Recent Literature

IN John Worthington’s Name, Mr. Benedict has quite made good the promise of his earlier novels. He has always given proof of considerable painstaking in his writings, but only too often they bore traces of an inability to free himself from the conventional framework of incidents which goes to make a plot. In this novel, however, he has struck out for himself, has chosen a very interesting plot, and set before us some real human beings instead of the rather shadowy creatures of his other stories. Indeed, the problem he selected, which in the main is the conduct of a woman who by thoughtlessness has got herself into very perplexing difficulties, is one very well calculated to baffle the ordinary writer of fiction. It would not be fair to tell the story, but a few words to illustrate what we are about to say of the book may not be out of place. The heroine, Mrs. Marchmont, is a spoiled beauty, the widow of a rich man whom she did not marry for love, and now her only interest is in keeping a prominent position in society; she likes her notoriety for beauty and extravagance, and by her carelessness she has got herself into debt. The most disagreeable part of this business is that she has authorized a Wall Street speculator to invest some money for her, which he has lost, and he presumes upon his claim of creditor to insult her with his attentions. She can only rid herself of him by the payment of her just dues, a tolerably large sum, and to raise this she is led to forge the indorsement of a friend of hers to a note which she gives the money-lender, he promising not to let it go out of his hands. The evilminded speculator manages to get it into his possession. Here our disclosure ceases; we shall try to be more honest and not let any more of the secret get out of our hands. There is novelty and a great deal of ingenuity in this plot, but there is something much better in the way it is told. Mrs. Marchmont, especially, is really admirably done. It is not every one who can in the first place describe intelligibly a fascinating woman, and there are even fewer who can go further and set one before us with all her hopes and wishes, and arts and ways. This Mr. Benedict has done with commendable success. His heroine is clever and her bonmots are given; she is cleverer than all the men, and they accordingly wither before her in turn; she is very beautiful, and her beauty is well described; her wiles, too, are very different from the monotonous, cat-like manners which even Charles Reade manages to see as plainly as he sees flaws in the convict-system or in the management of mad-houses; they are, rather, the far astuter ways of being honest and sincere, and saying what she really means, which, being mingled with a great deal of nonsense, is perfectly successful in confusing every one.

The way in which she was led into her troubles is so well told that we sympathize with her instead of condemning her folly, and her bravery in it all, even in very trying scenes, is what we cannot help admiring. Everywhere she is a lady; in spite of the folly of her fashionable life she is always that. We are interested in her every time she appears; very often she is represented battling against some of the meshes which are entangling her more and more at every step, and the reader cannot lay the book down ; and at the culmination of it all, — those who have read the novel will know what we mean, and those who have not would do well to set about finding out at once,—we find no lack of power on the part of the writer. He has all his characters well in hand there as elsewhere. It is a very well drawn scene, and it is well drawn on account of its simplicity, and the absence of any attempt at fine writing. We sympathize with the characters, wherever they appear, because we understand them; and this we do because the author understood them in the first place, and so knew how to put them before us like human beings.

It is not exaggeration to say that there is as much material as goes to making three fourths of ordinary novels in the rest of the story, which concerns itself with the love-making of Kenneth Halford and Milly; the young woman is by no means uninteresting, but her adventures grow very pale by the side of those of Mrs. Marchmont. This part, however, is cleverly woven into the rest, and the growth of this second heroine is well and sympathetically told. By no means the worst part of this clever novel is the ingenious treatment of the distinctly secondary characters. Mrs. Remsen, the astute matron, is well done; so too is Mrs. Marchmont’s companion ; clever, also, is what little we see of the ill-mannered, sour-tempered Maud. There is occasionally a little exaggeration in the absurdity of some, notably of the frivolous young men, but we would not insist on this; exaggeration here is something nearly impossible.

On the whole, this is a very readable novel, and it deserves especial mention because it shows such marked improvement on the part of the author ; there is nothing more welcome than this. A little care would have corrected some obvious misprints, and a few faults of style into which Mr. Benedict has occasionally fallen. Most of them, however, will escape notice, as would much worse ones, in the really absorbing story. We hope Mr. Benedict will not let this novel stand as high-water mark with him; we shall anxiously expect a successor which shall be even better than John Worthington’S Name.

— Mr. Underwood’s book is rather a picture of life in Kentucky than a novel, though there is a love story in it too ; and a good deal of exciting incident. The scene is altogether in that State, and the time is thirty or forty years ago, so that we have a social condition portrayed which is purely Southern and feudal. It is an incalculable gain to humanity that this condition has ceased, but it is an almost equal loss to fiction ; for it is safe to say that we shall never again see a phase of civilization so apt to the novelist’s purposes. It all appears in Mr. Underwood’s story, sometimes with sketchy and sometimes with elaborate treatment. We have the kidnapped freedwoman and her many-fathered children, whom the unhappy accident of an unusual education render susceptible, in their return to slavery, of an anguish that the common slaves could never know; we have the various house-servants, old and young, whose presence makes every suggestion of a Southern household so picturesque, — affectionate, subtle, simple, dishonest, faithless, devoted; and we have in contrast to these the other basis of society, poor whites, living in a sort of fierce, lawless servility to the rich slaveholders about them, with whom a common propensity to shoot offending objects at sight gives them a savage equality. Then amongst the baronial class we have the rival great families, entangled in old vendettas, with alternate appeals from the rifle to the law, and from the law to the rifle. This class, with all its faults, has the virtues of magnanimity, courage, open-handedness, and the stately grace which, if its quaintness makes us smile a little in the dapper ease of our modern social life, is undeniably a grace that we lack. The worst of the aristocratic virtues and graces always is that they cost too much ; they are cursed by the suffering and shame and degradation of a whole nether world ; and Mr. Underwood lets us see very plainly the cruel expensiveness of the obsolete Kentuckian gentility. He paints that by-gone society from thorough familiarity with it, and from a just sympathy with all its good points.

