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simply a clumsy vehicle for showing off Becky's "smartness, for no man could lash himself into a temper in such a ridiculous way. It is also obvious that while David is here a mere puppet through which Becky's wit is handed down to us, Becky herself has individuality and animation. There lies the strength of the novel. Becky is alive. It may be added that, though very high-spirited, she is one of the many women who enjoy being beaten by the right man. A fervid Imperialistic note sounds in the book, which is the apotheosis of the pioneer.

"Thank God we have Rhodes," said Billy.

"Rhodes is South Africa and South Africa is Rhodes," said Walter, "and we do thank God for him."

From this fragment of conversation it will be perceived that the book, though unconventional and sometimes grotesque, is not lacking in piety. Moreover, it is readable.

Anima Vilis: a Tale of the Great Siberian Steppe. By Marya Rodziewicz. Translated by S. C. de Soissons. (Jarrold.)

LIKE so much of what comes to us from her countrymen, the work of this Polish lady, new to the English-speaking public, is of a melancholy cast.

Antoni Mrozowiecki is a young man of blameless manners; yet from the cradle, wherein he was defrauded of his patrimony, to the moment when he is presented to us reduced by the hazard of the road to his last halfpence upon his way to the Siberian village of Lebiaza, he is ever the football of malignant destiny. In the house of his host he is still pursued by ill-luck; at every turn he finds himself in a false position, his honesty discredited, his most hopeful enterprises turned to shame and ridicule. His benefactor is driven to doubt his honesty, and presently he is haled to Tobolsk for a murderer. Finally, within twelve hours of his marriage he is overwhelmed, with his Marya, by a blizzard. So that the despondent exclamation of his good friend Andryanek-"Even if we find them they will be frozen. How unfortunate my poor friend is!"-has the effect, by its very inadequacy, of comic relief. Here, however, is the end of his troubles. Marya can predict, "Antoni, it is our last misfortune" and he liturgically may reply, "Thank God!" For such immunity is attributed by Siberian superstition to him who has cheated the blizzard.

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But the strange community-the weird land! Antoni's host is a doctor of medicine who buys and sells oxen and millinery, furnishes dram-shops with liquor, and peddles scythes through the countryside when the black eightmonths winter has broken down before a sudden breath out of the Asiatic desert. "Within two days the steppe was black; in five it showed signs of life; in a week it was green."

In the melting of Marya the intelligent reader may easily trace an analogy to this change of the season:

"I never said anything about it to anyone," she said thoughtfully, "but it has always seemed to me that this perpetual martyrdom this longing which must be overcome, has made me wicked. I think that one to whom it is forbidden to love his own country cannot love anything. Such a man or woman does not attain his full growth-he does not blossom, but becomes dried-up stubble. .."

"Do you know that there are some days when one is afraid to touch a knife. . . !"

Of the natives, she asks:

"Have you not noticed that they never laugh heartily? They are never merry without vodka! This country stunts the human mind."

Already, when she has become so communicative, the first warm breath has blown upon her soul. Presently she softens altogether, and blossoms like a peach on the sombre brown of the story.

Miss Rodziewicz is a writer of power and intensity of vision. The translator, however, can hardly be said to have done her justice.

Notes on Novels.

[These notes on the week's Fiction are not necessarily final Reviews of a selection will follow.]

BY JOHN SOANE.

THE QUEST OF MR. EAST. An original and well-thought-out novel. The spiritual and material adventures of Edward St. John in his quest of Mr. East-a kind of modern hermit-are good reading to those who, like St. John, are in quest of "the principle of unity in history and in modern life" which, if found, would compose all the differences of creeds. An important, if improbable, character is Father Optate, a learned Roman Catholic priest, who before he dies delivers his soul in an astonishing manner. (Constable. 68.)

