assessor Toucheronde, against whom the Judge had pronounced a sentence "which did not seem very equitable to that centumviral court." Bridlegoose explains and defends his giving of judgment by a cast of the dice.

I posite on the end of a table in my closet all the pokes and bags of the defendant, and then allow unto him the first hasard of the dice, according to the usual manner of your worships. That being done, I thereafter lay down, upon the other end of the same table, the bags and satchels of the plaintiff (as your worships are accustomed to do). . . . Then do I likewise and sembably throw the dice for him, and forthwith livre him his chance.

"But," quoth Trinquamelle, "my friend, how came you to know, understand, and resolve the obscurity of these various and seeming contrary passages in law?"

"Even just," quoth Bridlegoose, “after the fashion of your other worships; to wit, when there are many bags on the one side and on the other, I then use my little small dice (after the customary manner of your other worships), in obedience to the law. . . . I have other large dice, fair and goodly ones, which I employ in the fashion that your other worships use to do when the matter is more plain, clear, and liquid; that is to say, when there are fewer bags."

Throughout the whole of the scene. which extends to five or six chapters, the ironical jest is kept up in the gravest manner. A more richly humorous example is the banquet given by Bishop Homenas to Pantagruel and his suite, where the talk is in praise of the thrice-sacred decretals. One after other, on the spur of the moment, Friar John, Ponocrates, Eudemon, Carpalim, and the rest, invent a story of wonders achieved through the sacrosant decrees; and at each recital, Homenas, getting steadily tipsier, proclaims a miracle, and clamors to the waiting-maids to fill him another brim

mer of "light." Gymnast takes up the running:

At Cahusac, a match being made by the lords of Estissac and Viscount Lausun to shoot at a mark, Perotou had taken to pieces a set of decretals, and set one of the leaves for the white to shoot at. Now I sell, nay I give and bequeath for ever and aye, the mould of my doublet to fifteen hundred hampers full of black devils, if ever any archer in the country (though they are singular marksmen in Guienne) could hit the white. Not the least bit of the holy scribble was contaminated or touched; nay, and Sansornin the elder, who held the stakes, swore to us . . . that he had openly, visibly, and manifestly seen the bolt of Carquelin moving right to the round circle in the middle of the white; and that just on the point, when it was going to enter, it had gone aside about seven foot and four inches wide of it, towards the bake-house."

"Miracle!" cried Homenas. "Miracle! miracle! Clerica, come wench, light, light here! Here's to you all, gentlemen; I vow you seem to me very sound Christians."

What a treasure of joy is François Rabelais! Has any one understood better than he what George Meredith means by the "cataract of laughter"? In parenthesis, we may say that (if we remember rightly) Mr. Meredith uses the phrase to describe the "supper in the manner of the ancients" in Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle"; and that super-excellent episode, had we space to give to it, would aptly serve our purpose.

Half a century nearer to us than Smollett is Walter Savage Landor; and we might bring forward as a thoroughly literary example of sustained irony his "Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare," but with diffidence we submit that it is a little tough in the reading. Rather would we name the matchless "Imaginary Conversations," and in especial such a piece as

the talk between Louis XIV. and the unctuous confessor.

Still nearer to us, chronologically, is the namesake of the author of "Hudibras," Samuel Butler, whose "Erewhon," at no time as well known as it should have been, is greatly distinguished among the minor, or even the greater, efforts of satire. In "Erewhon" (need we say?) sickness is a crime, while crime receives the treatment that we bestow on sickness. In working this out, Butler, as Garnett says, "holds an inverting mirror to the world's face with imperturbable gravity."

The chapter entitled "An Erewhonian Trial" is a finished pattern of the author's ironic art. He begins with the directness and seeming earnestness of Swift:

But I shall perhaps best convey to the reader an idea of the entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption-an offence which until quite recently was punished with death.

The case is clearly a very bad one. The prisoner, a young man of twenty-three, coughs incessantly in the dock, and is kept on his legs there solely by the attentions of the two surgeons in charge of him. Vainly does his counsel plead

The Nation.

that the young man has been simulating consumption in order to defraud an insurance company from whom he wanted to buy an annuity. "If this could have been shown to be the case he would have escaped a criminal prosecution and been sent to the hospital as for a moral ailment." But the prisoner is damned by his appearance and his cough; and in ten minutes the jury find him guilty. The judge, in passing sentence of hard labor for life, says:

It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise SO excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for comparison; this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime. . . . You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year; and I find that, although you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no fewer than fourteen occasions, for illnesses of a more or less hateful character

and so forth. Here, again, is an instance of the art that raises the smile which sympathy would repress. But all humor, and the appreciation of humor, have their foundation in maliceand who should know this more certainly than the masters of irony?

