counters a mariner as quaint as if Mr. Jacobs had imagined him, and the whole book is simple truth. At least one copy to a family is the rule for the proper distribution of this book in New England. The Macmillan Co.

"A Century of Archaeological Discovery" by Professor A. Michaelis, seems defined by its title, but it is more than a mere chronicle. It is the work of a master of science written in the hope of obtaining true appreciation and proper respect for his science, not for his own sake, but for the sake of knowledge. The mere names of the discoveries, one name to a line, occupy twelve octavo pages, and many of these names belong to collections including thousands of objects all of which were 125 years ago concealed from mortal vision. Archæology of the spade is the author's name for his subject and he limits it strictly to the archæology of art, and especially to the rise, the diffusion, and the deepening of the knowledge of Greek art. The translator is Miss Bettina Kahnweiler. For all purposes of reference this volume supplants the various encyclopædias and the work of individual explorers, and it is uncommonly agreeable reading for anyone with a sufficient enamel of ancient history and the classics to understand it. The pictures make one wonder at the courage of those who strove, in the old pre-photograph days, to copy ancient drawing, or to draw ancient sculpture. E. P. Dutton & Co.

subjects, University Trustees, An Inspecting and Consenting Body, The University Faculty, The Elective System, Methods of Instruction, Social Organization, are treated with severe simplicity. The lecture on the elective system, the first which teachers will seek, is not a defence so much as a plain statement of good results; and under the head of Methods of Instruction the written examination, the bogey of the indolent teacher and the empirical school board, is admirably explained. In matters pertaining exclusively to the University and to the College, the book will be found invaluable by those concerned in the same work as the author, and will long remain a monument of years spent in the trying light of publicity, spent with conscientious application and in fearless independence. If Dr. Eliot had left no other word for the encouragement of college and university instructors than this one volume the world might well have been content with his work in its behalf. Houghton Mifflin Co.

"The Perfect Courtier" is the second title which Mrs. Ady has given to the two superb volumes of her "Baldassare Castiglione," taking it of course from Castiglione's own book "Il Cortegiano," "the best book that was ever written upon good breeding" according to Dr. Johnson. In Italy a hundred editions appeared in less than a century after its first issue; seventeen times has it been republished in England and three reprints have been made during the last ten years. Naturally Mrs. Ady follows her studies of its author's contemporaries with this biography of the noblest of the circle, not the most successful but surely the happiest. If chance has kept his name from becoming as popularly familiar to English speaking folk as that of the Frenchman and the Englishman with whom one so often compares him as one

reads, it is not because he was not more than the peer of both, and in his day he was more widely known in Europe than Bayard or Sidney in theirs. It is possible that the very length of his name may have influenced both John Bull and Jonathan to refrain from making it a household word. Howsoever that may be the biography is the richest contribution to history yet made by its learned author and its illustrations constitute it a portrait gallery of the period. Castiglione's portrait by Raphael is the frontispiece of the first volume and a gracious company of ladies, princes, and churchmen follow. The binding is both rich and substantial and the printing clear and bold. E. P. Dutton & Co.

Calendars for 1909 for every mood and in every form and size are published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Among them are two Phillips Brooks calendars, one a block calendar with selections for every day in the year, and the other a calendar with illuminated text presenting selections for each month; "The Life Beautiful" with beautifully illuminated pages of verse decorated with flowers; a "Madonna and Child" calendar, with reproductions in color from the old masters, and a smaller "Madonna" calendar, similarly decorated; the "Lullaby" calendar, showing baby faces on each leaf; a "Lincoln" calendar, containing the same well-chosen selections that were used in the calendar for 1908 but with new calendar pages; a "Fra Angelico" calendar, with rich and exquisitely illuminated pages; "We Praise Thee, O God," a Te Deum calendar, and a "Kindness" calendar, in the form of booklets with decorated pages; the "Daily Strength" calendar, containing a Bible message for every day; "The Word in Season" calendar, each leaf of which presents a bit of helpful verse

by the late Charlotte Murray; the "Pearls of Faith" calendar, with selections in prose and verse for each month; "Our Cats" calendar which has on each leaf cat pictures which will delight all lovers of cats; "The Light of the World" and "Mother Thoughts" calendars, in medallion shape; the "Good Luck" calendar, in the form of a horse-shoe; a Lord's Prayer calendar and a Forget-me-not calendar, and, in lighter vein an Ingoldsby Legends, a Mother Goose and a (modern) Proverbs calendar.

The final word can never be said about a man of lasting genius, writes Professor Albert Elmer Hancock in the preface of his "John Keats, a Literary Biography," and certainly very few are the geniuses of whom one may even hope that it has been said. The entire absence of any new matter or the thoroughness with which the old has been threshed gives no manner of security to those who ask nothing but quiet in which to enjoy their own conception and estimate of the work of the genius. Professor Hancock has no new incident or word to offer; but he is displeased with the figure of Keats common to nineteenth century biography and criticism, the figure gently pitied or jeeringly despised. He prefers to see the Keats able to endure the horrors of the dissecting-room until he was prepared to be a dresser at Guy's; broad enough in his sympathies to love both Hunt and Haydon; sturdy enough to continue to work with small recognition or reward; man enough to love profoundly, and to go away to die when the end came. Bit by bit he breaks away the fragments of marble that conceal the statue in the block meaning Keats to him, and it is a fine figure that he reveals, and the young readers who stand before it with no memories of the Marsyas with the lyre usually called Keats will be fortunate.

He has perhaps gone too far in his endeavor to make a new Hunt from the sorry relics of him whose poetry and honesty seem to have been kept in spiritual compartments between which there was no communication; but his Keats is a genuine gain to criticism. The book is choicely bound and illustrated. Houghton, Mifflin Co.

