boldly swung herself into our hero's chamber, who presented himself to her in that selfsame nightly costume in which Gil Blas and other heroes have stood.

"The servant-maid could not manage to make the quantity of butter which Mrs. Knepus allowed for weekly consumption hold out, and this the mistress said was only owing to her wastefulness; and that she might prove the truth of this, she laid a wager of three marks with the girl that she would make the allotted portion of butter last out the week. But, in order that the lady might not go and eke out the quantity from that which was in the store-room, which, as we know, was Christian's bedroom, the servant was to keep the key when he was gone to bed. The lady, however, found herself short in her calculation; but for all that she would not lose her wager, because upon that depended three marks and her reputation. From this cause she vaulted, at this hour of night, through the window into the little garret, to steal from herself.

"I am in a horrible situation,' said she; if anybody saw me getting through the window in this way, what would they say? But I do it on account of my honor, and "to the pure all things are pure!

"And the lady helped herself to the but

ter."

We do not know that any personage of the story is infirmly done, and the persons are of sufficient number to have excused some inefficiency of characterization. As is usual with Andersen's romances, this is told in what affects one as a series of episodes, though every chapter as a whole contributes to the progress of the story. Of the pas sages which are to be chiefly admired in and for themselves, none is more touching and remarkable than that which presents the tragedy of Steffen-Margaret, of the poor wretch who would have turned from her life of sin, and could only do so through death's door. Let us make haste to secure our author against a supposition that his story deals much with such characters. In the vast range of his romance, this one appears naturally with the rest, and is neither invited nor repelled. It is, in fact, an air of freedom in the movements of the persons which is one of the greatest charms of the book: they come and go; perhaps we see them but once; they are never strictly accounted for; the changes wrought in them by time are only incidentally noted,

It will be easily believed that this romance abounds in happy descriptions, and that it is full of Denmark as well as humanity; a book by Andersen could not be other. wise. The only thing to say against it is that it is too sad for so gloomy a world as we are obliged actually to live in.

The translation is more vulnerable; it is mainly good, but the foreign order is too often retained, and occasionally the translator seems to forget that he ought to be writing English.

The Handy-Book of Husbandry: A Guide for Farmers, Young and Old. By GEORGE E. WARING, JR., of Ogden Farm. Illustrated. (Sold by subscription.) New York: E. B. Treat & Co.

WE own that we praise Mr. Waring's book without any of that practical knowledge of farming which has enabled him to write it; but we cannot carry our candor to the vicious excess of pretending ignorance of the very obvious merits of the book, namely, its clear, straightforward method, its sensible style, and its wholesome limitations in matters of theory and advice. The spirit of the work is revealed in a passage of the Preface, which we shall do it the service to quote, and which we think will put every one in good-humor with it:

"It is sad to look back to the days when 'Agriculture' was a rosy future with me; when my work was done with the regularity and precision of clock-work by cheap and respectable farm hands; when my crops were all large and my cattle were all fat; when an analysis of my soil, and a chemical ledgeraccount with each field, kept fertility at the top mark; and when the balance-sheet at the end of the year was always adding to my fortune, - and then to bring my sobered gaze down over the hillside of hard realities that ended in a plain of simple 'Farming,' of humdrum hard work, dear labor, scant manure, small crops, bad markets, sick animals, and the least in the world a sick heart; with soil analysis' an ignis-fatuus, and nothing but patience and toil and skill and experience and hard study to take its place. I make no complaint of my disappointment, for even the harder experiences of life are not without their advantages, when they are past, but the hope that I might turn the steps of other young farmers into pleasanter paths was not the least of my motives in writing this book."

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From a farmer who writes in this spirit, it is probable that his brother-farmers will get an amount of good sense about their vocation that is seldom talked to them, or that, saving their respect, they are apt themselves to talk about it; for Mr. Waring has in his own case overcome the prejudices of the practical farmer and the enthusiasm of the book-farmer, and has reconciled the experience of the first with the ideas of the last.

The scope of the book is sufficiently great. It treats of buying and leasing farms, of fencing, buildings, and implements, of drainage, ploughing, and trenching, of manures and rotation of crops, of stock of all kinds and their management, and of the dairy in all its departments; and each of these particulars is discussed in the same temper as characterizes the passage we have quoted from the Preface. Just how much Mr. Waring's advice upon any one point is worth, the nearest farmer would be better able to say than the present critical authority; but in all modesty, we can assure that farmer, from a pretty wide conversation with recent literature, that Mr. Waring does not write in the least like a quack; whereas, and we are open to correction if wrong, many agricultural authors do. Farming seems, indeed, to have been the science destined, after medicine, to evoke the greatest charlatanry and pretence; and now, if we may judge from the general tone of Mr. Waring's book, it is destined like medicine to return with an enlightened intelligence to the use of simples, and a system of wise and careful nursing.

