shape. It is the fear of being saddled with a book for years after we have lost all interest in it that deters so many of us from buying, and sends us to the lending library. Let us, like our Continental neighbors, have a destructible book published at half-acrown or three-and-sixpence, and capa

The Outlook.

ble of being annihilated or disposed of without embarrassment. Then I think the publishers would notice a change, and would find many buying who now only borrow, and many more reading who now scarcely concern themselves with books at all.

Sidney Low.

Edward Stratemeyer, who comes near being an American Henty, at least in the range and the number of his stories for boys, adds a new volume, the fifth, to his "Dave Porter Series" in a story of "Dave Porter and his Classmates." This is a story of school-life, with the all-subduing titular hero as its central figure. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

"Iblis in Paradise" by George Roe is a poetic re-telling of the story of the temptation, the materials for which the author has found in Oriental legends, and has adapted to his uses. corresponds closely in some particulars with the story in the book of Genesis, and in other particulars it differs from it.

It

Whatever its source, it is daintily conceived and expressed, and is presented in a pretty dress. The Henry Altemus Co.

Dr. Edwin W. Bowen's "Questions at Issue in our English Speech" deals with a fascinating subject in a very practical and diverting way. It is made up of six or seven essays upon English spelling and pronunciation, upon vulgarisms and slang, upon Briticisms and Americanisms, and upon standard English. These essays have been already published, in whole or in part, in the Atlantic Monthly, the Popular Science Monthly, the North American

Review and other periodicals. They are closely related, and they em

Professor Allan Marquand's "Greek Architecture," summarizing and ordering the results of the latest excavations and the newest theories is intended for the serious student, but the frivolous may find pleasure in examining its drawings and the designer should not neglect them. The chapter headings are "Materials and Constructions"; "Architectural Forms"; "Proportion"; "Decorations"; "Composition and Style" and "Monuments." There are nearly 400 illustrations ranging from small details to pictures of entire buildings and there is an index which seems good enough to endure the test of use. The volume realizes the overworked

and often misapplied phrase "appropriately bound." The Macmillan Co.

Miss Jeannette Marks's "Through Welsh Doorways" is a pretty volume containing eleven carefully finished short sketches of Welsh husbands and wives, or pairs of sweethearts and of the modest chicanery of the nearest approach to a petty politician that rural Wales can produce. The good folk are very like other dwellers in places of exceeding quiet, but their amazing names, the slight idiomatic difference between their speech and ordinary English, and the deliberation with which an idea is conversationally presented and received continuously remind one that they dwell in Cadwallos' country. In curiosity and in the searching quality of their comment upon things observed they are not outdone by Yankee or by Scot. A Welsh crowd is as pitiless as a Parisian street group, but the national devotion to music and poetry shapes them to a finer appreciation of fine qualities and gentle deeds than one discovers in other rustics, and in making this evident in perfectly balanced and modelled description Miss Marks's distinctive quality appears. Gently. quizzical, but always loving, she sets forth her little pictures and if they be not immediately received into high favor, it will be because gentleness and love are out of fashion. Houghton Mifflin Company.

The day of the hybrid heroine seems ended, and henceforth, when a girl appears in a story as the daughter of a woman of color and a white man, one may be quite sure that she will be triumphantly proved to be of unmixed blood, or will die pathetically, after saving the hero's life. However the average novel reader, carefully taught, with due reference to totally irrelevant Scripture that an octoroon, a halfbreed, or a Eurasian is the equal of the

Caucasian, will not perceive this for some little time to come, and will expect the dark lady to remain unchanged to the end, as in the days of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Therefore, the readers of Mr. Harold Morton Kramer's "The Chrysalis" will not be sure until they come to the end of the story that he is not in any detail a sentimentalist of the civil war period, and may fancy that his twentieth century mixture of financial war, football and politics is to be crowned by a mixed marriage. Instead, they will find an ending both sensible and romantic, and fitly terminating a tale in which the hero's powers slowly develop, and from a mere incarnation of brute strength he becomes a creature capable of fine self-sacrifice and scornful of low aims. The story is better plotted and better written than any of its predecessors and reveals powers of which they gave no hint. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

The civil engineer educated in the very latest discoveries in electricity is in high favor at present, and Miss Adele Marie Shaw and Carmelia Beckwith present a very good specimen of him in London West, the hero of their "The Lady of the Dynamos," a story of Ceylon. In addition, they furnish the reader with portraits of a mother and daughter, both scheming to marry the daughter to a rich man, and both cherishing a pious hope that Heaven may send the mother a second husband; and these two use all their skill to destroy the hero's happiness after he has found it in the island. The exceeding cleverness of their wiles is a little exaggerated, perhaps, but none the less entertaining, and the heroine is no willing victim but a clever antagonist. Indeed, the somewhat complicated struggle among the entire group of characters reveals all of them as able. The scenery and the natives are vividly described, and the cleverness, energy, and

uprightness necessary to control them are powerfully set forth. This is one of the truly patriotic stories in which the best qualities of the American abroad are set forth and also the exceeding mischievousness of the unimaginative man who attempts to control natives by brute force. The book ranks next to "The Little Brown Brother" in the fast growing group of American novels showing Americans among the peoples of the tropical East. Henry Holt & Co.

