Comment on New Books
Literature and Criticism. The Macmillans have begun the issue of a series of what may be called forgotten English novels, — books which have a historic interest and some intrinsic value, but have not been kept steadily before the eye of the public. The series opens with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and The Absentee. Mrs. Ritchie furnishes an acceptable introduction which is a résumé of Miss Edgeworth’s career, and there are twoscore illustrations printed with the text, — illustrations in which the interest depends mainly on the composition, since delicacy of detail is forbidden by the conditions of paper and printing. The effect, however, is often very good, even in the matter of expression, and there is a freedom from over-refinement which is most agreeable. — Another number in the same series is Captain Marryat’s Japhet in Search of a Father, with an Introduction by David Hannay, and illustrations scarcely so good as those in the earlier volume. — McClurg & Co. (Chicago) have added to their Laurel Crowned Tales a translation of Paul and Virginia, with introduction, by Melville B. Anderson. Mr. Anderson adds distinctly to the interest of the book by his biographical and critical introduction. — Macmillan & Co. continue their issue of Dickens by the publication of Little Dorrit, with a preface by Charles Dickens’s son of the same name. The publication in a single book, on thin paper, forbids a very satisfactory reproduction of the illustrations ; otherwise the volume is an attractive one. — Messrs. J. M. Dent Co., London, have begun the issue of an edition of De Foe’s Romances and Narratives in sixteen volumes, of which three have reached us through Macmillan & Co., New York. These three comprise the whole of Robinson Crusoe, including the Serious Reflections and A Vision of the Angelic World. Mr. George A. Aitken, so well known by his life of Steele, edits the series, and furnishes an introduction which really introduces, providing also special introductions to the separate pieces. Mr. J. B. Yeats’s etched illustrations add but little to the distinction of the edition, but the paper, print, and binding are so good that one asks nothing further in the way of book-making. — Letters Addressed to a College Friend during the Years 1840-1845, by John Ruskin. (George Allen, London ; Macmillan, New York.) The Ruskin of the early forties talking unconstrainedly on paper to an intimate friend is the very Ruskin of later and ostensibly more formal occasions. His enthusiasm for Turner, for example, was never more vigorously expressed: “He is the epitome of all art, the concentration of all power ; there is nothing that ever artist was celebrated for that he cannot do better than the most celebrated.” And again, see another bending of the twig : “ I have not answered your conversation about the Church, because I sympathize completely in all you say, and I don’t see the use of answering unless you have to contradict something or somebody. What a stupid thing conversation would be without contradiction ! ” These are but two instances of the characteristic flavor of the letters, which must appeal to all the worshipers at Raskin’s shrine. — The Book-Bills of Narcissus, an Account Rendered, by Richard Le Gallienne. (Putnams.) This third edition of a book which, upon accepted principles, could not have been thought likely to prove popular, is enlarged by a chapter relating one of the schoolgirl love-passages in the career of Narcissus. It cannot contribute so much to one’s liking for the whole as a few of the original chapters, notably The Children of Apollo, a delightful analysis of the poetic temper, and That Thirteenth Maid, which shows Narcissus himself not so thoroughly a child of impulse as to fail of being a man. What is said in the last chapter of all about “ the new journalism ” might be amusingly connected with current remarks about Mr. Le Gallienne and “the new log-rolling;” yet would the book remain an uncommonplace and pleasurable work. — In Bohn’s Novelist’s Library (George Bell & Sons, London ; Macmillan, New York), Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle in two volumes and Roderick Random in one are reprinted with Cruikshank’s illustrations. It takes a pretty strong stomach to stand some of Smollett, but one brings away certain stout English characters, like Commodore Trunnion, for example, which are not willingly forgotten. — The pretty little series of The Lyric Poets (J. M. Dent & Co., London ; Macmillan, New York) is further enriched by a selection of the lyric poems of Robert Burns, edited, with an introduction, by Ernest Rhys. The introduction, which quotes liberally from Burns’s own account of himself, is pitched in a good key, and will please a lover of Burns. The brief notes accompanying the poems are to the point, and a glossary adds to the convenience of this choice book.— Gulliver’s Travels, with a Preface by Henry Craik, and one hundred illustrations by Charles E. Brock. (Macmillan.) A very dainty little edition, in which the artist has struggled successfully with the problem of how to make little and big help each other in proportion.— The Amateur Emigrant, from the Clyde to Sandy Hook, by Robert Louis Stevenson. (Stone & Kimball, Chicago.) This welltempered volume, coming almost as a posthumous work, gives one an admirable notion of Stevenson at his quietest. It is a delightful piece of English, and, with its skillful touches in portraiture and clever use of what to most would have been ordinary material, it shows the hand of a master who could play on his instrument, when his theme was a simple variation of a familiar air, in such a way as to deepen the significance of the familiar.
