D. Appleton & Company's New Books THE STORY OF THE RAILROAD. By CY WARMAN, author of "The Express Messenger," etc. A new volume in THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES, edited by RIPLEY HITCHCOCK. With maps and many illustrations by B. WEST CLINEDINST and from photographs. Uniform with "The Story of the Cowboy, "The Story of the Mine," and "The Story of the Indian." 12mo, cloth, $1.50. This book, which follows "The Story of the Cowboy" in this series, pictures the building of the earlier transcontinental lines across the true West. It tells the story of the engineer who found the way and who was the pioneer of permanent civilization among the Indians and buffalo of the plains and in the mountains. Historically, the book is valuable because it gives a comprehensive sketch of a great subject in a brief compass, and, furthermore, the strange and picturesque phases of life which are depicted are full of immediate interest. A New Volume in the "Concise Knowledge Library." The thoroughness and compactness of this well-digested and comprehensive work render it invaluable as a convenient book of reference. The American edition has brought the history of our own country down to the close of the war with Spain. SPANISH LITERATURE. By JAMES FITZ-MAURICE KELLY, Member of the Spanish Academy. A new volume in THE LITERATURES OF THE WORLD SERIES, edited by EDMUND GOSSE. Uniform with "Ancient Greek Literature,”** French Literature," ** Modern English Literature," and "Italian Literature." 12mo, cloth, $1.50. "This is an excellent and model hand-book. It is treated with perspective and proportion; it is comprehensive, clear, concise, yet not dry as dust; the judgments are judicial, impartial, and well on the hither side of exaggeration; the style is good, lucid, and interesting. It is a work well done by one who has a thorough grip of his subject, and has thought out its essentials before he set pen to paper."— London Academy. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1763-1783. Being chapters and passages relating to America from the author's History of England in the Eighteenth Century." By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY, M.P., author of "The History of European Morals,"" Democracy and Liberty," " 'Rationalism in Europe," etc. Arranged and Edited, with Historical and Biographical Notes, by JAMES ALBERT WOODBURN, Professor of American History and Politics in Indiana University. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. Appletons' Home - Reading Books. OUR COUNTRY'S FLAG AND THE FLAGS OF FOREIGN HISTORIC BOSTON AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. By THE SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS OF THOMAS Edited by Prof. MICHAEL FOSTER, M.A., M.D., LL.D., By Prof. JOHN TROWBRIDGE, of Harvard University, author of "What is Electricity?" etc. Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, $1. IMPORTANT NEW NOVELS. DAVID HARUM. A Story of American Life. By EDWARD NOYES WESTCOTT. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. "Mr. Westcott has created a new and interesting type. We are led into a bright and sunny, although quaint, atmosphere. David Harum' is a character entirely unlike those we have had from Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, or any of the English school. He is distinctly American, and yet his portrayal has awaited the hand of Mr. Westcott, in spite of the activity of Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, and others. . . . The writer has large knowledge of men and things. It is only when they are presented in such a bright and original light that we realize some of the things which are passing around us. A pleasing portrait of Newport life is incidentally painted for us in words that flash back the color of the various parts, and Newport means more (or less) than it did before.... The character sketching and building, so far as 'David Harum' is concerned, is well-nigh perfect. . . . The book is wonderfully bright, readable, and graphic."-New York Times. A HERALD OF THE WEST. An American Story of 1811-1815. By J. A. ALTSHELER, author of A Soldier of Manhattan" and "The Sun of Saratoga." 12mo, cloth, $1.50. "Mr. Altsheler has suddenly leaped almost to first place among writers of American historical romance. . . . 'A Herald of the West" is a romance of our history which has not been surpassed in dramatic force, vivid coloring, and historical interest. In these days when the flush of war has only just passed, the book ought to find thousands of readers, for it teaches patriotism without intolerance, and it shows, what the war with Spain has demonstrated anew, the power of the American people when they are deeply roused by some great wrong." San Francisco Chronicle. HER MEMORY. By MAARTEN MAARTENS, author of "God's Fool," "The THE PHANTOM ARMY. By MAX PEMBERTON. Uniform with "Kronstadt." Illus trated. