Recent Literature

To our taste, Mr. Parton always writes entertainingly, and with a right-mindedness that rarely fails him. His papers upon Caricature,¹ which Mcssrs. Harper offer as their principal contribution to holiday literature, deal with a subject which could easily be made mischievous to that great body of readers who want their thinking done for them; but Mr. Parton treats it in such a way as to be historically instructive, while he guards against the acceptance of the caricaturist’s wit as necessarily either truth or justice. The chapters on Caricatures of Women and Matrimony, and Caricature during the French Revolution, are eminently illustrative of this fact, and of a humane conscience in the writer which gives tone to his whole work. He recognizes the moral quality of caricature, and refuses to consider it solely from the artistic stand-point. Sometimes, indeed, his care not to have vicious or cruel things liked becomes almost too explicit, but this is an error in the right direction. His book is one which may safely become popular. For the student of the subject, it has very serious limitations. It is inevitably superficial; however, it is by no means so superficial as a casual glance would make it appear. It sketches very agreeably comic art among Greeks, Romans, Hindoos, and Egyptians, as it has come down to us in frescoes, mural sculptures, and keramics; in the Middle Ages as it appears in the grotesque details of Gothic architecture; and of the times since as painting has preserved it, not omitting a glance at the caricature of the Chinese and Japanese. It thus affords a means of comparison and contrast, which the reader will find curious and interesting, and to which he will like to turn from whatever history he is reading for that vivid glimpse of past feeling which history is so rarely able to give. One does not understand all the passion of the Reformation till he looks at the clumsy and brutal caricatures of that time ; one has not a due sense of the ferocity of the French Revolution till he sees it in the ruthless pictorial satire of the period. When we come to our own century it is French caricature which Mr. Parton treats most fully, and here we think he might have spared something and given us more of the manlier and finer wit of the Punch caricaturists of the days when Punch was a great power; even now Du Maurier, the most exquisite and spiritual of all those who make us smile, is better than Gavarni, and should have had greater and not less space. Mr. Nast is not represented at his best; one does not get a just conception of his fertile and powerful genius from the illustrations given; and we resent the intrusion of even one of the revolting vulgarities of Mr. Sol. Eytinge. The taste of Spanish wit which Mr. Parton offers has a very distinct and pungent flavor, and makes us ardently desire more. Italian satire is very inadequately touched. Apparently Mr. Parton has not examined any Italian comic journals since 1849, and does not know how full of good things they are.

— Mr. Benjamin is a painter with feeling and respect for his art, whom the average reader may trust for a plain and unpretentious statement of the present condition of art in England, France, and Germany; whoever turned to him for brilliant literature or subtile criticism would be disappointed. What he does in the first of the three magazine papers which form his volume on Contemporary Art in Europe² is to treat of English art in some general observations on the characteristics of various schools of art, and then with brief biographical sketches and critical notices to acquaint the reader with the different English painters and their principal works. The paper on French art is much the same in method. In both chapters there is a clear and good account of governmental patronage ; and this is also the case in respect to German art, to the several schools of which in the several small and great capitals due attention is paid. The illustrations are portraits of the painters and reproductions of their works; and into a little space is thus collected a great deal that it is useful and pleasant to know. Mr. Benjamin has succeeded generally in choosing something fresh as well as typical from each painter; though in some cases he conspicuously fails, as in that of Millais, whose well-worn Huguenot Lovers is given. His comments are usually just, if a little crude in expression, and the reader who spent some time in the different rooms of the art-gallery at the Centennial will find this volume extremely convenient in the arrangement or rearrangement of his impressions of European art. It is rather for such a reader than for the connoisseur, whose knowledge may be more particular or more general. There is no charm in Mr. Benjamin’s style; and his reader will have some honest work of his own to do, but he will be repaid for this in the end.

— To the vast majority of the vast public to whom Millais’s Huguenot Lovers and Faed’s Evangeline have made their work known, if not their names, we fancy that Messrs, Osgood & Co. could have offered no more acceptable holiday books of the kind than their heliotype selections from these masters.³ They are both painters of the kind of pictures dearest to the AngloSaxon heart, — the pictures that tell stories,— and they differ only in Faed’s appealing to the natural sympathies, and in Millais’s appealing to the cultivated sympathies. For the connoisseur they both tell their stories somewhat crudely, but no one can deny that they tell them effectively. They are men of dramatic genius, and they are liked by all who like to be strongly moved. It is easy to see how, when they approach each other’s level, they begin to fail; the simpler subjects of Millais especially, are poor; but at his best, he is extremely good. The text which accompanies the selection of his pictures gives an interesting sketch of the pre-Raphaelite school which he helped to found in England and then forsook, and the comments on his work are very good. In this respect the Millais Gallery is more satisfactory than the Faed Gallery.