We will not spoil the pleasure of novelreaders who care for plots by unfolding the story ; but we will ask them to note, when they come to it, how well-done is the little neighborhood shooting-match between Beauchamp Russell and his Cracker enemies ; and we bespeak their appreciation of the rough and vigorous painting of a Cracker house in the Kentucky woods. These poor whites seem to us the most artistically managed people in the book; their dialect is faithfully caught, and the grotesque squalor of their life is graphically sketched. The most interesting of the gentry is the uncle of the hero, whose queer misanthropy seems proper to the time and place, and whose philosophy of life is amusing; it is observable, too, that he returns to a friendly interest in mankind without becoming silly, as your misanthrope is apt to become in novels The old villain of the book is also well enough as villains go ; and there is no want of lifelikeness in any of the people — not, at least, till they take to journalizing to help out their story. Mainly the story is pleasantly told, with an agreeable flavor of the older fashion of novel-writing; but Mr Underwood sacrifices his narrative again and again to his own wish to say certain things and develop certain doctrines of life which might have been better reserved for a separate work. However, you are not obliged to read these passages : you may recur to these after you have finished reading the story, if you like, though they break up more and more a narrative that without them would tend to fall into not strongly sequent scenes and incidents. But taking the book with its faults, it is one that we read with entertainment, and a pleasure all the greater from our sense of the author’s own earnest interest in writing it

— Mr. Proctor’s books have ceased to suggest astronomical problems; they are provocative of psychological investigations. Sir Thomas Browne says, “ The world I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast my eye on ; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.”It is the microcosm of our author’s frame that we are forced to cast our eye on, and we behold him turning not only the “world” but the whole universe, not for recreation, but to make a book. It is impossible not to take an interest in the operation ; it is the goodnatured interest which every Anglo-Saxon feels in the highwayman who stops him and jauntily demands his pence; he delivers and rides on, half indignant at the extortion, but wholly curious as to a manner of life, and of getting a living, so novel.

It must be admitted that Mr. Proctor has done the literature of science great services. One of his earliest books (we believe his very first) was Saturn and his System, which was admirable in every way. Above all things it was thorough, as far as its scope allowed it to be; and it was at once attractive to the general reader, and valuable for its well-compiled statistics and for tables and drawings due to Mr. Proctor himself.

This book was a success, as it deserved to be, and it led its author (as too candid biographers have told us) to attempt to earn a large sum of money by writing similar books. The titles of these are well known, and are an index to the rather sensational character of the books themselves: The Sun, Ruler, Light, Fire, and Life of the Planetary System; Other Suns than Ours; The Orbs around Us; Other Worlds than Ours, etc.

The contents of these books confirm the evil prognostic of their titles. The same subjects arc treated over and over again in quite a wearying way; so that our ears ring with stories and guesses about meteors, comets, colored suns, Mars and Jupiter, and the like.

Amid all this trash appeared one very excellent book, The Moon, which like Saturn and his System is an exhaustive treatise from the author’s point of view. It is not too much to say that there are very few men now living, who have the requisite knowledge, and the still rarer tact for stating it, which the making of this book required. It is the best popular exposition of rather hidden truths since Herschel.

Yet this book is succeeded by The Borderland of Science, and in rapid succession by the two now before us. We begin to see that Mr. Proctor will write, whether well or ill it matters little.

If it were a purely literary venture, it could be left to its fate, and pure justice would be done. But Mr. Proctor’s case is not so simple ; he represents himself as a teacher of the masses and as having high ideals in science, and he speaks with a certain authority on account of his known work in astronomy itself. He says, “ I have invented the only true way of mapping the stars” (be it noticed that Mr. Proctor is not too modest), “I have discovered star-drift and have made some interesting predictions which Huggins subsequently verified. I have enunciated the only true theory of Jupiter ; I have invented the true principle of star-gauging ; I have the only true theory of the universe; I have overthrown the Astronomer-Royal with regard to the transit of Venus ; therefore, O public, buy my authoritative books.”

But on the other hand, he says by his books, although he does not mean to say it, “ I will trade on this reputation and this solid work of mine; I will write up. things from the Cyclopædia; I will write about Colored Suns, about the Queen of Night, about the Ringed Planet, about the Prince of Planets, about the Ruddy Planet, about Ghosts and Goblins, about Comets and Visitants from the Star-Depths, about these same depths ‘ astir with life,’and in general about heaven and earth and all that therein is.” For him the time is always come

“ But for fear these things may pall upon you, O public, and because Mitehel’s Astronomy of the Bible is out of print, I will write for you a highly moral and a religious book which I will call The Expanse of Heaven, whose chapters shall commence with a text from Holy Scripture, whose paragraphs shall each contain a line (or more) from Milton, in which the consideration of each topic shall be appropriately closed by an (original) exhortation to the Most High, and which shall be of no value whatever to any living soul. This I will procure to be published, and as it is religious I will vend it at two (currency) dollars per volume. I must ask you politely yet firmly to stand and deliver.”

This, we say, is amusing, but it is also sad; it sets us to thinking. Why should it not be possible for Mr. Proctor’s great talents to be usefully employed on real labor ? Why should he feel obliged to join feeble essays and loose description to thorough work ?

One of the great European astronomers said of him, Why do not the English people put him in an observatory and restrain him from writing essays on the Fire, Light, and Ruler of the Earth ? ”

Some of Mr, Proctor’s good work is contained in the latter half of The Universe and the Coming Transits.

His unfortunate difference with the Astronomer-Royal has given a factitious importance to the discussion of the selection of stations for observing the transit of Venus in 1874, but this difference, out of which Mr. Proctor has made a great deal of capital, was largely in a matter of words. The Astronomer-Royal made it a fundamental principle not to consider stations in such places as were not accessible at all times of the year; and Mr. Proctor’s desired stations were on the Antarctic Continent, where a stay of about, a year would be entailed upon the observers, during the major part of which time they could not be reached by vessels.

Hence, setting aside other differences, the Astronomer-Royal and Mr. Proctor could not have agreed ; and in fact they did not agree, and the present book is a statement of Mr. Proctor’s position. It is composed of reprints from the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and comprises much of only transitory importance, as well as some valuable maps and discussions.

Mr. Proctor succeeds in these discussions in making his meaning clear, and in convincing the reader that his points are (from his point of view) extremely well taken. The half geometrical form of his reasoning is well adapted to the subject, and here, as in all cases where Mr. Proctor consents to reason carefully, he appears to very good advantage.

The Essays on the Universe in the first half of the same volume are reprints from English magazines, and are usually interesting. Some of them are accompanied by valuable maps which illustrate the distribution of nebulas clusters, etc. But in reading them, one is at once struck with the fact that parts of them sound familiar, as if they had been read before; and an examination shows that whole pages of quotations are given here for the second time at least. It would be interesting to know how many times Mr. Proctor has quoted from Richter a passage descriptive of the flights of a soul through space.