Prenticeana; or, Wit and Humor in Paragraphs. By GEORGE D. PRENTICE. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by G. W. GRIFFIN. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger.

WHEN Mr. Prentice, eleven years ago, made this collection (now newly republished) of paragraphs from the columns of his newspaper, the Louisville Journal, he seemed to appreciate somewhat accurately its character by writing: "I am as well aware as any one can be that there are just grounds of grave objection to this book. Probably in many things that it contains little else than partisan bitterness will be found." This is too true, and the volume would give a lay preacher sufficient texts for an historical sermon on the grievous personalities of Western

political editors thirty years ago; which doubtless might be harmlessly addressed and brought home to certain Eastern newspaper editors of to-day. A large number of these paragraphs were written in reply to quoted expressions from other contemporary editors, whose names were used often in the original publication, but are here indicated chiefly by dashes, and whose known or presumed personal habits, morals, and reputation for truth or honesty were treated as public property and characterized with such words or phrases as served the political purposes and ministered to the popular or local taste of the time.

To his well-grounded apprehension concerning this prevailing characteristic of partisan bitterness, Mr. Prentice added further concerning his paragraphs, and with no less truth: "I have no doubt that a very considerable proportion of them, which perhaps from partisan partiality were deemed 'good hits' at the time, will, now that the occasion which called them forth has passed, be read with comparatively little interest. I know that such things do not keep well." We feel sure that the self-criticism here hinted (with the modesty of its expression) was sincere with Mr. Prentice. And, indeed, many, very many, of these paragraphs, far removed from the heats of politics and the petty local enmities and quarrels that produced them and gave them their pertinence and force, rise up, stale, flat, and unprofitable, after a twenty years' sleep in the dusty newspaper files. Yet we know that city and country journals overflowed with these things in the palmy days of the old Whig party, when Clay was a Kentucky giant and Webster a Massachusetts Jove, and that the name of Prentice became familiar everywhere, currency for witty retorts, shrewd and humorous turns of expression, and numberless epigrammatic sayings. And per

haps, after all, wit is chiefly to be known and should be judged by its immediate influence and effect; a pun that makes nine men laugh at the dinner - table (where it keeps company with the wine) is genuine and good, in spite of the tenth man, who, with grim and dyspeptic face and in bed next morning, professess critically that there was nothing in it. Wit, like eloquence, often is to be recognized and appraised in the effervescence of the occasion, new-born; its sparkle seen and felt to-day is vague, dull, lost, to-morrow. Yet this immediately contemporary and local interest, now,

often almost entirely escaped, is only one phase, although it is not a slight one, of the book before us. There are in it hundreds of paragraphs that are as good now as they ever were, and can be still appreciated by the nine men at table, whenever they happen to come together.

This volume of Prenticeana (the title was not chosen by the author) was collected at the solicitation of the original publishers in 1859, and it was reissued, doubtless, because of a presumed revival of interest created by the recent death of Mr. Prentice. Perhaps it may be said justly that the book is hardly the best showing that might be given of his wit, for the collection, somewhat hastily made from the files of his newspaper, was almost twice as large in manuscript as in print. Mr. Prentice intrusted the sifting of this original material to one or two friends, and it may be doubted if many paragraphs were not rejected that might properly have taken precedence of many here retained. Yet, with the volume as it is, it would be difficult to deny the possession by Mr. Prentice of the abundant wit for which he had during many years a reputation by no means confined to this country.