A DREAM OF A THRONE. BY CHARLES FLEMING EMBree. The story of a Mexican revolt. Says the hermit to the hero: " Child, to save a lost and fallen race is the noblest calling that a man can have. If that race be your own, and its blood leap in you, and you be fighting the battle of your butchered fathers, and winning that which is by God's right yours, the task is infinitely great. Do you know, child, whose is that task? . . . Boy, that task is yours." The tale is full of action, and is enlivened with patios, jefes, mozos, and sopladors. (Gay & Bird. 6s.) THE MYSTERY OF MUNCRAIG. BY ROBERT JAMES MUIR. The kailyard again, with ministers and whisky and the Psalms of David and Scottish life generally, by one who knows it. The story opens in Edinburgh in 1861, and the hero is charged with piracy in the South Seas, a circumstance which provides a pretty proposal scene later. "You haven't asked me yet.' 'No! It has never been my way to ask for things.' 'Oh!' said Isobel, trying to look in his face, 'I suppose you-pirates-just-takethings?' 'We do,' said Rob. And he took one." (Unwin. 6s.)

THE NORTHERN BELLE.

BY JOHN Werge. A "Diamond Jubilee Romance,' " in which a major brings his daughter to London and talks to her, by the page, like this: "We are now passing the Hotel Cecil, but it is partially obscured by these shops, which, however, are soon to be removed. Down this street is the Savoy Hotel and Theatre, and here is Terry's Theatre. There are some very handsome shops between the places I have named, but they are nearly all closed at this time of night. Now we are at Somerset House, a large building extending to the Embankment, and having a fine river frontage." (Digby, Long & Co. 68.) THE QUEEN WASP.

BY JEAN MIDDLEMASS.

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A story of society match-making and shady finance, opening on an evening when Grosvenor-place was "instinct with life and aglow with light." "Lady Sabina looked round. 'Harry, dear,' she suggested, will you go and tell the bandmaster to begin playing?' He did as he was bidden. Harry Jolliffe always tried to do what his wife wished. He was desperately in love with her-worshipped the very ground she walked on. Alas! it is not always those who love the most who bring to others the greatest meed of happiness." (Digby, Long & Co. 6s.) BETTINA.

BY MAY CROMMELIN.

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THERE is a magic in all remembrance of one age by another. The past within a past-how remote, how vivid it seems! How we warm to Cicero, and feel his antiquity in a flash, when we find him remembering the figures that moved about Rome in his boyhood.

There was old Caius Duilius, Marcus's son, he that gave the first blow to the pride of Carthage by sea. Many a time, when I was a youngster, have I stood to look upon him as he was marching home after supper, with a waxtaper to light him, and a violin playing before him. That was always his humour, and the great reputation of the man easily justified the levity.

How that figure engages itself to live in the mind, and gives the sense of immemorial distance. And why? Because it is recollected by Cicero, not related by Mommsen. It would be easy to collect such passages. One we will quote for its beauty. It seems more than probable that Defoe described his own boyish curiosity, and insatiable love of a story, when he wrote this passage about his boy hero, Captain Jack-a passage which no Englishman can read without a thrill.

In this way of talk, I was always upon the inquiry, asking questions of things done in public, as well as in private; particularly, I loved to talk with seamen and soldiers about the war, and about the great seafights, or battles on shore, that any of them had been in; and, as I never forgot anything they told me, I could soon, that is to say, in a few years, give almost as good an account of the Dutch war, and of the fights at sea, the battles in Flanders, the taking of Maestricht, and the like, as any of those that had been there; and this made those old soldiers and tars love to talk with me too, and to tell me all the stories they could think of, and that not only of the wars then going on, but also of the wars in Oliver's time, the death of King Charles I. and the like.

Nor does the power of reminiscence end soon. While it enlarges and flatters our grasp of life it is all the time making that grasp more sane, more deliberate, less childishly tight; it is preparing us to let all go. We see how men were witty, were fed, were in love, were powerful, were eccentric, were envied-but how they, who differed so widely and piquantly in life, were huddled into Charon's boat together. There is a page of Hazlitt that is something to the point. Calling on Northcote one day, he found the painter half regretting that he had just sold a whole-length portrait of an Italian girl, which had become an old friend. The purchaser had said to him: "You may at least depend upon it that it will not be sold again for many generations." The picture was still in the studio, and Northcote showed it to Hazlitt.