Lovers of Mr. Proctor’s recent style of writing have no cause to be dispirited, however, for it is unofficially understood that he is soon to publish his lectures in America, and a book of reminiscences — a kind of ” People I have met ” book. But all lovers of thorough work in literature or science or life will regret that circumstances keep so talented and industrious a writer from that earnest work which alone is worth doing, and which alone is of any lasting value.

—Dr. Maudsley’s work, Responsibility in Mental Disease, is, barring a couple of points which we shall note, admirable as a popular account of the diseases the human mind is heir to, and deserving of its polyglot destiny in the International Scientific Series. Our first cavil is that the accomplished author is somewhat tediously querulous with the “ theological” and “metaphysical ” way of looking at things, which figure throughout, as if the neck of humanity were still under their foot and the yearly holocaust of human victims had to be handed in. We can only account for Dr. Maudsley’s surliness by supposing it to be based on some harsh personal experiences of his youth. These are known often to leave idiosyncrasies of feeling behind. Our second objection is relative to the main thesis of the book, which we cannot consider the author to have conclusively vindicated. He thinks that American legal decisions, as being more merciful than British ones where possible insanity was involved, have been in advance of the latter; that no act which is a product or offspring of mental disease can be criminal; that a partial “monomania” should shield the wrong-doer from ordinary punishability, even where the crime seems to have no logical connection with the mental disorder ; and that “ It is truly a strange piece of irony to exact perfect controlling power in a disease the special character of which is to weaken the will and increase the force of passion.” We hold that the punishment of the insane is after all a matter of public policy, to be decided by many other considerations than the psychological one which Dr. Maudsley has alone considered, namely, whether the subject have flexibility of choice enough to make him properly “accountable” to us for his deeds. This criterion we admit to be ably treated by the doctor; but unable, in this place, to expatiate further on the subject, we may say that Dr. Hammond, in his pamphlet published last year on Insanity in its Relations to Crime, seems to us to have taken a truer, if a less merciful view.

The last chapter in Dr, Maudsley’s book, on The Prevention of Insanity, is the most original and valuable. Much has been written of late on the hygiene of the mind, but for a certain depth of intuition and vigor of expression, we remember nothing comparable to this chapter. It is a pity it should not be reprinted as a tract, and dispersed gratis over the land. The first factor in the production of mental disease is the hereditary factor. Second in causative importance comes, according to the author, intemperance. “ If the hereditary causes were cut off, and insanity thus stamped out for a time, it would assuredly soon be created anew by intemperance and other excesses.” But as men cannot be expected to abandon their excesses at a stroke, it is to the slow education of the race that we must look for relief. “ There can be no doubt that in the capability for self-formation which each one has in greater or less degree, there lies a power over himself to prevent insanity. Not many persons need go mad, perhaps,—at any rate from moral causes,— if they only knew the resources of their nature, and knew how to develop them systematically.” Accordingly the author sketches his ideal of what should be aimed at. We cannot mar it by short extracts, but will merely say that while Dr. Maudsley’s professed criterion of excellence in character is the evolutionist one of “ harmony ” with the world, he lays immense stress in his conclusions upon inward consistency of thought and action, with selfdevelopment as an aim, and indifference to outward fortune as a riding mood. These conclusions are no doubt true, though it may be doubted whether a rigid and adequate logical bridge to them from the premised harmony with the universe has yet been built. A great Roman emperor said : “ O universe, whatever harmonizes with thee is harmonious with me ! ” The “adjustments” and “correspondences” of the Spencerian philosophy were not in his mind, but the indifference to fortune which Dr. Maudsley preaches, and the firm serenity which more than anything else a consciousness of one’s consistency will give, were alike features of his moral ideal. Moralists need not be anxious when the most advanced positivism comes to practical conclusions that differ so little from those of the “ metaphysically ” minded Marcus Aurelius.

— In the memoirs of H. F. Chorley we see a man of inborn artistic sensibility, highly cultivated, widely appreciative, and possessed of some real power of insight into the characters of those people more distinguished in the world’s eye than himself, whose fame is to give value to his reminiscences of them. Not the least excellent trait in him is the perfectly unaffected, unembittered humility with respect to himself, that is apt to show itself in a mind of sensitive fibre which has experienced the longing to create — whether successful in creation or not. For Chorley was something of a poet and novelist, as well as critic; and was born with a quick apprehension for music, which would doubtless have gained him renown as a composer, had it been assisted early enough, and which, as it was, made him the chief authority of his day in English musical criticism. On terms of intimacy with Dickens, Browning, Thackeray, Mendelssohn, he received from the first two the warmest praise of his novel of Roccabella, and his drama, Duchess Eleanor (first brought out with Miss Cushman in the part of the heroine). He was also the author of certain ballads (both words and music) which met with approval from musicians. Yet, as an artist, he never achieved a general and lasting support from the public, such as he must have desired. “ I cannot call to mind a writer more largely neglected, sneered at, and grudgingly analyzed, than myself,”he writes, in reviewing his career ; but he accepts the destiny gently, attributing his failures in great measure (and no doubt rightly) to his fearless and strictly discriminating fulfillment of his duties as critic to The Athenæum. This discrimination, however, apparently never degenerated into savageness; a quality frequently confused with it, as we have opportunity for observing in the conduct of at least one soured periodical in this country. “ Enthusiastic in expressing his admiration of whatever approached the high standard by which he judged,” writes one of his friends, “ he was especially severe in censuring all that he deemed false.”

His power of appreciation seems to have been remarkably various, though always consistent with the most firmly-fixed principles of taste, He was apparently wise and clear in his distinction of feeding from sentiment ; placed Beethoven among the men distinguished for the former, as opposed to Mozart, — chief among musicians of sentiment,— who, he thought, “provided for the average sensations and sympathies of mankind, rather than enlarged the number of these; ” and on the same principle preferred Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese, to Raffaelle. These preferences, however, could not deter him from a perfectly patient estimate of the respective worth and proper position of all who have gained distinction or popularity in art. His delicate and skillful analysis of Strauss’s waltzes, and his enthusiasm over their beauty, illustrate the genuineness and catholicity of his taste, and are of a piece with his gentleness in recording the insolent conduct toward himself of the surly old banker-poet, Rogers,— with his quick justice to Sydney Smith, for having allowed a good anecdote to be corrected, in which he had unwittingly distorted facts, — and with his chivalrous loyalty to Lady Blessington, in time of false report and covert attack upon her. With all this it is curious to see how at last