Fiction. The People of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard. (Longmans.) A “record of barefaced and flagrant adventure,” the author rails his tale, which follows the fortunes of a young Englishman who has lost, by his father’s misdeeds, ancestral home and worldly goods, and goes to Africa in quest of gold. How he, with the aid of a native dwarf and an old woman, rescues a beautiful girl from the clutches of the Yellow Devil, a notorious slave-trader, destroying the ruffian’s “nest ” and slaying his fellow-demons, is told with abundant vividness and force. To paint in too strong colors the horrors of slave-driving is beyond even Mr. Haggard’s power. But these stirring scenes are only the mild prelude to the journey in quest of the wondrous rubies and sapphires to be found in the city of the People of the Mist, and the so to speak breathless narrative of the strange and fearful haps and mishaps which befell the hero and his friends there. It can be confidently stated that no falling-off is discernible in the writer’s power of invention or skill as a raconteur. —Marsena, and Other Stories of the Wartime, by Harold Frederic. (Scribners.) Mr. Frederic’s “specialty,” aside from newspaper correspondence, seems to have become the writing of stories of the war, especially with relation to the men and women who stayed at home. His scene, in this book as in others, is laid in the Lemprière region of New York State, and a vivid memory of persons and sentiments that impressed his boyish mind gives a strong flavor of reality to what he writes. The resources of humor and pathos, moreover, are not beyond his reach. The exception to his rule of keeping the characters at home is found in the last portion of Marsena, the principal story of the book ; and there is a true element of the tragic, even if the situation is a trifle forced, in the picture of the foolish woman who has sent two brave admirers to the front, ignoring them both, in her capacity of sanitary nurse in a field hospital, that she may pay fatuous attentions to a picturesque officer far less seriously wounded than either of her former lovers. — Men Born Equal, by Harry Perry Robinson. (Harpers.) A showy piece of work with superficial excellences. The author has taken advantage of the attention drawn to strikes, especially as connected with politics, and has aimed to draw the character of a young enthusiast who represents the better element of the Democratic party, and makes great speeches in a fusion with the Populists. His course, misinterpreted, estranges for a time the affections of the heroine, whose father is a capitalist, and president of steel works and an electriccar company. A strike leads to violence ; troops are called out ; the hero, seeing how the baser elements of his party have been in collusion with the strikers, loses faith in it and swings off. Mr. Robinson has tried to do two things : tell a story, and show the folly of much of what is called the labor movement. Unfortunately, he fails to penetrate the difficult situation, and gives his treatment a partisan air. He does not convince, and makes the reader impatient at his inadequate handling of the subject ; his story, meanwhile, is a transparent one, with conventionally conceived characters. — Books in paper covers : A Traveller from Altruria, by W. R. Howells (Harpers); Martin Hewitt, Investigator, by Arthur Morrison (Rand, McNally & Co., Chicago) ; Uncle Sam’s Cabins, a Story of American Life Looking Forward a Century, by Benjamin Rush Davenport (Mascot Publishing Co., New York) ; Some EveryDay Folks, by Eden Phillpotts (Harpers) ; A Woman of Impulse, by Justin Huntly McCarthy (Putnams).