On my expressing my admiration of the portrait of the Italian lady, he said she was the mother of Mme. Bellochi, and was still living; that he had painted it at Rome about the year 1780; that her family was originally Greek; and that he had known her, her daughter, her mother, and grandmother. She and a sister, who was with her, were at that time full of the most charming gaiety and innocence. The old woman used to sit upon the ground

without moving or speaking, with her arm over her head, and exactly like a bundle of old clothes. Alas! thought I, what are we but a heap of clay resting upon the earth, and ready to crumble into dust and ashes. However careless, "genial," and superficially chatty recollections may be, they are, at least, a personal record of the world when it was preparing itself for your own distinguished advent; and out of that adjacent past, and out of the crowd of men so nearly your contemporaries, who might have been your uncles, there issues many a sharp analogy, many a conversation one would like to have carried further, many a stray shot at the conscience which the reader must ward off as he can.

To-day the flow of reminiscences is a torrent without precedent, but not without proportion or explanation. For there was never an age in which writing was so fashionable or recollection so rich. An old man who has never dreamed to distinguish himself as an author through all the years of his strength, may do so if he will only sit down and dictate to the phonograph what he remembers of the tinder-box. Is it strange that many do it?

So wonderfully has the social life of England changed in the Queen's reign that the personal identity of the nation has almost wanted proof; and this proof the reminiscence writers have furnished. It may be found, in infinite witness-box variety, in the published recollections of Mr. Justin McCarthy, Henry Vizetelly, Sir Algernon West, Sir Edward Russell, Dr. B. W. Richardson, the Right Hon. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Mr. W. J. Linton, Fanny Kemble, Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Sir Harry Keppel, Mr. A. J. C. Hare, Stacey Marks, Dr. Newman Hall, Frederick Locker, Mr. Joseph Arch, Miss Betham-Edwards, Mr. G. W. E. Russell, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Admiral Sir John C. Dalrymple Hay, Mr. James Payn, Mr. T. A. Trollope, Mrs. M. C. M. Simpson, Prof. Max Müller, Walter White, Mrs. Oliphant, Mr. Baring-Gould. If this list, written down from memory, seems wearisome, consider its utter incompleteness! We will add to it only the name of Mr. Sutherland Edwards, who has just published his Personal Recollections through Messrs. Cassell. His anecdotage, which is gay and tragic, and wholly readable, begins at a time when Fleet-street was paved with cobbles, and when no omnibus charged less than sixpence to carry a Londoner the length of the Strand.

Those who had business to transact in the City went there in cabs; but there was little communication between the two extremities. ... Ladies did not use these cabs. They were out of everything. No lady was admitted into a restaurant, nor into the coffee-room of an hotel, nor into an hotel at all if travelling by herself. Ladies who, in the middle of the day, were kept from home by the pleasures and pains of shopping, went for lunch to pastrycooks' shops, where they got indigestion by eating raspberry tarts. . . . In families where no carriage was kept ladies going out for the evening had to take what was called glass coach." . . . A lady living alone in apartments could not in those days receive a visit from a gentleman; still less could a gentleman living alone receive a lady in his rooms. . . . It was scarcely fashionable to go to the play, and few persons went there in evening dress. The theatrical saloon, whose abominations were put an end to by Macready, was a disgusting place. Very little money was spent on stage production. Painted calico did duty for silk and satin, spangles for jewellery; it was held and believed that for stage purposes imitation was better than the real thing.