he goes wrong in some judgments upon Hawthorne’s character; and it would be distressing, were it not more amusing, as showing how, with all his critical charity and long culture, he had yet not been able to get rid of that instinctive sense of superiority to all other nationalities which has long made Englishmen so intolerant toward Americans, and still clouds their understanding of us. Chorley had been the first in England to greet the Twice Told Tales and Mosses; and on Hawthorne’s arrival at Liverpool (where the critic had lived in youth), sent the romancer a letter “referring him,” as he says, to certain cultivated people there (it would not have been out of place, except that Chorley’s friends were English and therefore superior to any possible American, to have asked Hawthorne’s leave to introduce some of them to him, instead of“referring him” to them) “in case he should Stand in need of society, . . . totally apart from the tinseled folly of lionism,” The author, however, made no demonstration in response; and it was only when he got safely away from Liverpool that he wrote to Chorley, in London. They then met, and Chorley’s impressions seem to have been agreeable “ of a man genial and not over sensitive, even when we could make merry on the subject of national differences,” . . . But all this was reversed when Our Old Home appeared; and insult added to injury, it would seem, when the English Notes were printed. “The tone of these English journals,” says Chorley, “is as small and peevish as if their writer had been thwarted and overlooked, instead of waited on with hearty offers of service,” etc. This must certainly amaze all American readers; for, unless we are strangely in error, the impression gathered by them from all Hawthorne’s writing about England is one in great measure composed of fond retrospect upon that country, and we should never have suspected him of peevishness, since the evidence is so complete of a cordial reception from the English, and of hearty enjoyment of that reception by our romancer. He did not, however, find it necessary to divest himself of his peculiar personality, in token of gratitude, nor conceive of such a thing as being denied the right to publish his individual American impressions. This was fatal, so far as Chorley was concerned. But another generation of the English will probably, before its maturity, grow up to some glimmering perception of the right which Americans will surely continue to exercise, of visiting England and enjoying hospitality there without abandoning their personal or national character; even as the typical Briton is wont to inspect all quarters of the earth and pronounce judgment thereon in no timid language.

After all, Chorley’s strictures upon Hawthorne are more troubled than violent. Not even in this case had his fine critical instinct relaxed its hold upon his mind. He does not treat the New England romancer’s delinquency with priggish or pragmatic, certitude, but is disappointed at what seems to him an undeniable inconsistency in “ a man so great and real.”We can still learn from him the value of that thoughtful, trenchant, often brilliant criticism which he studied and practiced as an art: criticism which, while perfectly decided in censure, seeks and dwells on the best traits in any work, rather than its defects; the only criticism which will ever correct had art or cultivate genuine appreciation in the public mind.

—Professor Bascom’s performance comes up to its promise, and in this respect is superior to Taine’s ambitious History of English Literature, thwarted as that is by futile and often unfitting theory. But the division of the book into lectures will deny it that supremacy of literary composition found in Taine’s work, and still more preeminent in Emerson’s masterly chapter on Literature, in the English Traits. Nevertheless, Mr. Bascom cooperates with Lowell, Reed, and Whipple, in proving that English literature meets with an appreciation from American critics which is not the least subtle or comprehensive accorded it. The philosophy of its history which he aims to present is summed up thus: “ The æsthetical impulse, or the element of form, is predominant in literature, and the more so as long periods are taken into consideration ; and a controlling force, giving character to the literary effort of any period, is found in the ethical nature.” We have three periods outlined: the initiative, that of Chaucer; the first creative, or Elizabethan ; the second creative, embracing Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth, as the leading and formative ones. Between the first and second creative periods is the transitional epoch of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson. The fostering forces upon which each of these depended for its development are carefully and clearly sought for and examined; and the whole presentation is distinguished by criticism at once close and comprehensive. Not the least excellent trait of the author’s philosophy, however, is his admission that some things do not admit of complete explanation. The sudden preeminence of a man like Chaucer, in a time like his, and the long retrogression after him which proved to have been leading up to Shakespeare, are processes in national development as mysterious as the unconscious cerebration maturing thought in an individual; and such processes Professor Bascom does not profess to unravel. The great-man question, naturally, brings him into sharp conflict with Taine, and he makes some good points in his argument. In concluding the discussion, “ The truth would seem to be,” he says, “that, setting aside foreign forces often very influential, a nation’s growth ... is determined by external conditions of soil,

. . . by constitutional character and general cultivation, accumulated and transmitted, . . . and by individuals. Which of these three is the more controlling it may not be easy to decide, nor do they always maintain toward each other the same ratios of force.” External conditions he thinks, on the whole, are decisive only in incipient stages of growth, and then as to direction rather than as to degree of activity. Men of genius, “ in so far as they transcend the national type,” remain unexplained. “All that is really additive is due to the individual, while preservation, continuity, the conditions of increase, come from the nation.” And the efficiency of a man of genius “ is due more to what he brings to the common stock of qualities, than to these stock-qualities as held by him.” He points to Johnson as tending to confirm national traits by his vigorous embodiment of them. And we who have the beginnings of a literature under our eyes, seeing how difficult it is for men composing in an atmosphere still reverberating with the utterance of masters, can sympathize with this American critic who feels so strongly the tremendous and almost appalling influence of great imaginative minds on the literatures of their countries. Still, we are not at all sure that he uses the right word when he characterizes the growth and influence of genius as “ supernatural.” The chapter devoted to the novel and newspaper has a healthy tone ; the classification of novels into pictorial and ethical, with various subdivisions and combinations of is exceedingly good, — much better than any which Dunlop, with his two thick volumes on the history of fiction, has been able to devise. A concise account of English philosophy concludes the volume. The volume, as a whole, is eminently clear and sound, and hardly likely to mislead or confuse any one. It is adapted to the wide diffusion of views not merely coldly correct, but intelligent, flexible, and appreciative. Its conciseness will, we imagine, make it very valuable as an initial tractate to students.

— If it be allowed us to draw a rash conclusion, we should say that the great success of Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean augurs well for the future of Scandinavian literature. There can be nothing more disheartening to an author than the consciousness of having a small public; and the fact that this work has found so large a sale in Sweden, as well as in Norway and Denmark, seems especially significant, as promising a speedy end to that provincialism and narrow separatists feeling which so long has cramped the activity of Scandinavian authors. In addition to this we are glad to see that the poet has adopted the modified spelling recommended by the Linguistic Congress in Stockholm (1870 or 1871), the object of which is the approximation of the two, or (if any one chooses to call them) three, different languages.

