and doctor’s degrees; we confess it is with some surprise that we find so many candidates for these degrees.

On the whole, the volume marks cautious hut steady improvement, and it well deserves the attention of all the friends of education throughout the country.

Messrs. Harper and Brothers send us their illustrated library edition of Wilkie Collins’s novel, Moonstone; A Princess of Thule, a novel by William Black, author of Strange Adventures of a Phaeton ; Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, a Tale of Australian Bush-Life, by Anthony Trollope; the revised edition of Albert Barnes’s Notes on the Epistles of Paul to the Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians; and William Swinton’s School Composition : being advanced Language-Lessons for Grammar Schools.

From Macmillan & Co., Now York, we have Storm-Warriors, or, Life-Boat Work on the Goodwin Sands, by Rev. John Gilmore; and The Sources of Standard English, by T. L. Kington Oliphant.

We, have also received the following books: From the American Publishing Co., Hartford, The Gilded Age, a Tale of ToDay, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. From A. D. Worthington & Co., Hartford, Ten Years in Washington : Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman sees them, by Mary Clemmer Ames. From J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston, the first volume of George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind. From D. Appleton & Co., New York, The New Chemistry, by Josiah P. Cooke, Jr., Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard University. From Porter and Coates, Philadelphia, In the Days of my Youth, a novel by Amelia B. Edwards. From Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York, A Very Young Couple, by the author of Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal. From Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh, Business, by a Merchant. From J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, An Introduction to the Study of Practical Histology, for Beginners in Microscopy, by James Tyson, M. D. From D. Van Nostrand, New York, Our Naval School and Naval Officers ; a Glance at the Condition of the French Navy prior to the late Franco-German War: translated from the French of M. De Crisenoy by Commander Richard W. Meade, U. S. N. From Jansen, McClurg & Co., Chicago, Landscape Architecture, as applied to the Wants of the West; with an Essay on Forest Planting on the Great Plains, by H. W. S. Cleveland, Landscape Architect.

The æsthetical heretic who has written twelve letters in book-form is a very bitter foe of certain appearances of modern art; in fact, he is a confirmed grumbler : but many of his lamentations are well founded, the general drift of the book is excellent, and one cannot help applauding the manner in which some of the most dangerous and most popular theories of the present time are attacked. Ruskin, alike with his praise and his blame, has been almost without effect on modern art, and, according to our heretic, it is the way in which we let our thinking be done for us, that injures our power of appreciation and comprehension. We read serious books on art, and get from them rules rather than principles ; we adopt their conclusions and consider ourselves cultivated. Hence, he says, in Germany, while music has advanced so far, Thorwaldsen has been declared equal to the ancients, and Cornelius a rival of Michael Angelo. The frequenting of galleries is the favorite antidote to such crudeness of thought and neglect of taste, but, the heretic goes on, the pictures are ill arranged, without regard to the places for which, and for which alone, they were painted, they crowd one another before the spectator’s eye, and how little they serve may be judged from the meagre results they help to produce. We know what we have to admire, and to what extent ; the author contrasts our conventional admiration of what we have learned deserves it, with our uncertainty before anything new. Then comes a letter on the realism of the present time, the effect of a reaction against the classical revival. The general ignorance of what is really artistic makes us admire qualities which it is easier to detect than genuine artistic excellence. Reproductions in miniature inspire the writer of this book to fresh outbursts. What he hopes is that some man may come along, strong enough to break from the misleading theories of nowadays, and able to take up the traditions of the past; who will in spite of opposition make his influence felt, as has been done in literature by Goethe, and in music by Beethoven. A great deal of what this author says is worth reading. Every one will find an attack upon some favorite hobby of his own, but he will also find ample compensation in the abuse heaped upon his sinning neighbors. The following extract may serve to show the author’s manner of writing.

Speaking of the connoisseur, he says, — “ He is the slave of the subject; in Rubens he dislikes the flesh-tints; in a picture of Piloty’s or Gérome’s he is attracted by the story, whether tragic or comic, that it tells. But that is open, above-board interest in the subject. The hidden sort is much worse. In the first place one hunts after ‘ expression,’ then after wit or sentimentality; afterwards art becomes moral, Christian, heathen, or even national, all of which arc things with no importance to art, and which only show that in the plastic arts we are on the same level as were our great-grandfathers with regard to literature when Gottsched and Breitinger disputed whether poetry ought to be allegorical, moral, didactic, or descriptive; all forgetting that poetry should he above all things poetical. . . . . Every great work of art is at the same time both objective and subjective in the highest degree, as Goethe’s Faust or Dante’s Commedia. This subjectivity is the expression, and not the cheap representation of pain, emotion, wrath, devotion, maternal affection, etc., which our modern expression-painters, like Ary Scheffer, conceive in the abstract, and try to give again ad hominem in a concrete form. The joy of the Philistine is certainly great when he has understood the expression or made out the story. That such an expressive figure, however, is no real person, but only the representation of an emotion, a lay figure clothed with certain moral drapery, is of no importance to the Philistine, nor does he care whether the figure which stands before us, frightened, angry, or tender, as the case may be, is represented so that we could easily imagine it under the influence of another emotion, or so that its personality strikes us more than the abstract passion which animates it.”