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. Mr. Pemberton has written a romantic novel characterized by continued and increasing interest and stirring adventures. His hero, an English soldier of fortune, is enrolled through a strange series of incidents, in the "Phantom Army," which has its stronghold in the mountains of Spain, like certain of the Carlist bands of a few years since. The picturesqueness and dramatic quality of the tale will find immediate favor with readers. Maxwell Gray's New Novel. THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN TREASURE. A Novel. By MAXWELL GRAY, author of "The Silence of "The Silence of Dean Maitland' was a very popular novel, and we cannot see why The House of Hidden Treasure' should not rival the success of its forerunner."- The London Spectator. CONCERNING ISABEL CARNABY. By ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER. 12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50c. No. 252, "Appletons' Town and Country Library." "Concerning Isabel Carnaby is beyond doubt a book to be read. It is a book with a great deal of fresh and interesting observation in it; the leading characters are really studied, and the detail is obviously from life. Miss Fowler has sympathy and understanding, and her range is a wide one. She can describe a Nonconformist circle in the provinces, and pass from that to society and politics in London, or house parties in the country, and seem equally at home in all of them. She writes without malice, yet with shrewdness and humor."- Westminster Gazette. LATITUDE 19°. A Romance of the West Indies in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Twenty. Being a faithful account and true of the painful adventures of the Skipper, the Bo's'n, the Smith, the Mate, and Cynthia. By Mrs. SCHUYLER CROWNINSHIELD, author of Where the Trade Winds Blow." Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. (Ready shortly.) These books are for sale by all Booksellers, or they will be sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers, D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 72 Fifth Ave., New York. THE DIAL A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information. THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by draft, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to PAGE 289 291 293 295 297 299 300 . . . 301 RECENT FICTION. William Morton Payne BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS . 306 309 309 310 310 HAROLD FREDERIC. American fiction could ill afford to lose so good a writer as Harold Frederic, who died at Henley, England, on the nineteenth of October. His reputation as a novelist was hardly more than ten years old, but it was firmly fixed, and we had come to think of him as one of our foremost story-tellers, as one to the growth of whose powers there was no readily assignable limit. That he should have been taken away in the very prime of life for he had only completed his forty-second year is of itself a happening sufficiently tragic, and the tragedy becomes heightened by what is reported of the circumstances under which he died, for the despatches state that he had fallen into the hands of those fanatics who deny the efficacy of the scientific treatment of disease, and that he was refused the medical attendance which might, it is claimed, have averted the disaster of his early death. If this be true, a heavy indictment lies against those who were responsible for the neglect, and they stand condemned morally even if they are beyond the reach of the civil law. Harold Frederic was born on a farm in central New York, August 19, 1856, of an ancestry in which English, French, and Dutch elements were commingled. His childhood was familiar with poverty, and his schooling ended with his fourteenth year. Forced thus to become a selfeducated man, his subsequent career gave evidence once more of the truth which some seek to minimise or even to deny — that education is none the less education because a man gets it by his own unaided efforts that the education gained in this strenuous way may be of a more solid kind than that attested by a parchment certificate. After a few years of employment, first as office-boy, then as draughtsman, then as retoucher of photographic negatives, Frederic found himself landed in journalism, and speedily made his way to the front. At twenty-four, he was one of the editors of the Utica "Observer," at twenty-six, he became editor of the Albany "Evening Journal," at twenty-eight, he was engaged by the New York "Times," and sent to London, as correspondent for that newspaper. Since 1884, then, his career has been public property, and we are now left sadly wondering at the position he created for himself during the last fourteen years of his life, and at the amount of serious work that he had accomplished before he died. It was, we believe, in this first year of his English life, that we first saw the name Harold Frederic in print. It was signed to a short paper in the "Pall Mall Gazette," written "by an American in London," and devoted to an account of the condition of literary affairs in the United States. We well remember ask ing ourselves who this man could be, whose name was wholly unfamiliar, yet who wrote with so much assurance and intelligent grasp of his subject. It was not until some three years later that the name