Emperor and Galilean is, according to the title-page, an historical drama, and is divided into two parts, each of which is a five-act play. It is thus neither a trilogy nor an ordinary drama, and in fact defies all attempts at classification. Nevertheless we think we are justified in dealing with it as a drama, although it is evident that the author never intended it for stage representation. The hero is Julian the Apostate, and, as might be expected, the theme, varied through all the ten acts, is the mutual relation of Christianity and Paganism., Whoever is acquainted with Ibsen from Brand and Duke Skule, and knows what vast forces lie has at his command, what hidden recesses of the human heart have opened at his bidding, will be in a way prepared for those swift flashes of thought and that power of characterization which especially distinguish the first part of the present work, while he will be no less disappointed at the lagging action and the lack of dramatic skill which seem to us so apparent in the second.

In the first act we find Julian at the court of the Emperor Constantius, where every step of his, every word and action are watched by a thousand suspicious eyes, He is a youth of a mobile and impetuous character, at heart still sincerely a Christian, but with a keen consciousness of his own strength and an ardent desire to test it. A meeting with the sage Libanios, whom he has hitherto detested as the arch enemy of Christianity, decides him to go to Athens in order to make himself acquainted with the wisdom of pagan Hellas, and thus be enabled to “ beard the lion in his den.” The second act finds him in Athens, a wild young sage who under the mask of external gayety hides a soul of fire. The cruel and shameful deeds of the emperor, of his own brother Gallus, and other nominal Christians, fill him with doubt and horror, while the joyousness and splendor of the old faith appeal with ever-increasing fervor to his youth, and the poetic sensibility of his nature.

“ Was not Alcibiades beautiful,” he exclaims, “ when, hot with wine, like a young god, he stormed through the streets of Athens, at the hour of midnight ? Was there not beauty in his defiance, when he Scoffed at Hermes and hammered at the doors of the citizens ? Was not Socrates beautiful in the symposium ? And Plato among the happy, reveling brethren ? And still they committed things for the sake of which yonder Christian swine would swear themselves away from God, if they should ever he accused of the like. . . . And look at the Holy Scriptures, both the old and the new ! Was the sin committed in Sodom and Gomorrah beautiful ? . . . Oh, as I live this life of storm and revelry, I often wonder if truth can be the enemy of beauty.”

In this last sentence, we think, the problem is clearly stated ; and again, further on, as his friend Bazil bids him search the Holy Writ, it is even more pointedly defined. “ The same answer of despair. Books ! books ! Stones for bread ! I cannot use books. It is life I am hungering for, a life face to face with the spirit. Was Saul made a seer by a book! Nay, it was a flood of light which poured down upon him.”

The guide to this life of the spirit he believes to have found in the mystic Maximos, whose arts remind us rather too forcibly of the spirit manifestations of to-day. Whether the mysticism of fifteen hundred years ago was so nearly akin to the spiritualism of our own age, we do not know; but in this, as in numerous other instances, we cannot conquer the suspicion that the problems of the nineteenth century are speaking somewhat too plainly through the mouth of the royal apostate.

“ I know all that has been written,”he passionately exclaims, “ but that is not the truth revealed in flesh. Dost thou not feel a qualm and a loathing, like a man on board of a ship in a calm, tumbled about between life, scripture, pagan wisdom, and beauty ? There must come a new revelation, or a revelation of something new. There must, I say, — the time is ripe ! ” That the simile with ship in a calm is very inadequate, we shall not dwell upon, but if the wants of aesthetic Athens in the year 360 were so nearly the same as those of æsthetic London or æsthetic Boston in 1874, and if those Hekebolioses and Libanioses and Bazils were merely Beechers, Conways, and Matthew Arnolds in Greek costume, then we should feel tempted to say that history is repeating itself. On the whole, Ibsen has occasionally allowed his zeal to run away with him, and has then treated his subject as a dogmatist rather than as an artist. But the reader will be ready to forgive him this when, as is frequently the case, his dogmatism rises to the grandness of inspired passion. Thus Julian addresses his orthodox friend Bazil : “ What ye in thralldom hope for behind death, that it is which it is the end and aim of the great mystery to obtain for all, consciously, in this earthly life. . . . Why so doubting, ye brethren ? ... In every passing generation there has been a soul in which the pure Adam has been renewed; he was strong in Moses, the lawgiver, he had the power to lay the world at his feet in the Macedonian Alexander, he was almost perfect in Jesus of Nazareth. But lo, Bazil, they all lacked what has been promised unto me — the pure woman.”

And again : —

“ This flesh-bound race shall perish. That which is to come shall he conceived of the spirit rather than of the body. In the first Adam there was equilibrium as in yonder statue of the god Apollo. Since then there has been no equilibrium. . . . Ye call yourselves believers, and have still so little faith in the revealing power of the miraculous. But wait, and ye shall see. The bride shall surely be given unto me, and then hand in hand we shall wander toward the east, where they say that Helios is being born — into the solitude we shall wander, hide ourselves, as God hides himself . . . and then — O glory—thence shall a new generation spring, and shall go forth in beauty and harmony over the earth. There, ye scripture-chained doubters, shall the empire of the spirit be founded ! ”

This lofty confidence in his own destiny has been inspired by the teachings of Maximos. But Julian does not rest satisfied with merely declaiming ; no sooner does he feel the imperial crown upon his brow than he sets about remodeling the world, so as to prepare it for this “ kingdom of the spirit.” Ami this is the theme of the second part of the drama. He immediately gathers the sages and philosophers of the world about his throne, rebuilds the temples of Jupiter and Apollo, reintroduces the bacchanalia, and sincerely tries to revive all that he regards as good in the old Greek paganism. Christ had preached life through death, Julian was to establish life within life. But he forgets that the thing he is attempting to revive is already a corpse. The first suspicion of this seems to dawn upon him, as he returns from the bacchanalia, where as a vine-wreathed Bacchus he has ridden through the streets of Constantinople.