Books for the Young. Tales of the Punjab Told by the People, by Flora Annie Steel. With Illustrations by J. Lockwood Kipling, C. I. E., and Notes by R. C. Temple. (Macmillan.) These folk-tales have been collected by Mrs. Steel with infinite patience and care after many recitals of the same from various village story-tellers, the hearer meantime rejecting feeble, imperfect, or ill-remembered versions, and comparing and piecing together till she has obtained a coherent whole. Her object has been to secure “ a good story in what appears to be its best form ; but the tales have not been doctored in any way, not even in the language.” Of course variants of some old friends are to be found here, but in their present shape they are distinctly of India in tone and atmosphere. As a collection of fairy-tales the volume should please the most exacting little critic, while Major Temple’s admirable notes and appendices make it valuable to the folk-lorist. — To Greenland and the Pole, a Story of Adventure in the Arctic Regions, by Gordon Stables, M. D., R. N. (Scribners.) It is pleasant to meet with a story of adventure for boys that can be so heartily commended as this. Though there is no lack of exciting incidents, they are never of so improbable a sort as to verge on the impossible ; and indeed many of the Arctic experiences are drawn from the author’s own journals, The youthful heroes do not imperil their own lives, and others as well, by willfulness or insubordination, as is too much the habit of their contemporaries in similar American fiction, and the tone of the book throughout is wholesome and manly. It is a volume of generous dimensions, the scene shifting from Scotland and Norway to Greenland, and finally to the North Pole, — Nansen, “ the bravest of Arctic explorers,” to whom the tale is dedicated, being the prototype of the Captain Reynolds of the story. — Sea Yarns for Boys Spun by an Old Salt, by W. J. Henderson. (Harpers.) Yarns of the old-fashioned order, which do credit to the inventive power and lively imagination of their narrator. They are amusing after their kind, and not without cleverness. — The Spanish Pioneers, by Charles F. Lummis. (McClurg.) A lively, sometimes dogmatic narrative, in which Mr. Lummis tries to repair some damages inflicted on the Spanish character, and to set right our general conception as to the persons on both sides most concerned in the Spanish conquest of America. — The Story of Babette, a Little Creole Girl, by Ruth McEnery Stuart. (Harpers.) A juvenile romance, as stories of youthful life in New Orleans generally prove to be. The little heroine is a stolen child, who, however, soon falls into the hands of kind protectors, and at the age of eighteen is restored to her own people. It is, on the whole, a pleasantly written and interesting tale, and though it ends with a wedding, the preliminary love-making is wisely omitted. It should be said, too, that broken English and dialect are used with commendable moderation.
Gossip and Curiosities. Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs, by Anne Thackeray Ritchie. (Harpers.) From the time when the young daughter of a great novelist wrote The Story of Elizabeth and retold the old fairy-tales in modern fashion, her faithful readers have never missed from her work a peculiar charm which is nowhere more pervasive than in these delightful reminiscences. We find the graceful, leisurely style, sympathetic feeling, kindliness of tone, and gentle humor, which we know, on every page of the recollections of her childhood and early girlhood, here set down by the author. The story is divided between Paris •— the Paris of Louis Philippe and the second Republic — and London, with sketches of travel interspersed, giving everywhere most agreeable glimpses of personages often very distinguished, occasionally quite undistinguished, — the latter sometimes as admirable bits of portraiture as are to be found in the book. Personally, Thackeray has never been more pleasantly presented to the reading public than as the generous friend and ever-indulgent father of these records, — over-indulgent, the austere Miss Bronte apparently found him. The description of an evening reception where this lady, as the guest of honor, by her shyness froze into silence the clever company assembled ; the account of the household life in Young Street, of Weimar revisited, of the first delivery of the opening lecture on the English Humorists, — these passages, and others like them, will also serve as fragments of a memoir which is, to our loss, to remain unwritten. — Half a Century with Judges and Lawyers, by Joseph A. Willard. (Houghton.) The autobiographic sketch with which Mr. Willard introduces his volume is a piece of racy writing which will give the reader a pleasurable anticipation of the reminiscences which follow. The official relation which Mr. Willard holds does not seem to have impaired his independence in the least, and it is refreshing to observe the frankness with which he deals with public characters. Any one who knows the authoritative nature of Mr. Willard’s notebook will not question the accuracy of his memory. So abundant a collection of anecdotes may be expected to be uneven, but the judicious reader will do himself a service by taking the book