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This is the world which Mr. Edwards peoples with men like the seven Mahews, the three Salas, Macready and Hans von Bülow, Douglas Jerrold and Shirley Brooks, Gavarni and Albert Smith, Edward Tinsley the publisher, and E. S. F. Pigott, the Censor of Plays-Thackeray and Browning, and Rubenstein lending their distinction. The same world has been described very, very often, but

apparently people do not tire of hearing of these men and their times. A faint odour of palled punch and stale tobacco is wafted from the pages, and strange tints of old play-bills are flashed on one's vision, and kind things are said of good fellows who went to the wall in the fifties by the methods then in vogue, and skits, and "witty" articles, and "agreeable" satires are quoted, and it is all amazingly ancient-modern. This vein of early and midVictorian anecdote will be worked out presently; and then? Will our own day have its small chroniclers? Will men write quaint and much quoted pages about the first cinematograph shown in London, and the Vagabonds' Club, and the late Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, and the supremacy of the novel, and the automatic scent sprinkler, and the motor omnibuses, and the Aerated Bread Company, and the "Souls." And will Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Andrew Lang, and Mr. John Kensit, and Mr. W. B. Yeats, and Bugler Dunne shine as stars in the anecdotal firmament of 1950? Doubtless. But the present fervour of reminiscence must, we think, pass away. It is natural that the Victorian era and the Nineteenth Century should put their papers in order. It is between those two worlds of Matthew Arnold, the one worn out, the other not ready to be born, that the cataracts of reminiscence have been heard all day long. It will be under similar conditions that the next wave of Reminiscence will arrive.

The Scholars and the Poet: a Parable.

ONCE there were four Scholars who all their lives spent much time and labour and learning in studying the works of a great Poet. And it chanced that they all died on the same night, and came together to the place of departed spirits; and, because they had given much devotion to this task, it was granted them for a boon that they should each make one request of the Poet himself. So they were brought to where he sat; and around him many were gathered, but at a little distance, for they might not draw nearer unless he called them.

And when the first Scholar was bidden approach, he said: "Tell me, I pray you, of your courtesy, concerning those sonnets of yours, whether they were in truth written of a certain lord." But the Poet only answered: "Look, yonder is my lord himself of whom you speak. Go and see whether he will talk with you of the matter."

So the Scholar turned away sorrowful.

And the second asked of a certain work of the Poet's youth, which of its lines were written by himself an which by another. But the Poet smiled and said: "Nay, I cannot now remember. But yonder is a learned Doctor who has studied the matter more nearly than I have. He will reveal it all to you if you ask him."

And the third Scholar said: "Know you not that some of your writings are deemed to be immoral in their essence, and others in their form, and therefore there are some who speak ill of you. Tell me how you would defend yourself against their accusations." And there was no displeasure in the Poet's smile as he answered: "Perchance my words thereon would not satisfy you. But here is a grave Professor who has written a book on this very matter. Inquire of him concerning it."

So this Scholar turned away like the others.

But when the fourth Scholar came, who on earth was accounted to have more love and understanding of the Poet than they all, he sat down at the Poet's feet, and, looking up into his face, said, as the children say, "Tell me a story." And the Poet's eye was kind, and his voice was gentle, as he told the Scholar a new story of love and joyousness and happy laughter. But the others were still held in talk by those to whom the Poet had sent them, and being a little way off they could not listen to the story. So they never heard it.

A Laureate's

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Satire.

Is Mr. Alfred Austin's satire, The Season, on sale at his publishers'? I should fancy it is not. "A new and revised edition, being the third," came out in 1869 with the imprint of Mr. John Camden Hotten; that edition, I take it, was disposed of long ago, and I have not heard of its being followed by another. The work is not of the kind which appeals to its writer when he has achieved a position of less freedom and more responsibility. Much has happened in Mr. Austin's public life since 1869. In 1862, when The Season first came out, matters were different. Its author was then only twenty-six years old. He had already published two books, but one of them had been anonymous, and neither had made any particular impression.

Practically, when The Season appeared, Mr. Austin made his literary début. It was the foundation, certainly, of his literary reputation. "Dedicated to Disraeli," says Mr. Escott in a recent volume (Personal Forces of the Period), "it secured the warmest recognition of Mr. Gladstone and his old select literary and scholarly friends." The book was not dedicated in the first instance to Disraeli. The first edition contained no dedication; it is in the second edition, issued very soon after the first, that we find the inscription: "To the Rt. Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, M.P., by one who reveres his genius and exults in his success.

