Comment on New Books

History and Biography. The Journal of a Spy in Paris during the Reign of Terror, January—July, 1794, by Raoul Hesdin. (Harpers.) Nothing is known of Raoul Hesdin except what may be gathered from this fragment of his diary. He was certainly an Englishman of some education, who had lived much in France, receiving there the training for his calling, that of an engraver. The editor also assumes, on rather insufficient evidence, that he was one of Pitt’s secret agents. Be that as it may, he was a very intelligent and shrewd observer, whose sympathies were as much French as English, and his journal is exceedingly interesting. It may not tell anything that is absolutely new, but it has a distinct individuality, and often some brief entry gives us a quite fresh realization of the horror of those months, and of the hideous grotesqueness as well. His feelings in regard to the Committee of Public Safety and its doings are those of a man of ordinary humanity and some political sense, who carried his life in his hand in the “ blood-dripping city.” To calmly philosophize on the Terror requires a good deal of distance in space and time. In view of later progress, or retrogression, whichever we may please to think it, the record of the smallest of his miseries is curious and amusing, — there are many side-lights of this kind in the diary : “The disgusting habit of smoking tobacco in all the coffee-houses poisons me. It was formerly the mode to do so only in the lowest cabarets ; it was regarded as a mark of vulgarity and boorishness. I find many of the patriot fashions difficult to assume, but this one impossible, and shall no doubt soon become suspect in consequence.” — The Journal of Countess Françoise Krasinska,Great-Grandmother of Victor Emmanuel, translated from the Polish by Kasimir Dziekonska. (McClnrg.) This journal is given without introduction of any kind, and we are left in doubt as to whether it is a genuine diary or an unusually clever bit of historical fiction. In either case it is a charming book, presenting a vivid picture of the life, still feudal, in a noble Polish household in the middle of the eighteenth century, as seen by the bright eyes of a naïve but quickwitted girl, who also interests us in connection with the history of our own time by the fact that her only child was the mother of Charles Albert, and thus the ancestress of the kings and queen of United Italy. A portrait of the countess, after Angelica Kauffmann, serves as frontispiece to the attractive little volume. *— Bayard Taylor, by Albert H. Smyth. (Houghton.) A number in the American Men of Letters Series, and a well-considered survey of Taylor’s fruitful life and of his place in literature. Mr. Smyth has been able to speak more openly on some points than was expedient in the authoritative Life and Letters, and he has gleaned after that book a number of interesting facts and opinions. The extent of Taylor’s industry is graphically indicated, and the relation which Taylor’s several literary enterprises held to his thought and purpose is intimated with a due sense of proportion. Altogether the book is a good reflex of the man. — Townsend Harris, First American Envoy in Japan, by William Elliot Griffis. (Houghton.) Mr. Harris’s Japanese journal, which occupies most of this volume, is a plain, unvarnished tale, yet has all the fascination which attaches to the narrative of a maker of history written during the process of making. The account of innumerable conferences with Japanese officials, extending over a period of about a year and a half, shows how long and how arduous was the campaign of education which Mr. Harris conducted against the duplicity and procrastination of a people who were wholly ignorant of the law of nations. The journal is valuable not only for the historical facts which it records, but also as showing the allconquering power of one man’s patience, perseverance, vigilance, and shrewdness, assisting a personality of great force, unfailing dignity, and the strictest integrity. Here and there are glimpses of out-of-door Japan which tell us that Mr. Harris had an eye for the beauties of nature as well as for treaties. That there are but few observations on the manners and customs of the Japanese will not surprise the reader, who will see how limited were Mr. Harris’s opportunities, He saw almost nothing of the common people, and his relations with the officials were necessarily confined to a more or less formal interchange of courtesies. The story of Townsend Harris’s life before and after his treaty-winning mission is told by Dr. Griffis, who has also supplied many illuminating footnotes to the journal.

