treated fully. Indeed, as the author himself says, most of the chapters might easily have been volumes, but their condensation, and the epigrammatic style that it induces, is one of the chief attractions of a very suggestive volume, though many of its statements will seem paradoxical, as, for instance, that art "is never the outcome of a religious people or a religious age," or that the Scotch and Continental Sunday arise from the same causes and result in the same effects.

Social and Economic Studies.

Upon the all-absorbing question of industrial combination John R. Dos Passos furnishes an interesting discussion entitled "Commercial Trusts." (Putnam, $1.) This argument, delivered before the United States Industrial Commission at Washington, has for its main burden the inability of written law to deal effectively with the natural evolution of business and trade. One cannot help feeling that in this very colloquial address the evils of the Trust are minimized and that the need as well as the possibility of control fares too ill. His discussion of the history and growth of capital is, we are inclined to think, the best part of the book.

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A more judicial treatment of the subject is to be found in "The Control of Trusts," by Professor John B. Clark. (Macmillan, 60 cents.) The author has the gift for dealing with these difficult matters in a stimulating way. proaches his subject in a spirit of largeminded optimism and in faith that whatever the popular well-being shall demand can be effected by the popular will. This attitude is essential to any worthy consideration of Trusts. After making the necessary distinctions between capital, centralization, and monopoly, he reminds us that against this last we already have a weapon in the common law. But it is not with the obvious and well-defined cases of monopoly that we are engaged, but rather with the oppressive domination which, while concealing its methods and suppressing the facts, succeeds in compassing monopolistic ends. Against this Professor Clark would secure protection by guaranteeing, through statute, the rights of the independent producer, thus allowing the natural laws of competition to take their course. There is a reciprocal relation here, too, for if we protect the independent producer in his competition with the Trust, he in turn becomes the guardian of smaller industrial groups. To this end legal penalties must be enacted against railway discrimination and the local manipulation of prices. The discussion is throughout cautious, as befits the present state of the problem.

Remedial legislation for industrial England receives a thoroughly scientific presentation in "The Case for the Factory Acts," a collection of essays by five different Englishwomen edited by Mrs. Sidney Webb, who contributes the first paper. (Dutton, $1 net.) The advance made over the shocking factory conditions prevailing in England during the first half of the nineteenth century is revealed in strong outline. The defects in the present factory code, and the vast improvement over home conditions that has been achieved by some of the colonial legislatures are stated in the frankest and most convincing way. These women speak from actual knowledge, and reveal the working of the trained economic mind as well as a deep humanitarian spirit. There is an introduction by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Whoever can present to the mind of the pupil the principles of government in a clear, living way may succeed in securing to the younger generation of scholars a veritable handbook of good citizenship. This has been attained by the volume "Government in State and Nation." (James and Sanford, Scribners, $1.) Too commonly text-books are uninviting, but the authors of this volume have succeeded in making a really fascinating book. Not only does it meet admirably the needs

of the higher classes in our schools; it furnishes an excellent introduction to the methods of advanced historical and political study.

It is not the picturesqueness and the dramatic touch, the real human sympathy, the insight into character, that makes the writings of Mr. Wyckoff so interesting and valuable; the point lies in the economic motive. He has applied the laboratory method to the problem of industrial life. His new volume, "A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days" (Scribners, $1), gives us vivid pictures of the writer's varied experiences on a farm in Iowa, as a Union Pacific section-hand, as a "burropuncher," and as a student of life in the slums. The sketches reveal broad interest in humanity, good or bad, at work or adrift.

"Common People," by Frank Oliver Hall (James H. West, Boston, $1), is an uncommonly interesting little book, dealing with the serious interests of everyday people; their work, their play, their reading and their religious faith. It is all sane, sensible, earnest, large-hearted. Here is great breadth of view and great forcibleness; best of all, this little book has the real prophetic quality. It deserves to find a multitude of readers; it could not but stimulate the multitude, and that is its design.

In a little volume entitled "Economy," by Orison Swett Marden (Crowell, 50 cents), we may see displayed both in prose and verse many excellent counsels of thrift, prudence and good husbandry. This is certainly not a book; nor, scarcely what it claims to be, namely a "booklet," for it is merely a compilation of the shrewd observations made from time to time by men who have achieved large material successes. It has several excellent portraits.