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The first edition had been issued by Robert Hardwicke, of Piccadilly; the second bore on the title-page as publisher the name of George Manwaring, of King Williamstreet, Strand. Had Mr. Hardwicke been alarmed by the hubbub which The Season had created? For it did create a hubbub-and no wonder. There had been nothing in the way of rhythmic satire, at once so vivid and so vigorous, since the appearance of The New Timon-an interval of fifteen years. The writer had his literary spurs to win, and did not hesitate to lay about him with a will. He was, or persuaded himself that he was, very much in earnest. In one place he wrote:

I am, I must insist,
A most uncompromising moralist.
And in another:

Who think by verse to better make the bid,
I grant it freely, must be vain or mad. . .
Yet in an Age when each one deftly hides
The scorn he feels for every one besides,
I claim the precious privilege of youth,
Never to speak except to speak the truth.

He certainly seems to have lashed himself into a state of violent indignation. The slightest thing would set him off. The anger which he could not introduce into the rhymed text overflowed into the prose annotations. Thus, below a couplet on the younger Lytton

Compete with [Owen] Meredith; discreetly steal Your plot, your apophthegms, and top "Lucile ". one found these sentences:

This clever but somewhat spasm dic young man, who is too modest to write under his patronymic, is perhaps too modest likewise to have his own opinions. But if he will not adopt the name to which he has a right, why does he adopt and dress up again for the public, already well acquainted with them, the dicta of his father, to which he has none?

Neither of these passages is to be seen in the third (and latest revised) edition of the Satire, which nevertheless includes all the most pungent portions of the original work. If you possess a copy of that third edition, you have all that is best in The Season as first published. And some of that best is excellent of its kind. A good deal of it, of course, is necessarily somewhat jejune after the

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lapse of so many years. The scorn poured by Mr. Austin upon designing damsels and match-making mammas, upon the popularity of "La Traviata" and the opera-ballet, and upon the morale of the ball-room generally, strikes one nowadays as trite. It was expressed, however, in a style which deserves to be remembered. Some of the writer's single lines, such as that about "the half-drunk" leaning over "the half-dressed," are assuredly pointed, if a little brutal. Genuinely epigrammatic, too, are such couplets as these:

What is the spell that 'twixt a saint or sinner

The diff'rence makes? a sermon? bah! a dinner.
The cdds and ends our silken Claras waste

Would keep our calico Clarissas chaste.

A hundred pounds would coy have made the nude,

A thousand pounds the prostitute a prude.

The poor votaries of fashion have never, probably, been so severely lashed as by this satirist in his twenties:

The padded corsage and the well-matched hair,
Judicious jupon spreading out the spare,
Sleeves well designed false plumpness to impart,
Leave vacant still the hollows of the heart.

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Their rounded, pliant, silent-straying arms
Seem sent to guard, yet manifest their charms.
Mark how the lorgnettes cautiously they raise
Lest points, no pose so thoughtless but displays,
A too quick curiosity should hide-

For they who gaze must gazed at be beside.

There was, I fancy, only one person about whom in the first edition of The Season its author had something pleasant to say; and that was Her Majesty the Queen, whose virtues were eloquently celebrated. This, at any rate, is a passage on which Mr. Austin can afford to look back with satisfaction. Elsewhere in the satire he had ironically suggested that contemporary bards should, with other things,

Industriously labour languid lays,

Beloved of Courts, and snatch the Poet's bays! Only the very ungenerous would nowadays turn these lines against their writer.

The stiff press criticism to which The Season was subjected led Mr. Austin to pen (in the same year) a reply, also in the conventional couplets, called "My Satire and its Censors." In this, again, there is much that is vigorous and vivid, but nothing quite so excellent, in a literary sense, as the best things in The Season. It is all very pointed and pungent, but, of necessity, only for the day. Mr. Austin was himself taken to task in yet another satire, written by Mr. Brook B. Stevens, and entitled "Seasoning for a Seasoner." In this composition Mr. Austin was certainly well peppered, but with no permanent effect. Seasoning for a Seasoner," like "My Satire and Its Censors," is, I take it, rarely read. The Season, on the other hand, has some claim to be regarded as a minor classic. It may, indeed, outlive much of the verse on which perchance the Laureate more prides himself. A.