Literature. The Entail, or The Lairds of Grippy, has appeared in the new edition of Galt’s (selected) works, edited by D. Storrar Meldrum. (Roberts.) This record of the fortunes, and still more of the humors of three generations of the Walkinshaw family is almost in its author’s best vein throughout. Its homely realism is seldom marred by the introduction of those romantic and sensational episodes that show Galt at his worst, though perhaps his limitations, even in his own range, are more evident here than in any other of his novels of equal importance. Though the old laird and his half-witted son are hardly less noteworthy character-studies, most readers, we imagine, will agree with Mr. Crockett in finding the altogether excellent presentment of the Leddy Grippy the crowning merit of the book, and will understand why Lord Byron should have read the history of her household three times over for her sake. — Marryat’s Peter Simple, illustrated by J. Ayton Symington, has been added to Macmillan’s Standard Novels. Mr, David Hannay, in his admirable introduction, agrees, we think justly, with the popular estimate of this tale, as on the whole its writer’s best, and aptly sums up the matter in this sound bit of criticism : “ Marryat wrote Peter Simple because he was full of the subject, while in later times he was compelled to get up the subject because he wanted to write a book,” — Sybil, or The Two Nations, illustrated by F. Pegram, has also been brought out in this series. Disraeli was the inventor as well as the greatest artificer of the political novel, and of his works of this class Sybil is perhaps the best ; certainly it is the sincerest in feeling. The essay in which Mr. H. D. Traill introduces this romance, now half a century old, to its new readers is an excellent commentary on the novel, and also, in part, on its author’s position as a novelist. — The Standard Novels continues the republication of Peacock’s tales in a volume containing Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey; the first being the writer’s earliest essay in story-telling after that new fashion — at least in English — which was to prove in many ways peculiar to himself, though undoubtedly, as Mr. Saintsbury points out, Marmontel’s Contes Moraux served as his models. Nightmare Abbey, his third book in point of time, shows the great advance made by the author in the interval, and his emancipation from his French master. Indeed, in comparison, Headlong Hall seems but ’prentice work. (Macmillan.)— Two new numbers of the Temple Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus, have been issued. (Dent, London; Macmillan, New York.) Frequent use of these volumes confirms our opinion that they are edited with singularly good taste and reticence. —The Arden Shakespeare is the general title of a group of books included in Heath’s English Classics (D. C. Heath & Go., Boston), and, so far as we have received them, limited to As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Cæsar, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Richard II. They are edited by different English scholars upon a conservative plan which looks especially toward what may be called a literary apprehension of the dramas. The several editors plainly regard the student as wishing to know his Shakespeare as Shakespeare, and not as a curious Elizabethan writer who forgot his grammar and remembered his dictionary. — The neat People’s Edition of Tennyson (Macmillan) has advanced two more numbers, one occupied with Will Waterproof and Other Poems, the other with a portion of The Princess. — The latest volume in Macmillan’s edition of Dickens contains A Tale of Two Cities aud The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The introductions, by Dickens’s son, are interesting, especially as regards the latter tale. For one thing, he disposes authoritatively of the notion that Wilkie Collins had anything to do with a Continuation of Edwin Drood.

Poetry and the Drama. The New Poems, by Christina Rossetti, which her brother William has collected, arranged, and annotated (Macmillan), make one very eager to have a full and well-ordered collection of all her poems. A taste for her verse is partly acquired, partly inborn, to certain natures. It can scarcely be expected that her work will ever be largely popular, yet it contains just that bouquet of religion which is so rare in Protestant poetry, and so grateful to those who have otherwise to content themselves with the few really beautiful hymns. — King’ Arthur, a Drama in a Prologue and Four Acts, by J. Comyns Carr. (Macmillan.) In the old-fashioned phrase, this is a drama rather for the stage than the closet ; which is not to affirm that it cannot be read with pleasure by others than those to whom it recalls a very agreeable theatrical experience. For, aside from its dramatic virtues, it is always poetic in feeling, if sometimes halting in expression ; and, in view of the character and aims of most contemporary stage literature, it excites gratitude that there is still a dramatist who will write a play like this, and a manager who will worthily produce it. — A New Library of Poetry and Song, edited by William Cullen Bryant. With his Review of Poets and Poetry from the Time of Chaucer. Revised and enlarged with Recent Authors, and containing a Dictionary of Poetical Quotations. (Fords, Howard & Hulbert.) The new poets and their accompanying illustrations are a distinct addition to the book, both in practical value and in appearance. — The Year Book of The Pegasus. (J. B. Lippiucott Co.) The first publication of the Pegasus Club of Philadelphia, with poems by twenty-one members. — Wayside Poems, by Wallace Bruce. (Harpers.) —Fact and Fancy, Humorous Poems, by Cupid Jones. (Putnams.) — The New World, with Other Verse, by Louis James Block. (Putnams.)—The Legend of Aulus, by Flora Macdonald Shearer. (William Doxey, San Francisco.) — Leaves of the Lotos, by David Banks Sickels. (J. Selwin Tait & Sons, New York.) —Volunteer Grain, by Francis F. Browne. (Way & Williams, Chicago.)—Acrisius, King of Argos, and Other Poems, by Horace Eaton Walker. (George I. Putnam Co., Claremont, N. H.) — Washington, or The Revolution, a Drama, by Ethan Allen. In Two Parts. Part Second. (F. Tennyson Neely, Chicago).