But, although best known perhaps to the general public by his paragraphs, it is fair to say that Mr. Prentice was not merely a writer of paragraphs. He was a scholar familiar with and loving the best literature, having been while yet a child a marvel of proficiency in Greek and Latin studies, and in his youth a close and industrious student, remarkable for his memory; in his early manhood and during his life he wrote poems that showed great tenderness and delicacy of feeling, and the possession of a fine fancy; several of these have long been popular favorites; and throughout his long editorial life in Kentucky, which he entered poor and unknown in 1830, he was a man who, through his real ability and his tireless devotion to the persons and policies of his choice, exercised for many years a power and influence second to no other man in the whole Western country, second to no other editor in the land. This is hardly the place to enlarge upon his political life; we may venture to say, however, that those who judge of Mr. Prentice by his presumed attitude during the war of the Southern Rebellion judge ignorantly and uncharitably of as true a patriot, unfortunately placed, as spoke a word or drew a sword for the gov ernment. At a time when two of his sons

were in the Rebel Army (one of them, to the father's great grief, killed in battle less than a month after, against his father's anxious entreaties, he had entered the Confederate service), he was true enough to the country to volunteer himself, and shoulder a gun, in company with a very few others in a city full of Rebel personal friends, who would have idolized him had he joined their cause instead, to defend Louisville against the expected enemy. This we think worthy of record on behalf of a veteran editor who has been too carelessly regarded as a doubtful friend of his country in its time of trial. This was his time of trial, too, a trial which, to an emotional and sensitive old man who loved his children passionately, was an ordeal of fire that did not come to many younger editors who volunteered to fight battles, and spared no presumedly lukewarm comrades -on paper.

Hammer and Anvil. A Novel. By FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN. From the German. By WILLIAM HAND BROWN. New York: Leypoldt and Holt.

It is an open question whether this book has established in all its excessive length a raison a'être, at least in its English form. It will hardly hold its own in point of interest with the average three-volume novel of Great Britain, and the lesson it would teach is not brought out with the directness and clearness even of the better class of American didactic fiction. We already have abundance of both these styles of im. aginative literature, and therefore we may have honest doubts as to the measure of hospitality we ought to extend in this instance to the foreigner who comes to us, not as a guest, but as a naturalized citizen of the same literary republic. If his claims to honorable consideration have no better ground than is to be found in his performance in the "Hammer and Anvil," Spielhagen will, it strikes us, have to make his way through a formidable burden of proof, in showing cause why he should be here at all.

This ponderous work, the "Hammer and Anvil," as nearly as we can understand it, designs to teach the duty of mutual helpfulness. The lesson, however, is not taught by the action of the story, but is dragged in, rather, in distinct paragraphs of reflection and whole pages of dreary monologue. Wheth

er in the mouth of his characters, or in the author's proper person, his preaching has that vague body, without head or legs, which one discovers to be a predominant family peculiarity in a great deal of the political talk and writing of the Germans. If these pages of endless moral labels could be cut out bodily, the reader might in the first and perhaps in the second part enjoy the pleasant but delusive impression that he had met that rara avis of the present literary period, a novel without a purpose. Still, the three parts of the story taken in connection and read thus, without the aid of the author's too frequent scholia, would seem to convey a moral exactly opposite to the one professed, namely, the one taught in many very ordinary works of fiction in all modern languages, that it is the duty of a healthy young man, with no money, but with great personal independence, to marry a rich wife. In spite of his virtuous lemmas and postulates, it does not become at all clear why George Hartwig, the autobiographical hero of this work, at a time when he is worth but a beggarly fifty thalers in the world, refused the good old Dr. Snellius's proffered loan of fifty thousand, to marry Hermine and a million. Now Herr Hartwig is, in some respects, a tolerably natural human being, notwithstanding his shadowy theories about the hammer and anvil, and we incline to the opinion that in allowing himself to be persuaded into this first marriage, while he was confessedly in love with her who was to be his second wife, he acted, as much as he does at any other time, in conformity to the dictates of our fallen nature. From a worldly point of view, at least, it was the most successful and practical stroke of business of the many he has to record of himself.

There are some dramatic scenes in the book, and some good characterization; but the former are by no means great, and the latter is never quite natural and consistent throughout. There is to be observed, too, the fatality which seems so generally to attend imaginative works overburdened with high precept, that the bad characters are the best drawn and act much more like human beings than the model heroes and heroines.

If the story were not told in the first person singular, it would be difficult to see how the most patient reader could ever get through it. The autobiographical form and a personal narrative have a stronghold in human curiosity which, in this instance, six hundred and ninety-one large pages can

WE tried to tell the reader some months ago what kind of writer Björnson is, and we do not know that his story in this collection affords cause for fresh dissertation upon him. It is of his realistic rather than his idyllic mood; but as his delicacy never fails him, the portraits of the simple, kindhearted, sensitive Canute Aakre, and the shrewd, hard, unscrupulously ambitious Lars Hogstad are as exquisitely painted as any ideal figure that the poet has done. The story is only the narrative of these two country politicians, in their early friendship and their later rivalry, the success of Lars in having the railroad run through the old village churchyard, which Canute had striven to protect from the sacrilege, and the final triumph of the latter in the good offices which he renders Lars when a spark from one of the first - passing locomotives has burned that successful man out of house and home. It is all very interesting, because it make us so intimately acquainted with the working of the local political machinery in Norway, and, better still, with the character of the people and their feeling when confronted with such modern thoughts as shake mankind through the railway and the steamship. The author has availed himself of the right of every one who tells a good story, to omit the application.