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The Charwoman,

SHE is an elderly person and she cleans shoes till you can see your face in them. But her ideas are limited.

We told her that Mafeking had been relieved. She did not understand. We told her that it had been surrounded by the enemy, so that none should leave the village and none enter it. She said it was a shame, but she did not seem to understand.

We then told her that the besieged had been living on horseflesh. Her gaunt face lighted up. "I knew a girl once who ate cat's-meat," she said.

Correspondence.

Soft as Velvet."

SIR,-I observe that, in a review of The Chaucer Canon, in your last number of the ACADEMY, the following statement occurs: "Soft as velvet has, we take it, been a stock description of turf at all times since velvet was invented." My argument is, to some extent, founded on the fact that such a statement is quite unwarranted; and that, as a matter of fact, the expression "soft as velvet" does not occur (outside of the two passages which I compare) in any English poem whatever, anonymous or otherwise, before the year 1500. It may even be doubted whether it occurs elsewhere before 1600. Certainly, it does not occur in Shakespeare, nor in Milton; the former has only "velvet leaves" or "velvet buds," and the latter has "the cowslip's velvet head"; and that is all.

Before 1500, the occurrence of the word velvet is by no means common. It is found, of course, in wills and inventories as far back as 1319, and in glossaries; but in poetry it only occurs twice in Chaucer, a few times in Lydgate, once in Sir Launfal, thrice in "The Flower and the Leaf"; but where else? This is precisely the point at issue. Seeing that "soft as velvet " is "a stock description," may we be favoured with a few quotations, of early date, in support of this assumption ?-I am, &c., WALTER W. SKEAT.

2, Salisbury-villas, Cambridge.

The Supremacy of Fiction.

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SIR, I have read, in a docile spirit, Miss Frances Forbes-Robertson's remarks on my remarks about the predominance of Fiction and "Fictionalists." This pleasing word I borrow from contemporary criticism: perhaps we shall soon read about "jurisdictionalists." I am prepared for anything. My humble essay, "On the Supremacy of the Novel," was prompted by Lytton's preface to Pelham. Seventy years ago Lytton frankly stated that he wrote novels because nothing else paid. Am I wrong in thinking that nothing else is remunerative now? For, of course, books about the war, and reminiscences, and educational books, and legal books are not, usually, "literature." I said, "we produce novels only." Miss Forbes-Robertson then talks about great works of philosophy, history, and poesy, written in my "lifetime." But I myself spoke of these; when I say we produce," and so on, I allude to the living present. Miss Forbes-Robertson then avers that "there is an immense population that in past generations never read anything." How could it read anything before it was born? unless this lady believes, like the Arunta, in reincarnation. My fair censor goes on thus: "This taste of the crowd neither augments nor diminishes the number of serious readers, unless, indeed, towards reading at all." The meaning of the text entirely escapes me. taste augment or diminish a number, or not do so, towards reading at all"? And how, next, can public that reads serious literature" be (as the lady avers) equally greater in number." Equally greater than what? Miss Forbes-Robertson is certain that the works of Mr. Meredith and Mr. James "tower above the expositions of subjective philosophers, metaphysical meanderings, tirades of criticism, or catalogues of historical events Mr. Lang deplores [sic] as no longer read." I cannot admit that even Mr. Henry James, "in every kind of way," towers above Kant, Hume, Hazlitt, or Gibbon. In how many ways can even Mr. James tower? But these authors-Mr. James, and the philosophers and historiansdo not work in the same matter. Even if Mr. James towers above them (which I don't think he does), we need not neglect criticism, history, and philosophy because, in fiction, Mr. James towers. I am supposed to contemn "great novels." This is a misapprehension. I would

66

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liefer have written Old Mortality or Esmond than all the works of Locke. I do not "contemn the literature which takes the form of a novel." I only wish that literature did take that form more frequently. I do say, and I keep on saying, that novels are almost, if not altogether, the only form of literature that is remunerative now. But I think, and I said, that a new Froude, Macaulay, or Tennyson would even now find readers. Still, I do not observe that poetry or history has, at present, any such authors as Tennyson, Macaulay, and Froude.