— The illustrations to Mr. Whittier’s River Path⁴form in unusual degree that sort of accompaniment which we all feel to be the true office of illustration. The descriptions in the text are so general, so abstract, that the artist is forced from the sterile ease of mere graphic repetition, and is obliged to create, to imagine something of his own, and add it to the poem. We have, therefore, some half score of exquisite little landscapes in which the artist seems to have won a charm from the poet’s thought rather than his words; the only unpleasing pictures in the book are Mr. Waud’s helpless literalisms and Miss Curtis’s extremely black eyelashed angels and cherubs. The lovely sketches in which Messrs. Moran, Brown, Colman, Hart, and McEntee have found themselves equal to the interpretation of the poet’s sense are all bits of New England scenery, stream and hill and quiet forest depth, treated with singular tenderness and sweetness. For the two lines,

we have two pieces, one by Mr. J. A. Brown and one by Mr. Anthony, which are exquisite studies of the pensive evening light on still water and lonely pasture land, the detail at once distinct and soft, and all suffused with the spirit of the lingering, vanishing day.

is another of Mr. Brown’s studies, kindred in mood, and almost as good. In

Mr. Hart studies, with the most charming effect, a group of tall, slim birches, and a peaceful river vista. Mr. Moran’s best contribution is the opening illustration of a wild hill-side clump of trees with the slender moon in the far horizon. The final picture is by Mr. Anthony, who here appears to equal advantage as engraver and designer: subtly felt, delicately wrought, a scene of solitary, land-locked waters, with the night beginning to darken down and through the tops and stems of its wooded-shores. We must not forget to mention with cordial praise Mr. McEntee’s riverside aisle of willows ; it is delicious.

— There seem now to be signs of a general revival of the trade in American books for children, which for some years past have been almost driven from our book-sellers’ counters by the cheap and pretty illustrated wares of the London presses. Messrs. Hurd and Houghton have done the little ones a most distinct pleasure and service in Mr. Scudder’s Bodley Family books; Messrs. J. R. Osgood & Co. will have the thanks of all boys who read Mr. Warner’s delightful study of Being a Boy; Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co. offer several entertaining books to the little public; and Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have also done their part towards the provision of the same sort of holiday literature. The Signal Boys,⁵ by George Cary Eggleston, is the best on their list, and may be safely praised as a thrilling book of adventure, with few or none of the faults of books of that kind. It is the story of half a dozen boys who were in the service of General Jackson at the time of the battle of New Orleans, and of their many perils from fire and flood ; their part in a naval fight, their capture by the British, their escape, their wanderings in the swamps, their second captivity by smugglers, and their final escape and restoration, after the war, to their Alabama homes. Dealing with scenes of violence, Mr. Eggleston is able to reduce the amount of bloodshed to a minimum; at the worst their captors are stunned or shot in the knee by the boys in their efforts to escape; we believe they actually kill no one in the whole book. Homicide has no share in the excitement; at the same time the art of the book is so good, especially in the minuteness of the narration, that we think it will be found intensely exciting, in a wholesome way, by the boys for whom it was written. The Wings of Courage,⁶ a little volume composed of three stories and named from the first, is adapted from the French, and is rather too fantastic and a little too distressing to be entirely commended; the stories are also somewhat oldish for children in some respects, without being quite old enough for their elders. Yet they are not unamusing, and they are not vulgar, as both Patsy ⁷ and Six Sinners⁸ are. These two little books are as false to life and character as they are in taste, and if they were true their coarseness of tone ought alone to condemn them. Their sprightliness is of a kind to make one shudder.

— The humor so characteristic of all Mrs. Diaz’s writings for children fills the history of the Jimmyjohns⁹ with something of the same quiet pleasure that made the William Henry books unique among boy’s books. But the Jimmyjohns are very much younger people than William Henryand his friends : they are four-year-old twins, and their history deals with the every-day adventures of that age, with side glances at character in the Funny Man, the Lobster Man, and other casual acquaintance of theirs. The funny man, especially, is a creation; though you see him only from the Jimmyjohns’ point of view, you recognize him for a charming type of the friendly humorist who likes to puzzle children, and to seem to be posed by them in many jokes they have together. He is apt to stop them in their play, and to be very much astonished by them, and to suggest just the very things they would prefer. He is managed with the greatest art by Mrs. Diaz, who has a genius for looking at everything in the world with childhood’s eyes, and for rediscovering the interest that has faded out of the world for old people. How the Barn came from Jorullo is an admirable example of her fun; and a peculiar, racy quaintness gives its zest to a score of other sketches and little stories in the book. What we like in her writings is her love for simple conditions and for the naturalness of all sorts of natural people. Her books form a real addition to the scanty number which can be placed in children’s hands with absolute safety to them in every way, and with the certainty of pleasing them.