as a dessert, and not as a full meal. Nuts and raisins are first rate, but they do not constitute a dinner. A minute index adds to the value of the collection. — In Old New York, by Thomas A. Janvier. (Harpers.) Even to one not remembering the first appearance of the papers that are comprised in this book, they would proclaim themselves unmistakably as magazine articles. They are written with the special design of interesting New York readers, and are provided with the aid of illustrations which as truly serve the same end. This is not to say that the articles, in the book, are incapable of interesting others than metropolitans. On the contrary, any one who knows New York at all must appreciate the charm of studies such as Mr. Janvier has made. As scratching the skin of a Russian shows what he is within, so these articles have a close enough relation to the New York of to-day to make more vivid the impressions of all the stages through which the city’s municipal and social growth has passed. — Wimples and Crisping Pins, Being Studies in the Coiffure and Ornaments of Women, by Theodore Child. (Harpers.) A handsomely bound and printed volume, liberally supplied with illustrations, mostly from the works of famous sculptors and painters, indicating some of the fashions of hair-dressing which prevailed from the days of ancient Egypt to the France of 1830. It is a rather desultory history, and the wimple is but slightly represented in comparison with the work of the crisping pin, which is curious, considering the long spaces of time when caps or headdresses, graceful, fantastic, or grotesque, nearly concealed the hair of most women. Although the letterpress is plainly written for the pictures, the author shows considerable enthusiasm for his subject, believing that “ coiffure is an art, — the chiefest of the decorative arts, inasmuch as its function is to adorn the most perfect of nature’s works, the beauty of woman.” It may be so ; but even in the not very comprehensive and usually favorable examples given here, the art in its most elaborate forms occasionally does its best to disfigure rather than adorn this beauty. — Early London Theatres [In the Fields], by T. Fairman Ordish, F. S. A. The Camden Library. (Macmillan, New York ; Elliot Stock, London.) An admirably arranged and also exceedingly readable summary of what is known (often very indefinitely and imperfectly) of the foundation and history of the first London playhouses. Priority belongs to The Theatre, built in the Fields north of the city in 1576, and followed closely, both in time and in situation, by The Curtain, while rival houses soon appeared on the Surrey side, probably one at Newington Butts, destined to be the scene of those successes of the young Shakespeare that roused the ire of Greene, The Rose, with which the poet had a brief connection, and others of less fame. A fresh and interesting contribution to dramatic history given in this book is the account of the constant warfare waged against the players by the London Corporation. Few of its readers, we imagine, will have realized how intense was the Puritan feeling among the citizens, even in the time of Elizabeth. The Queen and her Privy Council were on the side of the playhouses, but the victory by no means always rested with them. Though this is a theatrical, and not a literary history, it throws much light on the conditions under which were produced the plays of the great age of the English Drama, a subject none too well understood by the general reader. The story of the Globe and of the Blackfriars Theatre is reserved for another volume. —Colonial Days and Dames, by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton. With Illustrations by E. S. Holloway. (Lippincott.) Miss Wharton follows her pretty book Through Colonial Doorways with another, in which she takes a somewhat wider range from New England to the Southern colonies, though, naturally, she is most at home in Pennsylvania. The book does not profess to draw from unpublished sources, and is the rather light gleanings of an explorer who is looking chiefly for the footprints of women in our history. — Side Glimpses from the Colonial Meeting-House, by William Root Bliss. (Houghton.) Mr. Bliss has a somewhat similar air of gleaning, but his book is more distinctly a contribution to our historical knowledge ; for he has the instinct which takes him to the less familiar sources, and the sense of proportion which enables him to bring together the parts of his general subject duly. The study of this side of the New England character is intelligent, and often entertaining.— Roman Gossip, by Frances Elliot. (Murray, London.) Mrs. Minto Elliot’s recollections run back to the middle of the century, but apparently she does not rely on the advantages which her social position gave her to draw much at first hand. There is little, it is to be said, of her own reminiscences, but a potpourri of anecdote and narrative about such characters as the two Popes, Antonelli, Rossini, Garibaldi, Torlonia, the Buonapartes, as with true English obstinacy she calls them, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, and others. There is not much esprit in the book, but much of goodnatured comment, which sounds better in conversation than in literature.