Then he goes on to point out the evident evil effect such a course must have on the painter who is forever seeking novelty for his pictures, and who loses, moreover, the right method in his search for surprising effects. There is a great deal that is good in the book, besides this, which, to some of our readers, may be old, but the faults it attacks are still older. Any book which tends to make the public capable of forming an opinion that shall be original as well as sound, and not merely the echo of popular rumor, is a book worth reading.

— M. Foncaux, the professor of Sanskrit at the Collége de France, has written an introduction to a readable little book by Mrs. Mary Summer, called Les Religieuses Bouddhistes depuis Sakya-Mouni jusqu'à nos Jours. It will be remembered that Buddhism, although in most respects very tolerant, and notably so in comparison with the religion of the Brahmans, is exceedingly severe in all that it has to say about women According to its complicated theology, no living being, with very few if any exceptions, starts so unfairly in the series of existence tending towards Nirvâna, as does a woman ; her only hope is at some future birth to be born a man. When Buddha became a preacher and went out into the world making converts, he urged the men to retire into monasteries ; about five hundred women, led by his nurse and his former wife, presented him with a request that he establish convents for them. He refused absolutely at first, and in order to escape from them left that part of the country. The women, however, shaved their heads, covered their raiment with dust, and followed him, still urging their prayer, but Buddha still refused to give them the permission they desired; at last he declines giving any answer to their entreaties. On meeting that obstacle they, with some wiliness, approach Ananda, one of Buddha’s favorite disciples, a young man, and persuade him to intercede for them. He is successful and Buddha finally gives his consent. The life in the convent was very similar to what it was in that of other religions bodies. The women were admitted after a novitiate, and the residence within the walls was not very different from that of other convents. There was this exception, however, that married women could enter if they could obtain the consent of their husbands. The principal occupations of the nuns were instructing children, begging, and meditating. For a time all went smoothly, but after a while the laws began to be neglected, the dress of the nuns gradually assumed greater gaudiness, and more or less corruption appeared. At the present time convents are much rarer than they used to be, but they still afford protection to defenseless women. In Birmah, Monseigneur Bigaudet found two Buddhist convents; in one were seventy nuns, in the other about fifty. The women of the country resort to these places as a religious retreat; others again — generally, we are told, women past their youth — shave their heads and wear the peculiar dress of the nuns. With but few exceptions their conduct is exemplary.

In Siam few of the nuns are under fifty years old. They dress in white, observe the commands of the law, listen to daily preaching, and pray for hours in the temples. They also visit the poor and the sick. In China they are less highly praised. Convents are also found in Thibet and Ceylon.

The book itself is interesting ; the introduction by M. Foncaux is the least important part. In it he undertakes to disprove the resemblance so often found between Buddhism and Protestantism; he shows that many of the customs introduced by the Buddhists were exactly those which were the especial objects of the reformers’ attacks ; such were auricular confession, the worship of relies, and the very monasteries and convents we have been writing about. While so far as he goes he is right, it is to be remembered that the points of similarity are much greater and lie much deeper; they are to be found in the various modifications in the way of reform introduced by Buddha into the older Brahman religion, which was for a time supplanted. In each case it was the exaltation of the individual which was accomplished, or perhaps more truly, aimed at. The old system of castes was done away with, and the hold that priestcraft had on the people was weakened. In this way there is a certain amount of resemblance, and M. Foncaux’s argument goes for very little. Still, it is to be said that he acknowledges that Buddhism is a reform; it is the mint and anise and cummin which disturb him; he does not see the weightier matters of the law.

— The end of a notice might seem hardly the place in which to make even tardy mention of a volume by Sainte-Beuve, but the Letters to the Princess are hardly of enough general interest to demand more especial consideration. They are for the most part short, and about little events of the day, the elections for members of the Academy, and such trifling matters. There is but very little light thrown on the writer’s character, except so far as the book shows the kindness of his heart, and the agreeableness of his manner. Some of the gossip of the day must be of interest tor the survivors, but there is little that one of us outside barbarians will care to read.