— A new fairy tale is such an anachronism that one may be pardoned for refusing to read On a Pincushion ¹⁰ except as a professional duty; yet once read it becomes a pleasure to commend so pure and delightful a piece of imagination and fancy. The Story which gives a title to the book is the frame-work for three clever stories, and four more follow it, each marked by originality and by freedom in the main from the vices of modern fairy tales. The author must have come very near to believing her fancies before she could write so simply and truthfully; for the fault which underlies most modern work of this kind is a total disbelief in the creatures of fairy and a use of them for various moral and scientific purposes. Here, on the contrary, there is an honest delight in a good story, and what moral there is partakes of the blunt, homely character of the old fairy-tale morals.

The invention shown is very fresh and surprising. Everything follows naturally and with the serene reason of fairy-land, and the machinery which is set in motion is after the most approved model, while yet it does not copy the old stories in a cheap manner. The only exception which we notice is in the clever story of The Hair-Tree, which everybody in the kingdom is eager to find in order to repair the losses of the unfortunate queen, who has become absolutely bald. The finding of the tree is made the conclusion of a series of involved adventures. Rupert sails to the north until he comes to an island upon which are three solitary trees, one containing peculiar nuts, the second precious stones, and the third wholly bare except for an enormous pod like a brass drum at the top; the pod bursts with a tremendous noise, and sends out a dozen gold nuts. Armed with the red nuts, the precious stones, and the gold nuts, Rupert makes his way through ingenious difficulties, bribing right and left sunflowers with beautiful, cruel hands and arms, a swan, flowers with deceitful mouths, and lilies with tender eyes ; he reaches the hair-tree, secures some seeds, beats a beautiful tigress, and so sets free an enchanted princess, and hurries back to court, arriving just in time to prevent the execution of a dreadful decree by which all the women in the kingdom were to have their heads shaved in order that the queen might not feel mortified at her own peculiar condition. Here is a story entirely of fancy so far as we can discover, and very skillfully elaborated, yet a little unsatisfactory, for the very reason that there is not an element of moral heroism in it. Rupert in an old fairy tale would have been, not some chance sailor, but supplied with a reason for making the search, and in his encounter with the enemies on the way the moral conflict and triumph would have been apparent.

In other stories the homely morals are very well incorporated. Vain Lamorna loses her reflection, which is drawn down from the surface of the water by ropes of sand, and kept for the entertainment of the water-elves until she can safely be entrusted with it again ; and in the Seeds of Love a charming allegory of love and envy appears. There is a good deal of fun and some truly witty conceptions, as in A Toy Princess, where the real princess, who is being stifled under court etiquette, is removed by the fairy godmother to grow up in a sunny childhood, and a toy princess substituted, which is so much more satisfactory to the court that when the change is afterward confessed and the real princess restored, there is considerable consternation, and a vote being taken it proved that there was a unanimous preference for the sham Ursula. There is a very pretty fancy accounting for the opal, into which a sunbeam and moonbeam have been turned because they could not live apart, and the marriage of the princess of fire and the prince of water is as pretty a story as one could desire, with no suspicion, thank Heaven, of any lecture on the properties of steam. Altogether, On a Pincushion is a book to make one listen again for the faint bells of fairyland, and with its beauty and sweetness it is worth a shelfful of pragmatical priggishness.

— Pussy Tip-Toes Family,¹¹ Frisk and his Flock,'¹² and The Little Brown House and the Children who lived in It,¹³ by Mrs. D. P. Sandford, are books skillfully made up by a practiced hand to meet the insatiable desire of the little ones for “ stories,” no matter if they are only the simplest possible reproductions of the childish characters and trivial incidents that make up their own real, every-day world. The first two are a companion pair of quartos, bound in chocolate-brown paper, stamped with colored pictures, and profusely illustrated throughout with attractive designs corresponding to the text. The first one relates the destinies that befell four kittens, of whom Pussy TipToes was the happy mother, —destinies, it must be confessed, all strikingly similar, since each was adopted by some little girl into a comfortable home, appropriately named, and very much valued by her little mistress. Toward the middle of the book they are reunited at a party to which they are brought by their respective owners, but the mother and kittens naturally meet each other with perfect indifference all round. After that they are dropped from the story, and the narrative con fines itself to the doings of a certain little Eva, whose friends on every occasion tell her stories of children just like herself and her playmates. On this account it is specially well adapted for reading aloud to very young listeners.