Miss Carroll Watson Rankin's stories are those that girls would like to live, and though her small heroines are often naughty, their surroundings are so odd and uncommon that their sins do not suggest themselves as possible of imitation in an ordinary environment, and so their example is not mischievous. For instance "The Adopting of Rosa Marie," her latest book, will not lead any girl to adopt and conceal a baby,

first because half-breed Indian infants are not abandoned every day, and second, because few girls have a cottage at their command in which to conceal such infants when adopted, and so the fun of the story is innocuous. Henry Holt & Co.

Mr. Rupert Sargent Holland goes back to Alfieri for the first man in the group of those whose biographies are

included in his "Builders of United Italy." The others are Manzoni, Gioberti, Manin, Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, and a portrait is prefixed to each biography. Mr. Holland's subject is perfectly congenial to him, and he writes sympathetically of all his heroes, the poet, the man of letters, the philosopher, the "Father of Venice," the prophet, the statesman and the king, but he is never obtrusively partisan, and he carefully abstains from attributing Saxon ideals to Italians. The book is a better history of nineteenth century Italy than many an elaborate work. Henry Holt & Co.

Mr. Randall Parrish calls his "The Last Voyage of the Donna Isabel" a romance, and the classification is correct, except as concerns the closing chapters, which are purely incredible. It is the search for a treasure supposed to be contained in a ship, for a century and more, frozen into the ice a little north of the Antarctic Circle, which leads to the "last voyage," but one is taken thither through the ways of South American political intrigue, and some clever if unprincipled Yankee trickery. The hero tells of his bravery as modestly as may be, considering that the author gives him impossibilities to recount, and the heroine is a brave woman, and well described. Four full page pictures in color illustrate the story, but the author's pen does not need their assistance. A. C. McClurg & Co.

From "Coffee and a Love Affair," by Miss Mary Boardman Sheldon, he who is curious as to South American coffee may learn how it is grown, transported, and sold, and something of the modern Colombian revolution, a disturbance finely differentiated from the revolutions of other republics, and from the Colombian revolution of old days.

Also, while watching the love making of two young Americans, he may learn something of the customs and character of the native Indian and of the life which the resident white man and woman carve out for themselves by diligently taking thought for the least and greatest of details. Miss Sheldon makes no pretence at describing heroes and a heroine but she reveals a striking example of the manner in which the white man's burden is borne even by those pioneers who profess no aims not purely mercantile. Frederick A. Stokes Co.

"The Top of the World," by Mr. Mark E. Swan, is a story made from the extravaganza of the same title, and its amusing quality might be taken for granted without reading it, but no child will be persuaded to forego that pleasure after one look at the book's "jacket," on which is seen the wolf who swallowed a tablet of climate. Maida, the heroine, appears on the cover frozen into a cake of ice, and it is imperatively necessary to ascertain how she escaped, and within the cover are colored pictures of an amazing flying-machine and Jack Frost, and Santa Claus, and similarly interesting folk, and a story of the little girl who found all of them at the "top of the world," near the North Pole, which is really a wishing post, which once a year will grant a wish to any one who lays his hand upon it. The small reader will instantly see a reason for Arctic exploration. E. P. Dutton & Co.

each work is given, and it is described clearly and simply with as few technicalities as possible, and with no verbiage. It is plainly intended for music lovers, not for talkers about music. The younger European and American composers are fairly represented, but the elder are not neglected and the book will be found to be a complement of the average American concert programme. More than fifty portraits, some rarely published, illustrate the work, and also many passages of music, and it is substantially bound for the permanent use which it deserves. C. McClurg & Co.

A.

Dr. Louis Adolphe Coernes' "The Evolution of Modern Orchestration" is addressed to musicians and to those really learned in music, but American students should regard it as one of the books necessarily to be read, and immediately to be placed within reach of consultation for reference. Its three parts, "Preliminaries," "The Classic Era," and "Romanticism," trace the entire history of the subject, including some links which modern teachers are prone to regard as entirely negligible because now neglected in practice, and set the reader on the way to understand, not only former methods of orchestration, but also the real tendency of certain modern methods. An introductory note by Mr. H. E. Krehbiel sets the valuable seal of his approval upon the work which Harvard University accepted, together with the score of the author's "Zenobia," as a thesis, entitling him to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The Macmillan Co.