If there has been any loud call for another life of Walt Whitman, Professor George Rice Carpenter's brief biography written for the English Men of Letters Series should be well received by those having faith to believe that the "barbaric yawp" was uttered by a poet.

There be those who still hold to the maxim of Richard Grant White that no man can write poetry in a language of which he is ignorant, and that the title "Leaves of Grass" sufficiently proves Whitman not fully acquainted with English without the further evidence of the French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Irish words, the thieves' slang, New York streetdialect, Americanisms and archaisms to which he was compelled to resort in order to place himself upon paper. These good folk will not care for Mr. Carpenter's Whitman, because in it they will find even less account of the esteem in which the bard was held in his prime than they may glean from Mr. Perry, who mercifully refrains from giving his readers any idea of the mingled abhorrence and contempt in which Whitman was held by the mass of unaffected American lovers of poetry, and the wrath with which they met the condescending patronage of foreigners, asserting "This is your true representative." In Mr. White's "The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys" one may find the contemporary American opinion of Whitman up to 1875 or 1880, but the

American is too indolent to fight for his dislikes. What with O'Connor's proclamations that here was the one American, "all others is cag-mag"; with the humble approbation of Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Trowbridge; with the foolish fondness of certain youngsters anxious to distinguish themselves by oddity of taste and above all, what with the relaxation of austerity in expression brought about by Mr. Swinburne and by the study of Scandinavian, Renaissance, and Oriental literature Whitman was at last endured, and Professor Carpenter dwells upon this period. He does indeed, mention that certain persons disapproved of Whitman, that the newspapers ridiculed him, but he touches so lightly on these points that one might imagine that Browning encountered more opposition and was more severely condemned. As this is the book from which Englishmen will derive their impression of the United States of Whitman's day, an American must wish that it were less laudatory. The hospital service which he chose to offer to his country, instead of the military service for which he was well qualified brought him more readers than his verse attracted, his abolitionist friends brought him others, but until old age made him pitiable his coarse volubility commanded as much and no more respect in this country than England gave to the inane volubility of Tupper. Mr. Perry thinks that it requires intellectual and moral generosity to approve Whitman: Professor Carpenter would class him among those who "bring a message to man expressed mainly in their lives, such men . . . as Francis of Assist or George Fox; . . . they show new and noble ways of living. Whitman. . . . preached the vision of the world as love and comradeship." It is to be feared that St. Francis and George Fox and Whitman would be equally surprised by the classification. Macmillan Co.

BALLADE OF EIGHTEENTH-CEN

TURY LADIES.

In passionate dead days that were
Your loyal lovers pledged you keep:
Royally kind and warmly fair,

By tavern fire, on castled steep Where worms of desolation creepYou were the toasts, a gallant show, Ladies, too wonderful to weep, How ye were loved once, long ago.

Your pictured eyes with smiling stare Look from the dealer's gilded heap With rose-crowned heads and bosoms bare

Now is your full tide shrunk to neap: No more your stiff brocade may sweep

Your stately gardens to and fro:

White shepherdesses without sheep, How ye were loved once, long ago.

Your scented curls of shining hair,

Gold as the corn grown full to reap, Like thistledown to the wide air

Are scattered; small men peer, and peep,

And pry, and chatter, and make cheap

The things you treasured; none shall trow

How your eyes made men's hearts to

leap,

How ye were loved once, long ago.

L'Envoi.

Ladies, your beauty sunk in sleep,
What shall it profit ye to know,
In the long silence that ye keep,
How ye were loved once, long ago?
Ethel Talbot.

The Spectator.

ON EXPECTING SOME BOOKS. To-morrow they will come. I know How rich their sweet contents are, so Upon their dress let Fancy playWill it be blue, red, green, or gray? Sweet Books that I have oft heard named,

And seen stand up like blossoms framed,

Through many a common window

shown

When I was moneyless in town;
But never touched their leaves, nor

bent

Close to them and inhaled their scent.
They'll come like Snowdrops to a Bee
That, tired of empty dreams, can see
Real flowers at last. Until this time,
Now on the threshold of my prime,
I did not guess my poverty:

That none of these rich books, that lie
Untouched on many a shelf-save when
A housemaid, dreaming of young men,
And music, sport, and dance, and dress,
Will bang them for their dustiness-
That none of these were in my care;
To-morrow I will have them here.
Well do I know their value; they
Will not be purses found, which may
Be full of coppers, nails, or keys-
They will not disappoint, like these.
O, may their coming never cease!
May my Book-family increase!
Clothes, pictures, ornaments of show,
Trinklets and mirrors-these can go
Outside, that all my Books may be
Together in one room with me.
William H. Davies.

The Nation.

THE LADY POVERTY.

The Lady Poverty was fair:

But she has lost her looks of late, With change of time and change of air, Ah, slattern, she neglects her hair,

Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no

state,

As once when her poor feet were bare.

Or, almost worse, if worse can be,

She scolds in parlors, dusts and

trims,

Watches and counts: oh! is this she Whom Fraucis met, whose step was

free,

Who with Obedience carolled hymns, In Umbria walked with Chastity?

Where is her ladyhood? Not here,

Not among modern kinds of men; But in the stony fields, where, clear, Through the slim trees, the skies appear,

In delicate spare soil and fen, And slender landscape and austere. Alice Meynell.