Frisk and his Flock will entertain those who are somewhat older, and we fear the little people who trudge daily to the great brick caravansaries of our public schools, so stingily and unaccountably deprived as they universally are of the ample playgrounds that should surround them, will sigh over the idyllic picture of Miss Agatha’s schoolroom in the “ barn chamber,” with all of her orchard and garden to run over, and with her sagacious dog Frisk to bark them out of mischief and when the bell rang to gather them together and drive them before him toward the school-room steps! Miss Agatha evidently had no “school-committee men ” or “ male principal ” of a “ graded school ” over her. Every morning she taught her children beautiful texts that might last them through life as precepts to go by. She allowed them to have a “ schoolbaby ” in the school-room, that is, a wideawake three year old, whose mother was ill, and who kept running away because there was no one to direct her baby energies; if the scholars got promptly through their lessons at three, Miss Agatha encouraged them to ask her any questions they pleased, and she spent the last hour in talking to them about what they had been learning, or she would read them a story or teach them a new song. In short, here is a picture of a model school for training children in the “humanities” — and all evolved out of a single feminine brain —that might be commended to the consideration of the ladies of the ever “ exercised ” Boston school committee !

The Little Brown House is bound in slate - colored cloth and stamped with a black landscape and a little brown house in the midst of it, and with children and a kitten and also the title in gold and silver. It is of the same general character as the foregoing, by the same author ; the only “point” attempted in the story being the principles and rules of manliness, chivalry, kindness, and helpfulness that a company of boy soldiers (of whom the lieutenant, Christie, lived in the Little Brown House) made for themselves, and how much they were appreciated by their neighbors.

Captain Fritz, his Friends and Adventures,¹⁴ is a moving little story of a French poodle, told in the first person by the poodle himself, Captain Fritz, who, originally the pet of a petted little girl, afterward became the miserable thrall of a master who beat him and trained him until he was a “ performing dog ” and was able to be taken about the country with a performing monkey, and help the latter earn their owner’s living. After many sufferings, Captain Fritz finds a friend and spends his old age in tranquillity and ease; but most of the tale is one of misunderstandings and maltreatment of this poor little canine on the part of humanity, and it must help to awaken the sympathies of children for the dumb creatures which often so willingly serve or amuse them. The style of the narrative, with its involuntary reflections, is taken from the inimitable tales of Hans Andersen, but the truth, subtlety, and finesse of the model are not approached, as it was hardly to be expected they could be, by the copy, since those marvelous strokes of insight and of sympathy are just what made Hans Andersen the unique and priceless genius that he was; still this failure will not lessen its value for the readers for whom it was designed, and in its admirable fullpage illustrations even a grown-up lover of dogs may take delight, for they are by a French artist, E. Pirodin, and every one of them is a delicious character portrait, not only of the outer poodle, but of the inner as well.

— In the two volumes, Western Windows and The Lost Farm,¹⁵ Messrs. Osgood & Co. present to the public all that is best in the work of a genuine and very original poet; and we know of no two books of recent verse that we could more heartily urge upon the buyers of holiday gifts. The quality and value of Mr. Piatt’s work have already been discussed in these pages, and we shall not now enter upon any extended criticism. But we have to say that a fresh examination of his poems in the present collection leaves us disposed to reaffirm with increased emphasis all that we have ever said in their praise. He is a poet whose charm is often too subtle for instant perception, and the very simplicity of his expression sometimes bewilders the sophisticated literary sense; but his poetry has that element of growth in it that is sure of a future. In material and in form it is so distinctly individual that almost any stanza — we were going to say any line — of his books will declare its authorship; no poetry of our time has a more proper or more recognizable atmosphere. Something very wild and sweet, like the scent of dusky woodland depths or the breath of clover overrunning the site of fallen homes or the track of deserted highways, is its perfume; its tender light is the clear, pensive radiance of autumnal eves. So much of it deals with themes which are Western in their physical aspects that a hasty criticism might content itself with recognizing their local truth ; but we are not disposed to resign Mr. Piatt to the section with whose color and life he has done so wisely to tinge and vitalize his rhyme. A man is cosmopolitan only by being first patriotic, and Mr. Piatt is broadly American because he is so thoroughly Western; he is true to human experience everywhere, because he is true to what he has himself known and felt in the locality where he was born. It is the poet’s duty and privilege to divine the universal in the simple and common things; and the soft pathos of these poems, which touch with transfiguring loveliness the past of the Western pioneers and farmers, appeals to all hearts. The farm devoured by the growing city; the old well, secret and clear beneath its curb choked with stones and brambles; the chimney tottering, gaunt and lonely, above the empty cellar of the vanished log-cabin ; the deserted tavern beside the forsaken highway,— these are symbols of the homely past which is dear to the whole human race, and which in various symbols stirs always the same fond and piercing regret. The West may well be proud of her poet’s fealty, but he belongs to us all in moods which come to us all. Not that Mr. Piatt is merely the poet of these moods. His range is as great in feeling, if not in theme, as that of most of his contemporaries, and his work abounds in lines that reveal the thinker as well as the dreamer. But there is undeniably — and fortunately — the idyllic and dreamful tendency in him, and this makes him a poet. Examine certain of his airiest fancies, — butterflies that seemed to toss hither and thither in an air of intellectual caprice,— and you find them flowers of strong and fruitful stem, fast rooted in the soil of experience. His dreams, however mystical, have their meaning ; they prophesy and warn and console. Wherever he touches matters of fact and knowledge, as in his poems about the war, it is with the transfiguring touch of the poet, but also the warm and vigorous grasp of a man. His pensiveness is not morbid; his regret is impersonal, universal in its sense, however intimate its source ; and his sympathy with nature is often as joyous and sound as Wordsworth’s. Here is a sonnet of his which we have always liked for its rich vitality and hearty pleasure in the wholesome gladness of the earth: —