again attracted our attention, when it was attached to a striking story called "Seth's Brother's Wife," which began to appear serially in one of the magazines. From this time on which amounts to saying for the past ten years the name has been well known to all American readers, and has come to stand for good literary work, conscientiously performed, in whatever field of activity its owner might choose to engage. As a correspondent, Mr. Frederic's work has become very widely known indeed during recent years. His London letters, printed in a number of our leading newspapers, have been the most interesting of their kind, full of energy and ideas, bringing a trained mind to bear upon current questions of politics, society, and art, and embodying as much of style as could reasonably be expected of a writer who used the Atlantic cable for his instrument. Moreover, on at least two notable occasions, Mr. Frederic was not content with providing for his American public the news supplied to his hand in London, but set out to obtain news of his own by direct investigation. It was in 1884, at the outset of his career as a newspaper correspondent, that he made a personal inspection of the cholera-infected districts of Southern France and Italy. He visited Marseilles and Toulon in the days when the population of those cities was panic-stricken, and his letters upon the subject were an important contribution to our knowledge of the epidemic at a time when it was feared that even our own country was threatened with invasion by the dreaded plague. The second of the occasions referred to was in 1891, when the recrudescence of Jew-baiting in Russia was made the subject of a personal investigation by Mr. Frederic, the result of his observations being published the following year in a graphic and impressive work entitled "The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia." This work, and the newspaper correspondence which he carried on for fourteen years, gave Mr. Frederic considerable prominence as a student of public affairs, and his firm grasp of political problems made him something of an authority upon contemporary history. All this work, however, is of a sort soon to be inevitably for gotten because essentially ephemeral. But Mr. Frederic's fiction is not ephemeral, and has won for him a high place among American novelists. Eight volumes of that fiction have already been published, and two more will make the list complete. Ten volumes in ten years is not a bad record, when we consider that their author was by vocation a journalist, and a man of letters only by avocation, especially when we consider that the ten volumes are of a far higher character than the work of most journalists, that they are reasonably free from those touches of crudeness and vulgarity that few journalists are able to exclude from their attempts to produce literature of the serious sort. The ten volumes are these: "Seth's Brother's Wife" (1887), "The Lawton Girl" (1890), "In the Valley" (1890), "The Return of the O'Mahony" (1892), "The Copperhead" (1894), “Marsena, and Other Stories of the War" (1895), "The Damnation of Theron Ware" (1896), "March Hares" (1896), "Gloria Mundi" (1898), and "The Market Place," promised for publication next year. Of the eight volumes that are already contained between covers, "March Hares" and "The Return of the O'Mahony" are extravaganzas, and stand apart from the rest. Neither of them would we willingly miss, for they display a richly humorous side of the author's fancy, the exist ence of which would hardly be suspected by readers of his other novels. The second of the two just named, in particular, has never enjoyed half the popularity it deserves; for exuberant vitality it outranks the others, although this character is doubtless gained at the expense of more artistic qualities. From the other six novels that stand on the shelf, "In the Valley" stands apart as a work of historical fiction, in the sense that it deals with a bygone period. We make this distinction because all of the six are historical in a wide but very genuine sense of the term. Of "In the Valley," which deals with the Revolutionary period of our history, and with the events that prepared the way for an American victory at Saratoga, we do not hesitate to say that it is one of the best historical novels that we have, a strong and vivid portrayal of one of the most stirring and pregnant periods in our national annals. Five books remain for a few words of characterization. They all deal with the region and the period that the author knew so well, the central New York of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. They accomplish for that region and that period the work of analysis and portraiture that so many of our writers are doing for other regions and contemporary periods. Two of them reproduce for us the feeling with which the old North viewed the Civil War, and show us the cross-currents of sentiment and the conflicting passions that divided non-combatants as well as combatants. Two others are more strictly domestic in their interest. The fifth, by common consent Mr. Frederic's most successful