Fiction. My Lady Nobody, by Maarten Maartens. (Harpers.) The Dutch gentleman who, under the pen name of Maarten Maartens, has in the last few years won an honorable position among English novelists, gives us in this story another of his realistic studies of life in Holland, in this ease primarily that of a noble family of cultivated and, to their sorrow, costly tastes, as it is affected by the existence of the pretty, selfreliant daughter of the Dominé of the village near the manor-house. It is a book for a leisurely reader, for it is very long, and its effects are produced by careful elaboration and numberless minute touches. But, large as is the stage, it is overcrowded with characters, and there are certain persons, and episodes in which they play their parts, mainly humorous after very conventional patterns, that could easily have been spared, as the few puppets incommode the living actors in the drama. — Kitwyk Stories, by Anna Eichberg King. (Century Co.) There is little kinship, even by descent, between Mr. Maartens’s men and women and the denizens of Mrs. King’s eighteenth-century Dutch village. Vivid descriptive touches here and there depict such a little town and the surrounding country faithfully enough, but the place is used for its picturesque effect, and the people find their prototypes in the world of Diedrich Knickerbocker. The book is well illustrated, and its blue-and-white cover attractively simulates old Delft ware. — The Chronicles of Count Antonio, by Anthony Hope. (Appletons.) Notwithstanding the ingenuity and inventive power shown in devising the numerous thrilling adventures which befall Count Antonio, a gentleman whose character displays a curious blending of fourteenth and nineteenth century qualities, his history, except perhaps to boy readers, is on the whole rather dull, — a new word to use in connection with Anthony Hope. This is partly because of the manner of the supposed narrator, a prolix old monk, who proves himself a bore very speedily. In brief, the mediævalism of the tale is of an extremely artificial kind ; and as to its adventurous element, there are certain writers, dear to youth, who can do that sort of thing nearly as well. — Corruption, by Percy White. (Appletons.) Certain episodes in the history of Paul Carew, M. P., the well-born and brilliant leader of one of the subdivisions of the Radical party, who ruins his career for the love of a friend’s wife. The story of this passion, with its political underplot, is told with a good deal of cleverness, the cleverness of a well-equipped journalist. But neither the portrait of the distinguished and corrupt hero, nor the still more carefully elaborated one of the woman who is at once his victim and his enslaver, has any real vitality. The devoted and rather commonplace wife of the one and the honest, simple-minded husband of the other, two merely subsidiary characters, are much more livingand veracious. — A Hard Woman, a Story in Scenes, by Violet Hunt. (Appletons.) Miss Hunt is as yet but a far-off follower of Gyp, but she has the gift of writing bright, vivacious, pointed dialogue, a certain skill in characterization, and sometimes a touch of genuine dramatic power, together with several grains of that cynical, worldly-wise smartness which is one of the literary fashions of the day. Lydia Monday, with her easy success, superficial cleverness, and very real shallowness, egotism, and folly, is an extremely disagreeable, but a sufficiently lifelike personage, and the history of her downward career is steadily interesting. The good man who is so unfortunate as to be her husband is by no means drawn with so sure and strong a hand. —A Man and his Womankind, by Nora Vynné. (Holt.) The story of a young man who is petted and spoiled by his mother and sister, and later by his wife, — the first two sacrificing themselves for years to keep family troubles from his knowledge ; their reward being, of course, his anger and contempt when he discovers that he has been treated as a child. We said it was his story, but in fact it is only a fragment of it, for long before it is finished the book ends. This is the more unpardonable because we feel perfectly confident that the author could have brought it successfully to its natural conclusion. It is in truth a clever and entertaining, if incomplete sketch. But why should so sensible a writer indulge in the petty affectation of transforming her hero’s and heroine’s not very unusual names into Cedic and Cicily ?