SEPTEMBER.

This is like Wordsworth in the way in which one poet may be like another without ceasing to be entirely himself. In almost all respects we think Mr. Piatt shows less than any other poet of his generation the influence of his elders. His art, his technique is singularly his own.

We are tempted to quote another of Mr. Piatt’s sonnets, which we have always admired : —

TRAVELERS.

In the lyrical pieces the reader who recurs to them again and again, as we do, will find a peculiar and alluring music ; and in poems which have to do with character, he will feel not less the touch of genius. The Mower in Ohio and Riding to Vote are studies as diverse as they are strong and true. Few things are more affecting than the former, more delicately, more vividly suggestive. Mr. Piatt is no mere colorist; while his diction does not lack richness, it is rather refined than opulent; and of his art generally it may be said that you have the sense of something done rather than of something being done ; he values your sympathy rather than your surprise. Pure in thought as in ideal, his verse has the charm of the best in its remoteness from all that may be indicated as Swinburnian ; and we cannot but believe that a wider and wider appreciation awaits his work, which, not to our credit, has been more cordially praised by English than American criticism hitherto.

— There is nothing pleasanter, to the generous lover of literature, than to follow the constant advance of some favorite author,— to watch his star tranquilly increase, while the sky is streaked everywhere with meteoric lights that flash and expire, with rockets that climb the heavens to apotheosize into sticks. Mr. Aldrich’s growth as a poet has been one of the most notable facts of our recent literary history ; and his latest essay in fiction is stamped with the same tokens of maturing power. By power we do not mean the convulsive force that so often goes by that name in literature, but the quiet ability to imagine clearly, and the art to execute with delicacy and distinction ; the conscience that forbids the artist to let anything go from his hand without the last refining touch. It matters very little what the material is; with this power the work becomes excellent. In his new romance,¹⁶ however, Mr. Aldrich has something more than his usual mere fortune in the choice of a fable. The story, as our readers know, is one of singular freshness and interest, and from first to last it is treated with a certain charming respect for its rare qualities, as if one chancing on a precious stone should grow more and more in love with it as his labor brought out its rich lights and tints. In the opening of the romance there is the very breath of the happy morning on which Lynde sets out for his holiday; all outdoors smiles and sings in the prospect which spreads before the reader ; one becomes instantly the friend of hero and of author, and one remains so throughout, with a little dread, a little misgiving, that the daring plot may be going to involve a heart-break at the end. Each chapter of the book is a distinct drama, with its proper scenery, which is made not merely the dumb, perfunctory witness of the action, but seems somehow a sentient element of it, and whether in New Hampshire or in Switzerland has its conscious part in the story. The descriptions, of which there are many very lovely ones, have rightfully their place, because one feels that what happens could hardly have happened save in just such presences and aspects of nature; and in this way Mr. Aldrich’s romance totally differs from that mistaken class of fiction in which character is subordinated to landscape. Take, for instance, the pretty love passage where Lynde end Ruth leave the good aunt in the carriage and walk from one point to another on the Alpine road: it would lose half its charm but for the reader’s sense of the dark pines above the lovers’ heads, and the mild, balsamic odors that breathe around them. But this episode ought to be studied much more for the art with which the delicate flirtation is managed: it is just enough; if there were more, if any speech or any action were more openly significant, less apparently irrelevant, the scene would fail of its present effect. At every point Mr. Aldrich has shown the same wisdom in holding his hand, and nowhere more conspicuously than in that most difficult scene where the maniacs invade the New Hampshire village. As it stands, how successful it is ! But one trembles to think how small a thing would have destroyed the fine poise it now has. So, too, where Lynde has the bliss to give Ruth and her aunt a dinner in the Geneva hotel: it is quite enough that he should do this, and when the author has once realized the situation to the reader’s mind, he lightly turns from it to something else. With all this humor, with all this lightness, however, the author does not fail to keep alive the sense of a mystery, sad and menacing, throughout the course of the story; he turns to full account the undertone of weirdness in it, and the heroine is always treated with a peculiar tenderness, as if there were in his mind something like compassion for the dark fact of her history which she does not know. She is ns a character very charming in her pure girlishness, and Lynde is a young fellow who takes your heart from the beginning.