I am sorry to seem to accuse a lady controversialist of an ignoratio elenchi, but by these hard terms the logician is apt to style arguments like hers.-I am, &c.,

Book Titles.

A. LANG.

SIR,-Is there no available register of book titles which authors could consult before deciding how to name their books? Twice in the same day I have come across the duplication of titles. Two years ago Mr. John Lane published a novel of high quality by Mr. E. A. Bennett, called A Man from the North. And now I find "The Man from the North" at the head of a story by Mr. A. Gissing in a ladies' weekly. One of the most readable books on the war, Sidelights on South Africa, by Roy Devereux, came out in the earliest crop of South African works issued since the Boer ultimatum. This week's papers review a work by Lady Sykes called Sidelights on the War in South Africa. Surely something can be done to prevent this.I am, &c., MAUD STEPNEY RAWSON. 21, Greycoat-gardens, Victoria-street, S.W.: May 22, 1900.

The Missing Word.

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SIR,-May I quote from a letter I received from a Welsh correspondent? The following quotation is from Milton's Of Reformation in England: "O Thou that didst build up this Brittanic Empire to a glorious height, with all her daughter islands about her," &c. If Brittanic Empire denotes the Empire, then (by analogy of Teuton and Teutonic Empire) a subject of the Brittanic Empire is a Briton. The Americans recognise this in a way by the term Britisher - a subject of the British Empire. Brittanic for Briton seems far more dignified and quite as accurately descriptive terms. Possibly it may be objected that Briton is open to the same racial interpretation as Englander, but we do not say the English Empire. -I am, &c., H. LOGAN.

Sandgate, Prestwick: May 15, 1900.

[This correspondence must now cease.-ED.]

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This is the promised abridgment, or rather the quintessence, of Prof. Frazer's great Commentary on Pausanias' Description of Greece, published two years ago. "Slight and fragmentary as these sketches are," says the author, "I am not without hope that they will convey to readers who have never seen Greece something of the eternal charm of its scenery."

The places described include Marathon, Mount Hymettus, Phyle, the Port of Athens, the Sacred Way, Megara, Nemea, Delphi, the Lernæan Marsh, and many other spots. (Macmillan. 5s.)

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Two rows of foolish faces bent

In two blurred lines; the compliment
Toe formal smile, the cultured air,
The sense of falseness everywhere,
Her ladyship superbly dressed-

I liked their footman, John, the best.
The tired musicians' ruffled mien,
Their whispered talk behind the screen,
The frigid plaudits, quite confined
By fear of being unrefined.

His lordship's grave and courtly jest
I liked their footman, John, the best.
5s. net.)

(Grant Richards.
THE STORY OF BADEN-POWELL. BY HAROLD BEGBIE.
Obviously a timely book. In "An Introductory Frag-
ment on no Account to be Skipped," Mr. Begbie says:

Ask those who know him best what manner of man he is, and the immediate answer... is this: "He's the funniest beggar on earth." And then your informant will suddenly grow serious and tell you what a straight fellow he is, what a loyal friend, what an enthusiastic soldier. But it is ever his fun first.

(Grant Richards.)

LUCRETIUS ON LIFE AND DEATH. By W. H. MALLOCK.

This is the rendering of certain passages in Lucretius into English, and into the metre of The Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyam, to which we drew attention when it appeared in the Anglo-Saxon. We then pointed out that Mr. Mallock's idea has been to reduce Lucretius and Omar to a common literary denominator, and so bring out that likeness between the philosophies of the Persian and Roman poets which has been remarked by more critics than one. We quoted the stanza:

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift

I see the suns, I see the systems lift

Their forms, and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

The poem is very handsomely enshrined in white vellum. covers. (Black· 10s. net.)

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