History and Biography. The fourth and final volume of the new illustrated edition of J. R. Green’s A Short History of the English People (Harpers) covers the period from 1679 to 1815, with an epilogue summarizing the later part of the century. The scheme of the edition by which illustrations are drawn from actual objects, portraits, and the like is consistently carried out, though we question whether the general reader will greatly care for the large number of medals, and think he would gladly have seen other facsimiles, such as a page of The Spectator or the handwriting of Wellington. The illustrations, especially the portraits, serve in many instances to supplement the text: thus there are portraits of Pope and Addison, when their names do not appear in the text, if we may trust a cursory examination and the index, though the index is too meagre for a book of such extent. — The Crusades, the Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, by T. A. Archer and Charles L. Kingsford. The Story of the Nations Series. (Putnams.) Not often does a history told in outline present so many excellent qualities as are to be found in this work. Despite the necessarily severe condensation, the story is neither bald nor colorless ; for the authors, having a thorough mastery of their subject, do not fail to distinguish between events of greater and less importance, so that the narrative, comprehensive as it is, never degenerates into a mere enumeration of facts, but is continuously interesting. From history and romance the general story of the Crusades is tolerably familiar, but that forms only a portion of this work, which also gives due consideration to the causes and effects of those great movements, subjects imperfectly understood even by wellinformed readers, while its clear summary of the annals of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem will prove especially enlightening. The illustrations are numerous, and so very well selected that the descriptive list of them prefixed to the volume is welcome. — Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic, by J. L. Strachan-Davidson, M. A. Heroes of the Nations Series. (Putnams.) It is a subject for congratulation that the Life of Cicero, in a popular series, should have fallen into such peculiarly competent hands. The book is as readable as it is scholarly, and, the latter fact being self-evident, the writer has wisely economized the space at his disposal by refraining from controversy, and rarely straying from narration to criticism. Not that he leaves us in any uncertainty as to his feeling regarding Cæsarism, or his sympathy with the last struggles of the defenders of the republic. The materials for the biography are, of course, largely drawn from Cicero’s own writings, especially front that confidential correspondence which has made him the most intimately known of all the ancients, and, while it has unveiled his weaknesses to his detractors, has raised for him friends and lovers in every succeeding generation. The illustrations do not add greatly to the value of the work, and are not always particularly relevant. — The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, Written by Himself. In two volumes. (Scribners.) Mr. Sala has been entertaining the public so long with his comment on contemporaneous affairs, with the sauce piquante of his own personality, that it is at first a little difficult to see how he can make out two stout octavos afresh ; but the matter is explained when one notes that the point of view is shifted. It is now Mr. Sala who is the principal, and events and other personages the incidental. There is much that is amusing in this narrative, much more that is trivial, but the whole is not a bad portrait by himself of the modern personal journalist. A great many other persons besides Mr. Sala are mentioned in the work, and a few are hit off with something like characterization, but no portrait is drawn with so many touches as his own. — Josiah Wedgwood, F. R. S., his Personal History, by Samuel Smiles. (Harpers.) Mr. Smiles had in Wedgwood a most sympathetic subject. Here was an Englishman who struggled against all sorts of odds, held bravely to his purpose, and achieved most significant success. Moreover, he was connected with a group of interesting people, and beauty was made useful in his art. Then we have the narrative told in a succession of short sentences which march in an orderly, cheerful maimer to the end of the book. — The Buccaneers of America. A True Account of the most Remarkable Assaults committed of late Years upon the Coasts of the West Indies by the Buccaneers of Jamaica and Tortuga (both English and French), wherein are contained more especially the Unparalleled Exploits of Sir Henry Morgan, our English Jamaican Hero, who sacked Porto Bello, burnt Panama, etc. By John Esquemeling, one of the Buccaneers who was Present at those Tragedies. (Imported by Scribners.) The original narrative in Dutch was rendered into English in 1684, and is here reprinted, with an introduction by Henry Powell, and accompanied by contemporary maps and engravings. We are not likely to miss the adventures of the West Indian piratical folk, and it would seem somewhat discouraging to modern story-tellers who affect this period to find the original narratives so racy as they are. — Newton Booth of California, his Speeches and Addresses. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Lauren E. Crane. (Putnams.) A singular compound of biography and writings and speeches : first a chapter of Mr. Booth’s orations and addresses; then a chapter of his political life, especially as Governor of California and United States Senator ; then a chapter of lectures ; and finally a group of his contributions to magazines and newspapers. The career is one worth analyzing. — Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries, by Dr. M. Kayserling. Translated by Charles Gross. (Longmans.)—Mr. Fish and the Alabama Claims, a Chapter in Diplomatic History, by J. C. Bancroft Davis. (Houghton.)