Parents who disapprove of the current fiction prepared for children may find unexceptionable substitutes in the twenty volumes of "Life Stories for Children," translated from the German by Mr. George P. Upton, for, although nearly all of them are true tales, they

contain adventures at least as interesting as those of twentieth or nineteenth century Bill and Jack, or Revolutionary or Colonial William and John. The four volumes which now come to hand are "The Duke of Brittany," our Prince Arthur, nephew of John Lackland as his story is told by Henriette Jeanrenaud, who adheres more closely to history than to Shakespeare's dramatic version; "Arnold of Winkelried," by Gustav Höcked, who relates the whole story of the brave life to which the glorious deed at Sempach was so natural a culmination; "Marie Antoinette's Youth," by Dr. Heinrich von Lenk, who makes very slight attempts to soften the republican version of the behavior of the young Princess; and as the fourth, "Undine." All are illustrated and are bound in green cloth with a medallion portrait of the chief character ornamenting the cover, and each one will be regarded as a treasure by any child of discernment. A. C. McClurg & Co.

Those who flatter themselves that had an early copy of Fitzgerald's Omar fallen into their hands, they would have perceived its merits, proclaimed them, and so have prevented that long period of ignominious waiting at the bookseller's, now have the opportunity to test themselves. The editors of the "Wisdom of the East" series are publishing "The Diwan of Abu'l-Ala," translated by Mr. Henry Baerlein, and dedicated to Dr. E. J. Dillon. Abu'lAla was born in 973, forty-four years before Omar Khayyam, and the Diwan, or selection from his works, is intended as an introduction to his biography. The selections themselves are introduced by a commentary occupying half the little book in which they are printed and explaining their strangeness as far as may be possible. Inscrutable as a whole they will remain for most readers, but in each

quatrain may be discerned an evasive, elusive idea that both charms and beckons. The author's life was a romance in which public spirit, scepticism, self-sacrifice and the power of attraction were strangely blended, but the editor reserves its story for another volume. Meanwhile here are the quatrains, solid fragments of the hard undeniable common sense of the East. E. P. Dutton & Co.

If easy reading must be preceded by hard writing, the author of "The Little Brown Jug at Kildare," Mr. Meredith Nicholson, must have toiled mightily, for so lightly and swiftly is one passed from one amazing position to another that the mind is no more conscious of being taxed than the eye which gazes upon a tranquil sunlit landscape. Briefly, the book tells the story of two girls to whom chance simultaneously gave absolute power in a sovereign State, and sets forth the manner in which they used it, and the able assistance given to each by one of two friends who had been complaining to one another that adventures never came to them. As the two girl-governed States are contiguous, difficulties occur along the border, and attain such magnitude that the militia is called to arms, and the Governors of both States are imprisoned; but everything ends happily for everybody except for two scheming officials. The means by which this feat is effected make the most amusing book that has yet been written about the South, and a book at which the South will laugh quite as heartily as the North, for there is no smallest savor of ill-humor or unkindness anywhere in the story, and very nearly all the essentials of the ordinary romance of the South are absent from its pages. Those which remain, the brave ladies and clever men, the occasional pistol and a suspicion

of mountain dew, will be found anything but objectionable. Bobbs Merrill Co.

Mr. R. H. Johnston was rarely equipped for the journey from North China to Burma, through Tibetan Ssuch'-uan and Yunnan, described in his "From Peking to Mandalay." He is district officer and magistrate at Weihaiwei, knows the Chinese language and has the most friendly disposition towards the Chinese people, and made his long pilgrimage through to territory untrodden by any British foot unattended except by baggage coolies, and he acted purely for his own pleasure. His journey was not his first adventure in exploration, but it was his most important, occupying almost a year, and he brought home not only memories but photographs of unvisited places, and many scientific observations.

Moreover he has something of the spirit of the mystic and of the poet, and he writes of his lonely communion with nature in terms that arouse profound emotion. By a curious coincidence one passage in his book is almost identical with one in which Mr. Oscar Kuhns in his "The Sense of the Infinite" speaks of moments of elevated vision granted to those who contemplate the supremely beautiful in Art or in Nature, and as the two authors arrive at their opinion by entirely different routes this is interesting to the readers of both. Generally, however, Mr. Johnston is the wise and curious observer of men and manners, with a decided turn for the study of national proclivitives, and his note on the "yellow peril," although only three pages in length, suggests a remedy worthy of the consideration of all sane men. Thus in many ways his book marks a stage in the exploration of the East and is a model for his successors. E. P. Dutton & Co.