—College Girls, by Abbe Carter Goodloe. (Scribners.) Fourteen stories of the chipping shell order. The reader who wishes to get an insight into the actual life of college girls will be disappointed, for the writer is more eager to get her girls out of college into the world than to make careful studies of the interior. Her attempt at reproducing the young collegian’s brother is equally futile. There is a disagreeable air of knowingness about the book, — her young women are of the world, and not in it ; the fiction seems to be built on other fiction, and that the clever, not the great fiction ; in short, it is a book to make the judicious grieve, and to raise doubts as to the contribution to literature to be expected from women’s colleges.—Cherryfield Hall, an Episode in the Career of an Adventuress, by Frederic Henry Balfour. (Putnams.) A partly sensational, and partly, in intention, humorous tale, of very ordinary quality both in plot and in characterization. That the preposterous heroine should, without visible qualifications, and apparently with perfect ease, obtain an exceptionally desirable position as governess in a county family, will put to a severe strain the credulity of even the uncritical novel-devourer. — Uncle Remus, his Songs and his Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris. New and Revised Edition, with One Hundred and Twelve Illustrations by A. B. Frost. (Appletons.) One likes to have pictures of his old friends, and the reader is convinced that these portraits of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Tarrvpin, Brer Bar, and the rest are as authentic as they are amusing. But where are Miss Meadows en de gals? Possibly Mr. Frost is as much in the dark about them as Uncle Remus left the little boy.

Nature and Travel. Constantinople, by Edwin A. Grosvenor, with an Introduction bv General Lew Wallace. In two volumes. Illustrated. (Roberts.) By the time one has reached the seven hundred and eightysixth page of these two octavo volumes, — by no means an arduous task. — and indeed long before that, he is ready to agree with Professor Grosvenor that Constantinople is one of the most interesting cities in the world ; and this in spite of the fact that the author’s interest in the city is restricted almost entirely to its architecture and antiquities, and to the historical associations which are connected with nearly every rod of its territory. If the reader wishes to learn about modern life in Constantinople, he had better turn elsewhere ; but even if he takes up this book under a misapprehension, he will have no regrets, nor will he be likely to put it away before he has read it through. After chapters on the three epochs of Byzantian history, — Greek, Roman, and Turkish, — on the rise of the Ottomans, and on the present Sultan, comes the main body of the work, a description of the city from the archæologist’s and historian’s point of view. Professor Grosvenor illuminates his text with an abundance of tradition and myth. He is possessed by a fine enthusiasm which removes his book as far as possible from a mere repository of facts and legends ; and if it leads him occasionally into extravagances of statement, as where he assures us that the view from the tower of Galata is unsurpassed on this globe, yet it never degenerates into gush. There are many interesting illustrations, chiefly from photographs, and a few useful maps and plans. — Missouri Botanical Garden, Sixth Annual Report. ( Published by the Board of Trustees, St. Louis.) Besides the formal reports of officers and director, this volume contains five valuable scientific papers. An interesting instance of the interdependence of plants and animals is shown by Mr. Herbert J. Webber in his Studies on the Dissemination and Leaf Reflexion of Yucca aloifolia. This species of Florida yucca has adapted its fruit to meet, the wants of the mocking-bird, who fulfills his part of the bargain by sowing the seed. The larva of a moth also assists in the dissemination, taking its pay in the shape of food and lodging. — The Evolution of Horticulture iu New England, by Daniel Denison Slade. (Putnams.) A dainty little book, which gives a history of the practice of gardening from the earliest times in the colonies, rather than an account of the growth and development of methods of cultivation and arrangement. The author quotes liberally from the old writers.