Björnson is further represented in this book by two little tales which are not named in the title, "The Eagle's Nest" and "The Father," and which are wonderful in showing how much can be achieved in small space with simplest material and the quietest manner. One merely tells how the young man that climbed to the eagle's nest slipped and fell dead at the feet of his betrothed; the other, how the ever-prospered father was not truly blest in his only son

till he had lost him; but in the limits of these narrow plots the author contrives to touch the strongest chords in his reader with thrilling and irresistible force. Only himself can do justice to the idea of his most sincere and unaffected art.

In "The Flying Mail" we are charmingly made acquainted with a Danish writer hitherto strange to us, who shows himself master of a very neat and accurate knowledge of the human heart as affected by love and society. The pretty conceit of the young man intrusting to the winds a declaration of love for that unseen and unknown fair, one syllable of whose conjectured name they have blown into his attic window, is sufficiently daring, but it is managed with the utmost skill and grace; and in the slightly sketched personages, Ingeborg and Miss Brandt, we realize two very lifelike and natural people. It is in them, and in the surpassing daintiness and the fine humor with which their characters are indicated, that the new author secures his hold upon the reader, and that will make him welcome with whatever romance he appears hereafter.

Mrs. Thoresen, who writes "Old Olaf," is also a Dane, but Norway is her home, and the poetical feeling of her story is rather like that of Björnson than of Goldschmidt. She reminds us here and there of the former, as if she had made a study of his method; and her story is the least forcibly original of all in the book. This is not saying that it is not very touching in matter and good in form, we hope; for it is all this, and something better: studied from nature, we should think, as well as from Björnson, and characterized by a pure womanly feeling. We must add also that the sex of the author is shown in her disregard of human life among her characters, for she appar ently thinks nothing of destroying one generation of lovers, that another may profit by their sad fate.

.First Steps in English Literature. By ARTHUR GILMAN, A. M. New York: Hurd and Houghton.

THIS little book is a creditable attempt to reduce the study of English literature to the form of a scientific treatise. The works which it is designed to supplant have been composed almost entirely of details of the lives, and unsatisfactory quotations from the

writings of individual authors. Mr. Gilman has avoided this error, and has produced a manual of unquestionable value. Whether it is adapted in every way to the uses of a text-book, only the practical teacher can say. It may be hardly simple enough for schools, and hardly full enough for colleges, and it must in any case, as is evidently the intention of the author, be studied in connection with more exhaustive reading or lectures.

The careful charts, introducing each main division of the subject, and the “Bibliography" at the end of the volume, are what will make it especially valuable to the general reader as a book of reference. American literature has not been slightingly passed over, as it is so often in works of this kind. The general divisions of the subject are, it strikes us, very good and philosophical, and we wish we could say the same of some of Mr. Gilman's definitions. It is awful to think what will be the feelings of those who produce the average magazine and newspaper poetry, when they read, under the head of "Definition of Terms," this edict of exclusion against themselves as follows: "Poets are those writers who so combine the materials of the natural and moral world as to present them in new shapes, or in unaccustomed or affecting points of view, and in metrical language." Mr. Gilman, however, is not peculiarly severe upon poets, for if he has succeeded in carrying out his purpose, he has placed his book out. side of his own definition of literature.

Days in North India. By NORMAN MACLEOD, D. D., Author of "Wee Davie," "Eastward," etc., and Editor of "Good Words." Profusely illustrated. Philadel phia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

DR. MACLEOD was of course justified in writing of what interested him most in North India, but at first thought it seems not quite fortunate for his readers that it was the memories of the Sepoy mutiny which most interested him there. It is hard to have that story circumstantially rehearsed again in a book where you had a right to look for fresh speculations, if not fresh information, about Indian life; though the sense of loss proves not so great as it would have been if, in the few passages the author gives to his own experiences, he had shown himself a better observer than he does. He is not a good observer, we should say, nor