We touch at a few points only a lovely romance which no reader of ours can have forgotten in any point. To speak of the style of the book, to say that it is witty and full of a genial spirit, is to say that it is Mr. Aldrich’s work As for the mere diction, it must be very good since it does its office so transparently that one does not think of it.

— Surly Tim ¹⁷ is the first in number of eight stories which Mrs. Burnett puts forth as companion in some sort to her recent novel. They need no other introduction than their Own merit, and that is of a kind which does not call for very elaborate analysis. There is in each instance a story to be told, unless indeed Le Monsieur de la Petite Dame be excepted ; that is, a reader recalling the stories would find it quite possible to give the outline of each as a simple narrative. Then the characterization, if not especially vivid, is consistent. It may be said that Mrs. Burnett conceives her characters for what they do and say rather than for what they are; she lacks the high power of creating men and women who remain in the reader’s mind as separate, living persons; they all exist only for the story that is to be told. They serve the purpose of that, and are subordinate to the story, not the creators of it.

The subjects of which Mrs. Burnett treats are mainly emotional : a man marries a woman whose first husband, supposed by both to be dead, comes back and claims her; he tells the story sitting by her grave and the grave of their child; a beautiful woman marries a chivalrous but repulsive-featured man, and struggles to repress an unfulfilled love for a younger and more selfish man ; a showman of wax-works marries a young girl who falls into his hands just in time to be rescued from a rascal who subsequently causes him for a while to doubt his wife; a fisherman, who has won his wife by deceit, yet loves her with a heavy, dog-like constancy, is dismissed passionately when the deceit is discovered, and immediately afterward, working with others to remove a boat, is caught and held fast by the weight of the boat falling upon him, and is drowned before their eyes, past any chance of succor; a simple North Carolina girl and her simpler father are carried off to Paris by the mother of the family, when a sudden fortune has fallen to them, and pines away in the hated luxury until her lover comes across the seas to her ; a French peasant girl going to Paris falls into sin, but is befriended by her unselfish brother, who silently sustains his mother’s contempt while he shields his sister’s career from the mother’s eyes; a young artist, engaged to a faithful girl, sketches in the mountains of North Carolina, and basely deserts her for an Amazonian beauty whom he discovers there, only to hate himself for his baseness and desert the Amazon as the only way to recover his manhood ; a Lancashire girl, who has been treated kindly by a gentleman, crosses the Atlantic to find him, and is forced to don male attire, in which guise she lives near and serves her friend humbly, never discovered by him till after her death.

The pathetic is the strong element in the book, and it is strong because allied with noble suffering. It will be seen by the above scanty résumé that the subjects taken are such as are capable of an ignoble and vicious treatment. Mrs. Burnett shows at once her power and her right-mindedness in using them with dignity and with purity. There are situations like those with which the novel-reader is too familiar, where an author succeeds in disclosing his own sneaking fondness for vice by the very prudence with which he avoids it, but here there is not the faintest lingering at the edge of sin. Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which Laure Giraud’s life is suggested, with the foil of her brother Valentin in Mère Giraud’s Little Daughter. The shamo of Lennox, too, in Lodusky, has no trace of melodrama Or affectation about it.

It is a pity that the obverse of the pathetic, the humorous, is not more apparent. In Esmeralda the best touch is seen in the figure of the father. Smethurstses shows more careful and elaborate effort in this direction ; but seems somehow to have been anticipated by Dickens, and the humor is a little too conscious to be thoroughly enjoyable. The last story, that of Seth, we could easier spare, for a certain uncomfortable romance about it; and after that Le Monsieur de la Petite Dame, with its unsuccessful Frenchiness. The others all have strength and beauty, and if at times a little too hard and intense to be truly light literature, they have a nobility and a breadth of handling which make us believe that Mrs. Burnett’s more mature work will possess elements of ease and quiet which will render her stories enduring.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Adams, Victor, & Co., New York : Vital Magnetism : Its Power over Disease. By Frederick T. Parson.

Allen, Lane, and Scott, Philadelphia: Personal Appearance and the Culture of Beauty. By T. S. Sozinskey, M. D.

American News Co., New York: Chatterbox. Edited by J. Erskine Clarke, M. A.

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the year 1876.