Religion, Ethics, and Theology. As Others Saw Him. A Retrospect. A. D. 54. (Houghton.) A narrative, clearly conceived, supposed to be written by one of the ruling Jews, who had something of the spirit of Nicodemus, but who stopped short of Nicodemus’s faith, and ruminated sadly afterward over the way things went. The writer, who conceals his name, is clearly a man of literary power, a sincere man also, and so far in sympathy with modern Judaism that he may be taken as honestly wishing to know how an ancient Jew with the disposition of a modern one might have looked on Jesus, when he was neither an arrogant and obstinate Pharisee, nor a disciple, nor an indifferent Sadducee. The result is a fresh contribution to a great subject. — Faith-Healing, Christian Science, and Kindred Phenomena, by J. M. Buckley, LL. D. (Century Co.) The writer has less sympathy for the logic of Christian Science than for the other themes with which he deals, such as Somnambulism and Presentiments. The history and philosophy of the various influences from the unseen world are, however, set forth in a manner bespeaking no superficial study of the subjects. — A more recent book which may be mentioned here is Annie Payson Call’s As a Matter of Course. (Roberts.) Without using the terminology of any school of “ healers,” it calls upon men and women, especially when subject to nervous strains, to follow the paths of simplicity and nature, to do the things which should be done by normal persons “as a matter of course.” There is much truth in the book, if not quite all the freshness of the writer’s Power Through Repose.— The Government of God in Relation to the Evolution of Man, by William Woods Smyth. (Elliot Stock, London.) A new edition of a work published a dozen years ago, in which the author seeks to array what may be called the Bible as interpreted by an Evangelical against the prevalent doctrines of the evolutionists. — The Johannine Theology, a Study of the Doctrinal Contents of the Gospel and Epistles of the Apostle John, by George B. Stevens. (Scribners.) A companion volume to the author’s treatise on the Pauline Theology, with which indeed he compares this briefly in a closing chapter. Professor Stevens represents an interesting order of theologians, a man well versed in the literature of the subject, yet using independently a method of his own, — a method which may be characterized as direct and free from subtlety, an honest, face-to-face view. — Bible, Science, and Faith, by J. A. Zahm. (John Murphy & Co., Baltimore.) An interesting examination of the relation of science to faith, by a man of science who is also a devout adherent to the Roman Catholic faith. The book will have special interest from the free use which Dr. Zahm makes of patristic literature, a contribution not generally made by Protestant apologists. — The Life and Teachings of Jesus, a Critical Analysis of the Sources of the Gospels, together with a Study of the Sayings of Jesus, by Arthur Kenyon Rogers. (Putnams.) A book with an irritating tone of reasonableness about it, a calm assumption of individual judgment as to what is real and what legendary in the Biblical narrative ; yet the writer succeeds often in making suggestions of value. — The Gospel of Paul, by Charles Carroll Everett. (Houghton.) Dr. Everett, with a frankness which is most agreeable, introduces himself to the reader as one who has found a new interpretation of Paul’s doctrine of the atonement, and has found it, moreover, not in a logical conception into which the apostle’s words fit, but in an induction from the words themselves. He makes an interesting point when he shows that the writings of Paul are not strictly systematic, since they were addressed to persons who already accepted the doctrine which he held ; and thus Dr. Everett seeks to reconstruct the gospel of Paul by putting himself in the position of a hearer of it, and inquiring into Paul’s historical relation to Judaism and to Christianity. — The Witness to Immortality in Literature, Philosophy, and Life, by George A. Gordon. (Houghton.) A study of the doctrine of immortality as discoverable in Hebrew writings, the poetry and philosophy of the world, the argument of Paul, and the life and doctrine of the Christ. The plan is fresh, the cumulative argument is well managed, the writer has earnestness and a somewhat prolix eloquence. The treatment is so varied that the force of the presentation is greatly increased, since one looks at the subject now in this light, now in that.— The Monism of Man, or The Unity of the Divine and Human, by David Allyn Gorton. (Putnams.) — The sixth volume of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church contains the Letters and Select Works of St. Jerome, translated by Canon Fremantle, with the aid of the Rev. G. Lewis and the Rev. W. G. Hartley. (The Christian Literature Co., New York.)
Sociology. Wealth against Commonwealth, by Henry Demurest Lloyd. (Harpers.) A spirited recital of what the author believes to be the story of the concentration of industrial power in the hands of a few men and corporations. He fortifies his narrative with many citations from government documents and authoritative statements. Perhaps the tone of a zealous special pleader which characterizes the volume from the start is necessary to arouse attention, but the reader who is desirous of studying carefully the great questions which cause the book will hardly be satisfied with so entirely ex parte a judgment. It is something to be thankful for that Mr. Lloyd, after telling this story of gigantic oppression, does not lose one whit his confidence in the final victory of the commonwealth.