novel, has for its theme the warfare waged by two religious ideals in the battle-field of a man's soul; but even this powerful work is at the same time a richly observant study of provincial American society. We may perhaps be permitted to quote, in closing, a few words that we wrote of this powerful fiction at the time of its appearance two years ago: "Mr. Frederic has aimed to produce a great and typical picture of American life, and an unerring instinct has taught him that such a picture must be concerned with the life of a small community rather than with the more attractive but also more sophisticated civilization of the great cities. It is in the small community that the mainsprings of a nation's strength are to be felt most distinctly and the elements of its weakness most clearly discerned; it is here that its fundamental ideals are most naively offered to the view." These words were written of "The Damnation of Theron Ware," but their application extends to the greater number of Mr. Frederic's novels, and for this reason they are here reproduced. THE BYGONE LYCEUM. When, in the early thirties, Emerson, cut adrift from his church and his livelihood, began his forty years of platform work, the American lecturing system may be said to have its most definite beginnings. It is the old story of the mustard seed: there has sprung up a great tree, and the European celebrities come and lodge in the branches. Its like has existed nowhere else in quite such luxuriance. Archibald Forbes thought of a lecturing tour in England, after the Russo-Turkish war, he had no precedents, and was forced to barnstorm the country under the guidance of a theatrical manager. Jona When than's lecturing machinery was still a "foreign devil" to John Bull, for America, which led the way in establishing an organized system, has all along retained pretty much what a furnisher would call an exclusive design. The unit of the system in its completeness was the Lyceum, the idea of which is now concrete only to the old and middle-aged, and whose rise, decline, and fall have yet to find their historian. In a general way, the term denotes the various organizations which, flourishing or languishing as the local thermometers of "culture" registered high or low, once existed in city and village alike throughout the Northern States, with the improvement of the community as their especial aim, and the delectable exhibition, in courses of lectures covering the winter months, of the difficult for the present generation to realize the imintellectual lions of the day as a corollary. It is portance of this institution; the weekly lecture was the social event before which all other engagements must needs give way, and it often stood in lieu of the inaccessible theatre or the forbidden dance. The history of popular lecturing in this country would seem to fall into three periods: the first, roughly bounded, ends with the Civil War; the second, some twelve years ago; while the third is still with us. Of the early days, and Emerson's first Boston lectures, we have a sympathetic picture. "Who that saw the audience," says Lowell, "will ever forget it, where everyone still capable of fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite pathos. . . . I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper always played about the horizon of his mind like of the autumn leaves that are whirling around me." By Other men of letters followed Emerson, and lecturing began to grow in favor. It paid but meagrely at first. Holmes tells a story of "Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely, saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that season.' the time of the war, the lecturing field was crowded and the Lyceum system widespread. There is in the possession of the writer a bundle of old letters to whose yellowed paper and faded ink the signatures of men famous in literature and public affairs lend a revitalizing touch. They all pertain to lecturing, and were written during the Civil War to the secretary of a Lyceum in a town of western New York. Here are letters from statesmen, judges, bishops, war correspondents, editors, men of letters, merchants, lawyers, philanthropists, orators, and travellers; from politicians who were too busy to lec ture and politicians who had little else to do, poets open to persuasion and a poet who could not be lured, a man who had been president and men who were ambitious to be president; and, not the least interesting, letters from the Lyceum secretaries who talked of the great ones for whom they were angling as though they were commodities to be bought and sold. Those were the days of the giants, but the giants had their host of pygmy imitators, and in perusing these old letters no point is more striking than the present comparative unfamiliarity of the names of most of their authors. What, for example, do the names of MacGowan, Edwin James, Murdoch, or even the once celebrated E. H. Chapin, now mean to us? What legacy has been left us by Richards, who used to sugar-coat science for the crowd, and whose popularity permitted matinees for children? Where, outside