“ Was there beauty in this ? ” he asks. " Where were the aged men, with the white beards, where were the pure virgins with the fillets about their brows, with the chaste gestures, coy amid the gladness of the dance ? Fie, ye harlots! Whither has beauty fled ? Cannot the emperor bid her arise, and shall she not then arise ? Fie on this stinking lewdness! What countenances ! All vices cried out of these distorted features ! ” He has begun his reign with the declaration that no man should be persecuted for his faith ; but as one of his hopes falls after the other, and the Christians in their zeal tear down the temples, he soon comes to regard them as the real cause of all his misfortune. The sages, whom he once revered, show the same jealousy, hypocrisy, and avarice, as those who are unacquainted with the sublime doctrines of the academies, and the ragged gown and uncombed beard which made Diogenes a demigod to succeeding generations have made him the clown and the laughing-stock of his own people. It is disheartening to trace this downward course of the same hero, whom in the first part we could not but love in the midst of all his hallucinations, If we have understood the author aright, it is really the lurking doubt, the lack of faith in his own mission, which makes Julian plunge deeper and deeper into the magic and mysteries of Oriental nations. It is only the despair fostered by a hidden doubt which can drive an otherwise sane mind into deeds like those that mark the latter part of the reign of the Apostate. One of his first attempts to defy the Galilean is to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem; but an earthquake and fire hinder the undertaking. With admirable psychological insight is the development of the character traced; but the endless discussions are exceedingly undramatic, and unduly retard the action. Sometimes Julian appears too pitiful and ludicrous to command the sympathetic interest of any modern reader. The dramatic poet has a right to represent his hero as wicked, terrible, and even revolting, but to make him ludicrous is (unless it be in a comedy) a very dangerous experiment. “Ye call this beard without reverence a goat’s beard,”says Julian to his attendants, “ but I tell you, ye fools, that it is a sage’s beard.” And the reader smiles, as no doubt the attendants did.

It is indeed characteristic of this author to pursue his theme to its extremest consequences, to strike fearlessly forward, shrinking not even from paradoxes. The facts of Julian’s career, from the time when he assumes the imperial dignity to his death and final failure are, psychologically considered, as true as they are profoundly evolved and strikingly expressed. He sets out with a sincere desire to reform the world, hut finding himself baffled at every step, pride and defiance rise within him, his rage against “the Galilean,”whom he comes to regard as the secret cause of all his failures, drives him on to ever greater madness, and at last the situation only leaves him two alternatives : either to succumb or to declare himself God. And there is more satisfaction in following the historical truth and having him do the latter. But what we object to is, that this process is psychologically and not dramatically developed. We of course do not assert that the psychological element need be at variance with the dramatic ; what we criticise is the undue regard for the one at the expense of the other.

It is a curious fact that there is hardly a woman who plays any prominent part in this drama. Helena, the true sister of the emperor, whom Julian marries on his succession to the throne, appears but in two scenes, in the latter of -which she dies. She loves his brother Gallus, and is unfaithful to her husband. The prophecy that Julian is to possess " the pure woman" is not drawn into prominence as a leading dramatic motive, and seems at last entirely to be lost sight of. It appears hitherto to have been the mission of Henrik Ibsen to tell his countrymen disagreeable truths, which they were not always willing to hear; and we were at first under the impression that this also was the object of the present work. But the title " an historical drama” excludes such a supposition. However, as we have already hinted, there are numerous criticisms upon Christianity as well as upon enlightened Paganism, which are as valid to-day as they were in the days of the Apostate.

— Mr. Calvert’s book of essays contains a brief discussion of a number of subjects, such as Work, Art, Materialism, Travel, Aristocracy, Freedom, The Brain, in which we see the refinement of a man of culture rather than the strength of a man who feels a great impulse to tell the world anything new. The best of those we have mentioned is, perhaps, that on travel; those who believe in phrenology will have more respect for the one upon the brain than will those who are conservative in their views. A few of the essays are upon literary subjects : Shelley, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare, and a few of his plays. Speaking of Hamlet, he finds fault, and in our opinion justly, with Goethe’s characterization of that play as showing the effect “ of a great deed enjoined on an inferior mind; ” and elsewhere we have criticism of various degrees of merit, couched very often in not overcomprehensible language.

Some of the brevities we remember having heard before; some indeed are of the most hoary antiquity; for example: “Love kindles love, hate engenders hate,” and “There is no deeper law of nature than that of change;” and more might be found. Not all readers will assent to this statement: " The great recent discoveries of Gall, of Fourier, of Priessnitz, all combine to make apparent the resources, the incalculable vigors, the inborn capabilities of man.” Again : “ Allopathy is monarchical and ecclesiastical, inasmuch as it looks to something out of the body to cure the body. Under the action of drugs the body is passive, only rousing itself against their disturbing or poisonous action. Hydropathy is democratic; the body must bestir itself for its own salvation. Self-reliant, it must, use for its protection and re-installment its native internal resources. Allopathy, acting from without, and by means of foreign substances, is one-sided, depressing, weakening; hydropathy is all-sided, invigorating, purifying,”etc. Others, again, are less marked by whimsicality, and show a pleasanter side of the writer.

— Mr. Nordhoff’s Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands is a very entertaining book for those who stay at home, and we should fancy it would he found an excellent traveling companion for those who roam in the lands which the author here describes. It is not every traveler who can discriminate between the relative importance to the public of an account of the difficulties he had in getting a satisfactory breakfast, and of definite and exact information of the country in which he is journeying; but Mr. Nordhoff avoids this fault which so often mars books of travel; he gives us the results of his journey without any trivial personal reminiscences. He has collected a very considerable amount of information about the Pacific coast and the Sandwich Islands, both from what he has himself seen and from what he has learned through others. Fully one half of the book is taken up with the Sandwich Islands, giving us a good deal of their history, their geography, and answering just such questions as would naturally suggest themselves to a reader’s mind. The author’s intention, as he tells us in his preface, was “ to give plain and circumstantial details, such as would interest and be of use to travelers for pleasure or information, and enable the reader to judge of the climate, scenery, and natural resources of the regions I visited; to give, in short, such information as I myself would like to have had in my possession before I made the journey.” And this is exactly what he has done with most praiseworthy success.

The same can he said of the part of the hook treating of the Pacific coast. These pages are full of interesting and valuable remarks on the agriculture of Northern California, the wine-growing, the drainage of the land, sheep-grazing, tobacco culture, the timber, etc., etc.; in fact about everything that goes to distinguish the traveler with eyes from the ordinary roamer without them. There is a chapter on Chinese labor which gives us the opinion of an intelligent and experienced observer that “ if we could to-day expel the Chinese from California, more than half the capital now invested there would be idle or leave the State, many of the most important industries would entirely stop, and the prosperity of California would receive a blow from which it would not recover for twenty years. They are, as a class, patient, ingenious, and industrious. That they deprive any white man of work is absurd, in a State which has scarcely half a million of people, and which can support ten millions, and needs at least three millions to develop fairly its abundant natural wealth; and no matter what he is, or what the effect of his presence might be, it is shameful that he should be meanly maltreated and persecuted among a people who boast themselves Christians and claim to be civilized.”