Recent Fiction.

F. Marion Crawford has woven into "Marietta: A Maid of Venice" (Macmillan, $1.50), a fine description of the art of glass-making as practised at Murano, some thrilling adventures, and a very charming love-story. Commanded by her father to marry the man whom he has selected for her, she defies the conventionalities of her time, declares her own right of independent choice of a husband, and turns all adverse circumstances to her own final advantage and success. Zorzi and Marietta will take their place among the true and faithful lovers in fiction.

Ruined and forced to leave home through the machinations of another, Percival Colthurst, the hero of S. R. Keightley's "A Man of Millions" (Dodd, Mead, $1.50), comes home, after eleven years of wandering and adventure, to find the woman he loved married to the man who had wrecked his life and robbed him of his inheritance as well. The story of his wealth leads to new efforts on the part of his old enemy to victimize him; he seems to fall an easy prey, but really has the conspirators at his own mercy when the tragedy of the book transpires.

Of the making of historical novels there seems to be no end, and Edna Lyall has tried her hand at a tale of the times of the Cavalier and Roundhead. "In Spite of All" (Longmans, $1.50) has to do with the love affairs of a brave and gallant young rebel officer and his sweetheart, who remains loyal to her King. In spite of her resolve to cast him off, love wins in the end, though troubles dire and varied come to each in the course of the story, which is well worth the reading.

How so tame and insipid a piece of work as "Aphrodite: The Romance of a Sculptor's Masterpiece," by F. K. Gifford (Small, Maynard & Co., $1.50), ever got into print is a mystery. It has not even sufficient literary style to bring it to the level of the commonplace.

Around so simple an incident as the

legacy from a roving uncle of a pair of shoes, Neil Munro, in "The Shoes of Fortune" (Dodd, Mead, $1.50), weaves a story brim full of exciting incident and adventure. The ingenuous youth gets into and out of lots of trouble, through his wearing of the fateful red shoes, from the time of his duel with his young rival in love till his return to his lowly home on the moorland, and the Miss Fortune his legacy brought him.

What shall be said of an author who carries his reader with growing expectation and with ever-increasing enjoyment three-quarters through his book, developing characters that are admirable for earnestness of purpose, self-poise and unselfish devotion to making the best of untoward circumstances, and then, when the way is open to make the most of life and secure success and happiness, wrecks all on the rock of basest sensualism? This is what Cecil Headlam has done in "The Marriage of Mr. Merivale" (Putnam, $1.25), if indeed there was a marriage. Three lives are wrecked by the mad passion of one, at the hands of an author who wants to make a sensation and sell his book. The average young Englishman in real life would have kept himself pure in memory of his true love. Why need a mercenary author have made him out what his intended brotherin-law calls him-an "intentional blackguard" or "a weak-kneed beast"?

"Good wine needs no bush," and when it comes from a vintage of twenty years ago the mellowness of age is added to the fragrance of its bouquet. Louisa Parr, in the early eighties, placed "Dorothy Fox" (Lippincott, $1.50) among the lovable heroines of fiction, and showed in this delightful story, with its masterful analysis of motive and character, how true love sweeps aside the best laid plans of mercenary match-makers, and all barriers of sect or station. In an appropriate dress of quaker grey stamped with white roses and with four full-page illustrations, Dorothy Fox should win her way into the hearts of hosts of admirers of a new generation.

Maxim Gorky is the pen name of Aleksei Maksimovich Pyeshkov, a writer whose work has created a sensation in his own country, and who has been heralded as a great novelist by some critics. His "Orloff and His Wife: Tales of the Barefoot Brigade" (Scribner, $1), is a volume made up of translations of eight short stories published in 1896 and 1897. Six of these are repulsive in subject and treatment. "The Insolent Man" and "Comrades" are the only clean stories in a book, which they do not redeem from utter unfitness for translation. The student of SOciology alone might find excuse for these disgusting revelations of lowest life in Russia. If these be samples of the best work of a rising light in Russian literature the fewer we have of them the better; even if the book was written to bring the Russian people to a sense of the brutally low estimation in which they hold woman, its vileness should have been left to them in their own language.