the annals of journalism, do we meet with the names of W. C. Prime, Manton Marble, or Benjamin F. Taylor? Yet all had their vogue, and this one sentence of Taylor's, "My protracted absence with the Army of the Cumberland has served to confuse my lecturing arrangements," is indicative that there were those among them who stood near the pulse of the stirring life of the time. Bishops Clark and Simpson, good men both, the latter the man whom Lincoln regarded as the greatest orator he had heard, are shadowy figures; and to how many to-day comes as a familiar sound the name of "Edmund Kirke," the pen-name of J. R. Gilmore, who was at one time entrusted with what proved a bootless mission to the Confederacy? What memories of defunct issues that once were live are stirred by this voice from the past: "My subject," he writes, "will be "The Southern Whites: their characteristics, and their relation to the future of the Union.' It will, naturally, be largely descriptive and humorous, but while it will contain nothing to offend the abolitionist or anti-abolitionist, it will give the Vallandigham school of Copperheads Hail Columbia.' I wish this distinctly understood and assented to by you, as, like a certain old lady of everybody's acquaintance, I like to have 'my say." This was the season of 1863-4, and the men of affairs found other wine-presses to tread. Thus, Seward, writing from Washington, pleads in excuse that "my engagements obliged so early a return to this place.' "I shall be required at Washington," writes Fernando Wood; and Washington again claims the presence of Holt, the JudgeAdvocate General. Henry Winter Davis's duties "are too engrossing." "With my present engagements," says Charles Sumner, "I dare not promise myself." Reverdy Johnson's outlook is certain "to keep me in work"; Edward Everett has "not accepted any invitations to speak the ensuing season"; ex-President Franklin Pierce declines without explanations; and Wendell Phillips, in a scrawl that speaks of haste more than his assertion of the fact at the close, with a half promise, thrusts the whole consideration of the matter months forward into the uncertain future. These men, however, with the exception of Phillips, were hardly "regulars" in the lecturing phalanx which Emerson indisputably led. Among the professional lecturers, few were more sought after than John B. Gough and Henry Ward Beecher. Gough's agent announces by circular that he is booked for months to come; and one of the Lyceum secretaries states on the eve of Beecher's return from his memorable trip to England: "There is a pile of letters a foot high waiting his arrival, all of which relate to lectures." Another favorite was the comedian James H. Hackett, the Falstaff of his generation, who found time outside his theatrical work for occasional readings. He was much in demand, but difficult to pin down to a definite date, and there are in my pile several letters in his nervous, old-fashioned hand, anent one of the attempts to secure him. He makes an interesting confession as to his professional rewards. He had received an offer of $100 from Albany, a compensation which, he asserts, "approached nearer to such as I can obtain by four nights acting upon the stage." Naturally, in a collection like this there are letters from such platform celebrities as Curtis, Holmes, Holland, Bayard Taylor, and Anna Dickinson; but their correspondence contains but little of general interest. Curtis was then in the thick of that struggle to liquidate a publishing-house debt which he might have legally avoided, but which, like Scott, he chose to shoulder. The five letters in his hand, trifling though they are, reflect everywhere the "heart of courtesy " which this first gentleman of America so markedly possessed. Holmes's letters, like everything he touched, bear the imprint of his personality. This is rather a model declination: "I have got tripped up at starting,” he says, in breaking an engagement by reason of sickness. "I hate to disappoint an audience as much as any lecturer can. I have strong personal motives for carrying out my plan for that lecturing trip during that vacation. Nothing but necessity would have forced me to relinquish it, and that I am sure will prove sufficient apology." This same Lyceum also made an attempt to entice Longfellow. In a dainty monogrammed note from Nahant the poet replied: "It would give me great pleasure to accept your invitation if I ever appeared in the character of lecturer. As I do not, I must decline." The drama of the present was at that period too absorbing for interest in things literary or philosophic, and the subjects proposed in these letters are, with rare exceptions, pertinent to the struggle then in progress. Thus, we have "The Southern Whites," "The State of the Country," "The Probable Issues of the War," "The Way of Peace," "The National Heart,' ," and "The Crisis of the Nation." Politics, hitherto tabooed from the Lyceum, began to overshadow all else. From the point of view of our day, when the bestknown lecturers receive from three to five hundred dollars a night, and Stanley toured the country at |