He has too a good deal to say about the Indians ; he gives us a good description of an Indian reservation, which he calls “ a pauper asylum and prison combined, a nuisance to the respectable farmers, whom it deprives of useful and necessary laborers, an injury to the morals of the community in whose midst it is placed, an injury to the Indian whom it demoralizes, and a benefit only to the members of the Indian ring.”

The account he gives of what he saw fully justifies this language ; the young Indians are gambling all the time except on Sunday, which is all the enforced observation of that day ; there is no compulsion about attendance at school; immorality is not checked ; there is no inducement to work offered the Indian; “ there are two thousand acres of arable land on the reservation, about five hundred are kept for grazing, and acres are in actual cultivation this year — seven hundred in grain and hay, one hundred and ninety-five in corn, and one hundred and nine in vegetables. A farmer, assistant farmer, and gardener manage this considerable piece of land. When they need laborers, they detail such men and women as they require, and then go out to work. . . . Not one of the cabins has about it a garden spot; all cultivation is in common ; and thus the Indian is deprived of the main incentive to industry and thrift.” “At present,” he says, “an Indian reservation differs from an Indian rancheria or village, only in that it contains more food, more vice, and more lazy people.”

On the whole, Mr. Nordhoff’s book is as complete and intelligent as one could wish; every man who thinks of visiting the extreme West will find it invaluable, and every one will find it useful and entertaining. It does great credit to the writer. The illustrations, most of which are taken from photographs, add to the value of the book, of which scattered extracts cannot give a fitting idea; it is too compact for such treatment to be of any great use.

— In his Five-Minute Chats we have Dr. Dio Lewis once more prattling to the public in his own inimitable style about the merits of oatmeal, early hours, riding, and the equal horrors of food after two o’clock in the afternoou, of consulting regular practitioners instead of those gentlemen who only are Latin in such forms as " Bedibus Nineo’clockibus,” — which is the witty way of telling patients they must be in bed by nine o’clock, — of griddle-cakes, tobacco, air-tight stoves, etc., etc. Dr. Lewis has almost as great a contempt as Molière for the work of the faculty, but his humor is less delightful. His confidence in his own skill is a more noticeable quality; he undertakes to make the thin stout, and the fat thin, without any trouble; he cures all diseases : eat enough oatmeal, and ride horseback, and you need never die. He does not always limit the flights of his fancy to the ignoble cares of the body; he occasionally sings a bolder strain; and this is the way in which, having cured yourself and family of dyspepsia, and having brought them to the proper medium between corpulence and leanness, you have to act, if “your daughter is a fashionable butterfly.” “ I pity you,” Dr. Lewis says. “But you must not despair. Pray for her and pray with her. Ask the clergyman to call upon her and pray with her. Reason with her, expostulate, plead, implore. Impress upon her the dignity and decency of human nature. Explain God’s purpose in her creation. Hold a butterfly up before her, and elaborate the distinction between her and it.

“ If all these should fail, then comes a moment when it shall be decided whether you are fit to have the direction of your child, — whether it would not be better you were dead and out of the way, that she might fall into other and wiser hands. You must exercise your authority. You must strip her of those gewgaws and drive her into the kitchen.”

In general, however, the author aims at dyspepsia, and the ordinary ailments of the country-people who may be led to the purchase of this volume, with an occasional rap at hydrophobia, baldness, and so forth. It is a frivolous book of a bad sort, which undertakes to puff a panacea. The ignorant should be warned from it.

— One who comes to the pretty little book called Sea and Shore, with an expectation tempered to its size, cannot help being pleased with it, we think. It is not great enough to hold all the growth of the shore, or all the drift of the sea ; and it is very likely that many may miss their favorite pieces in the collection, but we believe that the most will not; and that all will find in it a brave as well as fine taste. We like its free range — from the Iliad to the children’s Nonsense Book — and we are glad of the sympathy and courage which have enabled its editors to mingle fresh if unfamous poems with those which cannot be left out of any such collection. A very large number of the pieces are of American authorship; but this seems an unpurposed result of sincere liking, and where the editors like a Spanish ballad or a passage from a Greek epic, they give that also, as well as certain untranslated French poems at the end ; and they are no more dismayed at putting in a hackneyed piece than at including a wholly unfamiliar one in their charming little volume.

— The first of Mr. Stoddard’s Bric-aBrac Series, — may the line stretch to the crack of doom ! — if hardly a book for review, may be justly praised for the aptness and unlading entertainingness of its selections. No more readable book has tempted the summer public, shy of literature and loath to tamper with the integrity of its own vacant-mindedness. It is as pleasing to the eye, too, as to the mind; it is altogether the most stylish American book that the Riverside hinders have turned out,—that is to say, that any of our binders have turned out, — and it may be compared with English-bound books without the rage and shame which swell the patriotic heart when the hooks of our enemies are contrasted with the ordinary bricks and blocks in which our mechanics serve up our literature.

FRENCH AND German.²

Not the least remarkable thing about Count Gobineau’s novel, Les Pléiades, is its resemblance to German models; it has all the faults of construction that a readable novel can have, it is full of episodes, the different threads of the story are taken up and laid down again at the author’s convenience, there is really no dénouement in it except two marriages, one of which is brought about by a combination of circumstances not unfamiliar to the reader of fiction, and one of the characters remains wholly unprovided for at the last. Such are some of the peculiarities of the outer husk of this book, but in every other respect it will be found less open to objection ; indeed, it will serve to show how insignificant is the skeleton of a story in comparison with the more important qualities of resemblance to life, and of wise views of the world. In one point the book differs from most German stories, in that it contains but little preaching; there are, to be sure, frequent and exhaustive reports of serious conversations, but these are all on subjects of direct interest, not on vague generalities, as is often the case in the much-abused German novel.