The book just named excepted, it would be difficult to find among the novels of the hour a coarser and more inexcusably vulgar one than H. B. Marriott Watson's "The House Divided" (Harpers, $1.50.) The language from most of the characters, female as well as male, outvies the license of the times in which the heavy melodrama is set, the middle of the eighteenth century, and should taboo the book completely.

We are glad to welcome in its fine new dress that clean, strong, wholesome and stirring Scotch story, Alfred Ollivant's "Bob, Son of Battle." (Doubleday & McClure Co., $1.50.) Twenty-four photographs from life include some excellent views of sheep-driving by dog and shepherd. Old friends and new will gladly make a place for "Owd Bob o' Kenmuir" by the side of "Rab" upon their book shelves.

(FOR NEW BOOKS OF THE WEEK, SEE P. II.)

rival, Siena. The story rests on legend only, but the triumph of Duccio's Majestas in 1310 is recorded history, while the contract exists that bound this same Duccio to paint for this very chapel a Madonna and angels, and the date of this contract is 1285.

The whole question is tangled and difficult of solution: if Cimabue painted the Rucellai Madonna, where is the great picture for which Duccio contracted? And if the latter is that now in Sta Maria Novella, what becomes of the Vasari legend of Cimabue? A comparison of the Florentine and Sienese Madonnas shows decided differences in treatment, the former being less tinged with Byzantine feeling than the latter, painted assuredly twenty-five years later. The drapery is Romanesque, that is, Italian, rather than Byzantine, or Greek, and this would seem to indicate it as the work of a Florentine rather than a Sienese, yet there is a unanimous testimony to the fact that Cimabue learned painting from Greek artists working in Florence. The gold and color are certainly Sienese, the drawing of the hands and faces, Byzantine. The drapery is the greatest puzzle, for it is in no single respect decadent Greek. If we could believe that, under the influence of the Pisan sculptors, Duccio had in his youth turned to Greek sculpture for his models, returning in his maturer years and when back in his own Siena to Byzantine models, the difficulty would vanish, and if the Rucellai Madonna is really Duccio's, then this is surely the solution.

In any case, however, the Sienese Majestas ranks the Rucellai Madonna in every way. Between them then there is no comparison: the latter is dull, lifeless, rigid, with no human or religious feeling that lifts it measurably above the barbaric work that immediately preceded it: the Majestas is free, supple, warm with devotional ardor and noble humanism. The faces possess absolute beauty, the drapery is studied from nature, yet decorative in composition and suave in line. The Rucellai Madonna is a glorified vision of a lifeless tradition; this

sistible vitality.

When we approach Duccio di Buoninsegna we feel at once that we are confronting a new and wonderful power full of vast possibilities: the Byzantine love of the splendor of gold and rich fabrics is still there, it lasted indeed through the whole two hundred and fifty years of the Sienese School: there is still the classical composition, the careful studying of line in limbs and drapery, the same dignity of facial type, the same grave and reserved color and space composition. Siena was a city of profoundly conservative instincts, and this lasted to the end. Matteo himself, the contemporary of Botticelli-one of the most modern of all the painters of his time-is yet haunted and controlled by traditions of the Greek methods of the thirteenth century. But through this reverence for precedent the new and human impulse shows itself for the first time in the work of Duccio. Examine carefully the great Majestas, painted for the Cathedral of Siena, but now dismembered and relegated to the cathedral museum. (Figures II., III., IV.) At first sight one is impressed only by the Byzantine externals, but as one studies deeper the inner character appears, and one sees that a true and sincere religious feeling is driving the painter's brush. Moreover, in the Sienese altar-piece, the central portion of which is shown in Figure II., there are the beginnings of all the painting of Italy; in very truth it made possible-indeed, inevitable-Titian and Tintorretto, Botticelli and Leonardo, Raphael and Michaelangelo.

It is possible to look on this as in fact the most significant and priceless picture in the world, not for what it is, though this is good, but for what it made possible. Its history is worthy of its nature: it was finished in 1310, and the people accepted it at once at its full value, the first painted expression of the Christian faith: that it was the first work in an incredible history of artistic triumph they could not know, but they carried it in solemn pro