Miss

A white stone should mark the Christmas season that brings a book by Mr. Austin Dobson, and a book as characteristic as his new "De Libris" requires a mark especially long and especially white, all the more as it is illustrated from sketches by Mr. Hugh Thomson and Kate Greenaway. Essays on books alternating with gay verses on bookish subjects form the volume, and very good they are. "The Parent's Assistant" is considered in one of the longer papers, which does equal justice to good Maria and her critical and criticizing father. "Modern Book Illustrators" is a heading which links together laudatory papers on Greenaway and Mr. Hugh Thomson, artists with whom Mr. Dobson must needs sympathize as kindred spirits; "A French Critic on Bath," summarizes two papers by M. A. Barbeau, “An Eighteenth Century Watering Place," and "Elegant and Literary Society at Bath under Queen Aune and the Georges," and so delightful does Mr. Dobson find the subject that he indulges himself in a five-page paragraph about it, leaving an American reader lost in wonder as to the opiate which he gave the proof-reader in order to have it printed undivided. Thackeray lovers, is a paper on "Esmond," telling, among other things, what Miss Bronté thought of the story when she read it in manuscript, and there is a paper on Bramston's "The Man of Taste," which book it is just possible that everybody may not know even in Boston. The poems are in

For

the same key as the papers, appreciatively but not riotously witty, perfectly worded, showing intimate acquaintance, not smattering, with their subject, whatsoever it may be, and all too brief for the reader as is the book itself. Still it ends with promise of another, and that is something. The Macmillan Co.

Mr. S. M. Crothers occupies an agreeable position among those happy persons whose remarks are accepted as witty almost before they are spoken, and the five essays in his "By the Christmas Fire" are quite sure of being greeted as perfectly appropriate for the season. The first, "The Bayonet Poker," discovers a weapon, perhaps the very one saved from premature uselessness by Mulvaney's refusal to allow Mr Kipling to use it to poke a camp-fire, now fitted with a handle and made useful. The second essay, "On Being a Doctrinaire," is a clever disquisition upon a common and obnoxious type. "The Literature of Disillusion" and "The Ignominy of Being Grown Up" follow, the first amusing and sensible, the second dealing charmingly with a pleasant child and severely with poor Maria Edgeworth, who believed in teaching, not in kindergartening. Last of all comes "Christmas and the Spirit of Democracy," condemning Boyle O'Reilly's lines on the statistical Christ, explaining some modern types to Scrooge and wishing for a Dickens to write a new "Christmas Carol" in accordance with the Spirit of Democracy, a statement exactly harmonizing with the spirit easily visible and audible in the almsgiving of many contemporaries. Mr. Crothers tells of a dinner given to indigent children and followed by a speech by a plethoric gentleman who insulted them by telling them of the duties of the indigent. Such dinners are now things of the past; the speeches

precede the dinners and if too long for the patience of the diners, they are howled down, the speakers retiring meekly, and the dinner being served with swiftness. This is the result of the diners' conviction that they are receiving only their due, for when the giver ceases to feel that he is sacrificing self the receiver instantly abandons gratitude. Scrooge very rightly prophesies that the new Dickens will not come for a long time. The volume is illustrated by excellent emblematic pictures, and has a rubricated title page and a cover upon which the title and the author's name form a cross of novel proportions. The Houghton Mifflin Co.

Max Rooses, the author of "Jacob Jordaens, his Life and Works," prophesies an increase in the interest in him which has for some years been steadily growing, and surely his beautiful book will be a powerful influence in causing such a result. The last twenty years have been productive in illustrated biographies of great painters, but none has been more superbly com. memorated than the subject of this great quarto with its sixteen photogravures and equal number of other full-page pictures and its 250 text illustrations giving details of large pictures, and complete small pictures. If Jordaens be less well-known outside his own country than his great contemporaries, Rubens and Van Dyck, it is because he was so deeply Flemish in feeling and in spirit. As the author says, he preferred to paint only those things which he knew, and far from attempting to broaden his mind by considering other countries, other times, other customs, he deliberately enclosed himself in a Flemish world. He painted innumerable Holy Families and Adorations, and in no one of them is there a Semitic countenance or a Semitic trait. Moreover, even in Flanders, he confined himself to a narrow

range of models, and his kings are anything but regal, his few nobles are plebeian. Such an artist, howsoever superb his work, risks neglect from those whom he has neglected, and although Jordaens was in his life time known and esteemed beyond the borders of his own land, he was half forgotten in the eighteenth century, and nothing but the new gospel of good work regardless of subject brought him into prominence in the nineteenth. Good work is everywhere in his pictures. The monarch in "The King Drinks" may be a bulbous nosed old person, suggesting "the plump head waiter at the Cock," rather than any wearer of a crown: the Virgin in "The Adoration of the Shepherds," in the Stockholm Museum, may be at least fifty years of age and may have a retreating chin and the hands of a charwoman; nevertheless the king's glass glitters even in a photogravure, and the ugliness of Our Lady is as solid as marble. In "The Four Evangelists," one of his best works, there is nothing elevated, no sign that these are they to whom a great work has been entrusted, but the modelling of their faces is a marvel. Thus it is in nearly all his work; it inspires the craftsman, it arouses emulation in the true artist, but it leaves ordinary beholders not interested in art for art's sake quite cold. The literary form of the book is simple and unornamented, but it abounds in good criticism, for the author, the Conservator of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, is deeply learned in art, and both impartial and discerning, and a thoroughly agreeable writer. Only a limited edition, 400, of the work has been printed, and these will hardly supply the demand of Art Museums and Libraries, and such copies of this first edition as may remain after they are supplied will be the prey of the bibliophile and the speculator. E. P. Dutton & Co.