A. L. Bancroft & Co., San Francisco : Checkered Life: In the Old and New World. By Rev. J. L. Ver Wehr.

D. M. Bennett, New York : Christianity and Infidelity; or, The Humphrey-Bennett Discussion between Rev. G. H. Humphrey, of a New York Presbyterian Church, and D. M. Bennett, Editor of the Truth Seeker.

Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, London and New York : The Leopold Shakspere, from the Text of Professor Delius ; and an Introduction by F. J. Furnivall. Illustrated. — The Life of Christ. Parts 13, 14,15, and 16. By F. W. Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster. Illustrated.

Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education. Nos. 1 and 2. 1877.

Congregational Publishing Society, Boston : Notes on the International Sabbath-School Lessons for 1878. Part I. Old Testament. By Rev. John E. Todd. Part II. New Testament. By Rev. Matthew B. Riddle, D. D — The National Question Book and Hand-Book on the Sunday-School Lessons for 1878. By Rev. John E. Todd and Rev. M. B. Riddle, D. D.

— Little Pilgrim Question Book on the International Lessons for 1878. By Mrs. William Barrows.

— Lottie. By Mrs. M. F. Butts. — David Kent’s Ambition. By Joy Allison.

Davis, Bardeen, & Co., Syracuse : Syllabus of Lectures in Anatomy and Physiology for Students of the Normal and Training School at Cortland, New York. By T. B. Stowell, A. M. — The Philosophy of School Discipline,

Dodd, Mead, & Co., New York : A Knight of the Nineteenth Century. By Rev. E. P. Roe. — Lapsed, but not Lost. By the author of the SchönbergCotta Family. — The Harmony of the Reformed Confessions, as related to the Present State of Evangelical Theology. By Prof. Philip Schaff.

E. P. Dutton & Co., New York: Lectures on Preaching, delivered before the Divinity School of Yale College in January and February, 1877. By the Rev. Phillips Brooks. — Switzerland and the Swiss: Sketches of the Country and its Famous Men. By the author of The Knights of the Frozen Sea.

Edmonston & Co., Edinburgh : The Tragedy of Macbeth. Hamnet Edition. By Allan Park Paton.

Estes and Lauriat, Boston: Forbidden Fruit. From the German of F. W. Hackländer by Rosali Kaufman.

Freethought Publishing Company, London : The Religion of God and the Scientific Philosophy. By Joachim Kaspary, Humanitarian.

Ginn and Heath, Boston: The Parliment of Foules By Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary,by T. R. Lounsbury, Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College. S. C. Griggs, Chicago : Monday Chats. By C. A. Sainte-Beuve, of the French Academy. Selected and translated from the Causeries du Lundi, with an Introductory Essay on the Life and Writings of Sainte-Beuve by William Mathews, LL. D. — Hours with Men and Books. By William Mathews, LL. D.

Henry Hoyt, Boston : Sermons on the International Sunday-School Lessons for 1878. By the Monday Club. — Five Problems of State and Religion. By Will C. Wood, A. M.

Jansen, McClurg, & Co., Chicago: Rebecca; or A Woman’s Secret. By Mrs. Caroline Fairfield Corbin

Lee and Shepard, Boston : Charlotte von Stein. A Memoir. By George H. Calvert.

J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia: Elements of the Laws ; or, Outlines of the System of Civil and Criminal Laws in Force in the United States, and in the Several States of the Union. By Thomas L Smith, Late one the Judges of the Supreme Court of the State of Indiana. New and Revised Edition. — Voltaire. By Colonel Hamley. —The Cross above the Crescent. A Romance of Constantinople. By the Rt. Rev. Horatio Southgate, D. D.— New Ireland. By A. M. Sullivan, Member of Parliament for Louth. — Who and What. A Compendium of General Information. Compiled by Annah De Pui Miller.

Lockwood, Brooks, & Co., Boston: Life of Edward Norris Kirk, D. D. By David 0. Mears, A. M. —The Story of Creation. By S. M. Campbell, D. D.— Slices of Mother Goose. By Alice Parkman. Served with Sauce by Champ. — Harry Holbrooke of Holbrooke Hall. By Sir Randal H. Roberts, Bart. Illustrations by the Author.

D. Lothrop & Co., Boston : Voyage of the Steadfast. By William H. G. Kingston. — Miltiades Peterkin Paul. By John Brownjohn. With illustrations by L. Hopkins.

Macmillan & Go., New York : Womankind. By Charlotte Mary Yonge — Chrysomela. A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick. Arranged with Notes by Francis Turner Palgrave. — The Principles of Science. A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method.. By W. Stanley Jevons, LL. D., F. R. S. — Transcaucasia and Ararat, being Notes of a Vacation Tour in the Autumn of 1876. By James Bryce.