The story opens entertainingly with the description of two young men, Louis de Laudon, a French count, and Conrad Lanze, a young German artist. They are traveling acquaintances, and in the north of Italy they meet a young Englishman, Wilfred Nore, in whose company they visit Lago Maggiore. That same evening they pass together, each one recounting to the others the story of his life. Nore had lived in East India, and when only eighteen years old had fallen in love with Harriet Coxe, the daughter of a distributor of Bibles, a young woman a few years older than himself. He has become privately engaged to her, and when he is called away to England she frees him of all obligation to her, from a notion that he would only find himself fettered by the choice of his inexperience. Laudon has led the life of a regular Frenchman, which is delightfully set before us in an unsympathizing but also uncynical way. Nore comments on the disposition now so frequently noticed among Frenchmen to try in every way to avoid becoming the dupe of any man, woman, or thing. Conrad Lanze tells the story of his life, which consists principally of a most unfortunate love for a Countess Tonska, an admirably described coquette. This heartless woman is set before us with just that accuracy which careless observation would call exaggeration. The different confessions are for the purpose of setting the characters before us; the narrators are the principal men of the novel; each one carries with him a great deal more weight than is generally the case, with heroes of fiction; they are not merely put together for the performance of certain mechanical evolutions; and we feel towards them very much as we do towards living people, whom we are accustomed to value much more for what they are than for the occasional dramatic situations of their lives. Throughout the novel the, action is very languid ; we see alternately the confusion wrought by the coquettish Madame Tonska, the way in which Lanze wastes his whole life under her baneful fascination; the emptiness of Laudon’s cool and restrained love for the wife of his friend Gennevilliers ; while Nore again meets his Harriet and marries her. A good part of the book is taken up with an account of the love-affairs of Prince Joan-Théodore, a long episode with the least possible connection with all the rest of the story.

This does not make a promising programme, but, as we have said, it is not for its construction that the novel deserves reading; it is for its drawing of character and for the admirable way in which different kinds of love work upon human beings. In both of these important matters the author is singularly clear-sighted. He manages to make this outweigh even his own technical clumsiness. He has written a thoughtful novel, rather than one which directly appeals to our enjoyment of the picturesque. That he is incapable, however, of delighting that part of our nature, is disproved by the most amusing episode of the scenes in the inn when Madame Tonska hears of her husband’s death, and prepares to join him, first winning the hearts of Monsieur and Madame de Genneviiliers. That is one of the lightest and most entertaining chapters in the story.

We hope this book will be read ; it deserves more popularity than it will be likely to get. For ourselves we can only say that we have found it very fascinating. The reader must not forget, however, that he will have a novel which will make certain demands on his patience, He will not be carried through in spite of himself, he will have to read it as patiently as he would a volume of essays, but he will be well repaid. He will wonder, when he lays it down, what was the author’s intention in writing it; it may have been to give us pictures of life, but the artist should have remembered that there is: no picture which is not. improved by having a frame, and that is lacking here,

— In a small volume, Eduard Zeller has collected certain facts about David Friedrich Strauss, the author of the Life of Jesus and of The Old Faith and the New, two books which are far from being repetitions of conventional theological literature. The biography is by no means an exhaustive one; the author felt his hands bound by the fact that many of the circumstances of Strauss’s life could not be explained during the life-time of other persons ; but partly to make up for that the writer was for a long time the intimate friend of the subject of the biography, and naturally has full knowledge of many facts which might escape the bookmaker. His style is very ragged; he plays all the freaks possible in the construction of a sentence — those, at least, at which German grammar smiles.

Strauss was born at Ludwigsburg, the birthplace of Mörike, the poet, and of Fr. Vischer, January 27, 1808. He was a delicate boy, prevented by his tender health from entering into the ruder sports of his age, and so driven, not unwillingly, to his books. His father was a shop-keeper in the town, who had descended from some higher estate, bringing with him a love of literature. His mother it was, however, for whom Strauss had the warmer affection ; she seems to have been, perhaps not so much a remarkable woman, as it is customary to call the mothers of distinguished men, as an excellent wife and a kindly, admiring mother of her only child who survived its infancy. He repaid her by a strong and lasting affection. From an early age he had been destined for the church, and it was in pursuance of this project that he studied at the University of Tübingen, following the lectures of Kern and Bauer, among others. The lastnamed, the founder of what was called the Tubingen school of theology, that, namely, of sharp criticism of theological books and matters, had an immense influence on his young pupil, whom he had already taught for four years previous to their almost simultaneous departure for Tübingen. In 1830 he finished his studies and became assistant pastor, the curate, so to speak, in.a village close by his home. In 1831 he went to Berlin with the intention of continuing his studies under Hegel and Schleiermacher, but the first-named, in whom he was particularly interested, soon afterwards died of cholera, and he found no particular pleasure or profit in what he got from Schleiermacher. The next year he returned to Tübingen and began to give instruction in philosophy there with great success; in 1833, however, he felt obliged to give up an occupation too distracting for the persistent work he had proposed to himself, and he devoted himself with great energy to his Life of Jesus. This was the great work of his life, that for which he had been preparing all through his previous years of study and experience. He had been through different states of mind ; at one time he had shown a tendency to interest himself in supernatural matters, approaching much more as an already half-believing inquirer than as the cool critic he later showed himself to be ; again he was for a time an admirer of Schleiermacher, who, with considerable eloquence, expounded an emotional view of Christianity. This book was of a very different sort; it examined the sacred writings of the New Testament after the keenest fashion, and expounded the author’s belief in the mythical origin of much that they contain. The effect of the hook was very great, and its fame, as is well known, spread far beyond the boundaries of Germany. It ran quickly to four editions, containing various modifications of the author’s opinions. These consisted for the most part of emendations, defense of himself against hostile criticism, criticising others, etc.

The nature of the book was considered so dangerous that the author was obliged to give up the position he had held at Tübingen, and he devoted himself to teaching young boys at Ludwigsburg. Later, the fact that he had been invited to the Zurich University created so much uproar that the offer had to be revoked. Thus deprived of a rare position, he felt himself at a disadvantage in whatever he undertook. He lived restlessly in different parts of Germany, giving his attention principally to literary work which has much less fame, though it is admirable of its kind. He also prepared another, much larger edition of the Life of Jesus, which differed materially from his earlier work. His last book was The Old Faith and the New, which has already been noticed in these pages,³ and which was in fact a sort of postscript to his Life of Jesus, attempting some constructive work in place of what he had overthrown.

Brief mention is made of the correspondence between him and Renan, which made considerable stir at the time; it is needless to say that the biographer has no respect for the frivolity of the Frenchman.

In private life Strauss seems to have been an agreeable man, and very capable of enjoying the humorous side of what he saw. His married life was unhappy; but he seems to have taken pleasure in his children. What he really suffered from was the way in which the writing of his book threw him out of the lists. It was only natural that this should have been the result, but it forever hampered Strauss. While awaiting any completer biography, this of Zeller will be found of use.