James R. Osgood & Co., Boston: Boston Monday Lectures. — Biology, with Preludes on Current Events. By Joseph Cook.— A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. By W. D. Howells. — Characteristics. By Thomas Carlyle. — Schiller. By Thomas Carlyle. — Favorite Poems. By Thomas Campbell.—Favorite Poems. By Robert Herrick

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Porter and Coates, Philadelphia: A Miracle in Stone ; or, The Great Pyramid of Egypt. By Joseph A. Seiss, D. D. — Proceedings of the Convention of the American Bankers’ Association, held at New York September 12, 13, and 14, 1877. — Dolly: A Love Story. By Frances Hodgson Burnett.— Music in the House By John llallah, LL. D.

Charles Potter, Sydney, Australia : Annual Report of the Department of Mines.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York: The World’s Progress. A Dictionary of Dates. Being a Chronological and Alphabetical Record of all Essential Facts in the Progress of Society, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time. Edited by Geo. P. Putnam, A. M. Revised and continued to August, 1877, by F. B. Perkins.—Economics, or the Science of Wealth. By Julian M. Sturtevant, D. D., LL. D.—Myths and Marvels of Astronomy. By Richard A. Proctor.—Money and Legal Tender in the United States. By H. R. Linderman, Director of the Mint. — Doubleday’s Children. By Dutton Cook.—The Flood of Years. By William Cullen Bryant. — History of French Literature. By Henri van Laun. III. From the End of the Reign of Louis XIV. till the End of the Reign of Louis Philippe.

— Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking. By Leslie Stephen. — Devil-Puzzlers, and Other Studies. By Frederick B. Perkins. A Blue - Stocking. ByMrs, Annie Edwards. — The Life of Count Oavour. From the French of Charles M. de Mazade. — Diana. By Susan Warner. — Ocean Note for Ladies. By K. R. L.

Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Indiana, being the Eighth Biennial Report.

Roberts Brothers, Boston: Last Series of Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty. — Discourses by John James Taylor. Late Principal of Manchester New College, London. — The Biography of Alfred de Musset. Translated from the French of Paul de Musset by Harriet W. Preston. — Sursum Corda. Hymns for the Sick and Suffering. Compiled by the Editor of Quiet Hours. — Will Denbigh, Nobleman. — Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner. By Edward L,. Pierce. Vols. 1 and 2.—The Fletcher Prize Essay, 1877. The Children of Light. By Rev. Wm. W. Faris. — Table-Talk. By A. Bronson Alcott.—Science of the Bible; or, An Analysis of the Hebrew Mythology, wherein it is shown that the Holy Scriptures treat of Natural Phenomena only. By Milton Woolley, M. D. Illustrated

Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., New York ; Modern Philosophy, from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann. By Francis Bowen, A. M. — The Earth as modified by Human Action. A new Edition of Man and Nature. By George P. Marsh. — The Beginnings of Christianity. With a View of the State of the Roman World at the Birth of Christ. By George P. Fisher, D. D. — The Final Philosophy or System of Perfectible Knowledge issuing from the Harmony of Science and Religion. By Charles Woodruff Shields, D. D. — Popular Science; or. The State, theoretically and practically considered. By Theodore D. Woolsey, lately President of Yale College. Two vols.—Faith and Philosophy: Discourses and Essays by Henry B. Smith, D, D., LL. D. Edited with an Introductory Notice by George L Prentiss, D. D. — Upper Egypt; Its People and its Products, By C. B. Klunzinger, M. D.

Sheldon & Co., New York. — A Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences, By Charles P. Krauth, S. T.D., LL.D. — The Science of Rhetoric. An Introduction to the Laws of Effective Discourse. By David J. Hill, — The Narrative of a BlockadeRunner. By J. Wilkinson, Captain in the Late Confederate States Navy.—Miss Misanthrope. A Novel By Justin McCarthy.

Smith, Elder, & Co., London : Renaissance in Italy. The Age of the Despots. by John Addington Symonds. —Renaissance in Italy. The Revival of Learning. By John Addington Symonds. — Renaissance in Italy. The Fine Arts. By John Addington Symonds.

Charles P. Somerby, New York : Through Rome on : A Memoir of Christian and Extra - Christian Experience. By Nathaniel Ramsay Waters.

Statistics of the American and Foreign Iron Trades. Annual Report of the Secretary of the American Iron and Steel Association.

The Fifty-Third Annual Report of the Officers of the Retreat for the Insane, at Hartford, Conn.

The International Conference on Education held at Philadelphia July 17 and 18, in Connection with the International Exhibition of 1876.

Peter G. Thomson, Cincinnati : Lotus Land, and Other Poems. By G. S. Ladson.

Trübner & Co., London: The Mount: Speech from its English Heights. By Thomas Sinclair, M. A.

Van Voorst, London: Zoölogical Record. By E. C. Rye.

W. J. Widdleton, New York : The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.