wide and fertile is the field cultivated by him. In Dr. Burgess's opinion, Ruskin was singularly and strikingly the prophet of his times, and his works contain such a fund of instruction in Biblical truth as is not to be found in whole theological libraries. His style is praised as warmly as his spirit, and his subjects are said to be presented with an eloquence and poetry "not surpassed in all the literary world." The selections, which fill some 350 large octavo pages, are preceded by a biography as enthusiastic as the preface, and the remainder of the volume is divided into five books in which the quoted passages are arranged under the heads "Religious Thought in Art," "Religious Light in Architecture and Sculpture," "Religious Studies in Nature," "Political Economy and other Things," and "Religion in Life and Poetry.” The passages selected are of generous length, not leaving a thought half-expressed, as is too often the case in works of this kind, and they are chosen in accordance with the spirit of the preface. The difficulty of indexing such a work is obvious, and it has not been fully overcome, but a little study will enable the reader to discover whether or not any desired passage is included in the volume, and how many on any given subject may be found in it, and the second edition, which must certainly come, may bring an index of greater scope and minuteness. Fleming H. Revell & Co.

Mr. George Cary Eggleston is one of those happy authors who may count all his readers, young and old, as his friends, and most critics and editors as his allies, and his "Recollections of a Varied Life" would probably be an agreeable book, even did he not choose to follow the good new manner of avoiding ugly stories except when the public welfare demands their recital. The book is an octavo of 350 pages, and

as the author's boyhood was passed in Indiana, his youth in Virginia, his young manhood in the confederate army, and the following years of his life among New York journalists, authors and publishers, and as he himself is the writer of many successful books, it is evident that there must be much that is worth while in his "Recollections." As he belongs to a generation following Mr. Bigelow's and as his experiences as far as he relates them, are confined to his own country and to the two professions of arms and literature, his work does not challenge comparison with his senior's, but it is far more valuable than any similarly limited auto-biographical volume published for many years. He has secret history to relate of Gen. Grant, of Mr. Davis, of Gen. Beauregard; illuminating and beautiful anecdotes of Mr. Bryant, the most reticent of American poets, the most beneficent and elevating influence in American journalism; he has stories of Stedman, Aldrich. Loring Pacha, of the entire fellowship of literature, and without any formal description he gives a clearer view of New York journalism than can be drawn from the great mass of fiction and the immense number of newspaper and magazine articles based upon the subject. Incidentally, he has something to say of "The Breadwinners," giving it on the authority of John Hay himself. His accounts of Indiana at the latter end of the early half of the nineteenth century, and of the Virginia dear to him both on his ancestors' behalf and on his own, are clear and vivid and valuable because he belongs to a family holding by unbroken traditions to the pre-Revolutionary days, and able to distinguish between real tradition and recent interpolations, in the interest of recent settlers. Literary New York of the last forty years may be agreeably studied in this book. Henry Holt & Co.

THE ENTHUSIAST.

His face is glorious with a beam Unborrowed from our earthly skies; The radiance of a heavenly dream

Is on his brow and in his eyes; And in his breast the unconquered heart

That fails not when his brethren fail, That sees his earliest friends depart

One after one, and doth not quail.

One after one they go, the bold

Companions of his dwindling band; For under stormy skies and cold

Their march is, through a barren
land.

And some their earlier faith deride,
(For man is man and seeks his own)
Till the last straggler leaves his side,
And the worn pilgrim walks alone.

Leopard and leopard-hearted men
About his perilous pathway prowl;
At even from his mountain den

Comes the gray wolf's resounding howl.

The heavy hauberk's shining mail
Is on his weary shoulders laid,
A helmet shields his forehead pale,
Gleams in his hand the naked blade.

But o'er the desert's quivering lines
He sees the city from afar.
By day a polished pearl it shines,
By night it glitters like a star.
He doth not feel his bleeding feet,
And when his nightly tent is spread,
The pavement of the golden street
Re-echoes to his dreaming tread.
Till his thin, shadowed temples tell
His livelong journey well-nigh done,
And 'neath the rock-hewn citadel

He drags himself at set of sun.
There, while he lingers, half in doubt,
The bells a joyous chime begin,
And lo! three shining ones come out,
And lead the weary traveller in.
Edward Sydney Tylee.

The Spectator.

TIPPERARY SKIES.

Now the stress and strain are ending,
As the year is running down,
And the thought of rest is blending
With the weariness of town.

Of the many differences between America and England which do not altogether minister to our national selfcomplacency, none is more striking than the contrast between our sixpenny monthlies and the ten-cent or fifteencent magazines that crowd the American bookstalls. On the surface, the contrast is most humiliating; and though, when we look below the surface, we shall find reasons which dimin· ish its significance, it remains, when all is said and done, a disquieting phenom

enon.

In trying to work out the equation, I begin by cancelling the factor of fiction. To be candid, I seldom read magazine stories on either side of the water. So far as I know, there is not much to choose between the American and the English short story in its present development. It was the Americans, as a matter of history, who first cultivated the form in our language; but they have certainly no monopoly of it. The same stories will often appear in the magazines of both countries; and though America is probably more prolific of fairly readable matter in this kind, I fancy England holds her own in respect of quality. It is not on the score of fiction, at any rate, that I claim for the American cheap magazine an immeasurable advantage over our own.

Apart from fiction, what do we find in the English sixpenny magazines? May not the rest of their matter fairly be described as magnified, and scarcely glorified, tit-bits? There are articles of cheap personal gossip, addressed for the most part to popular snobbery; articles of pettifogging antiquarianism, on Old Inn Signs or Peculiar Playing Cards; articles on homes and haunts of the poets, and on Royal Academicians, with reproductions of their master

pieces; articles on Indian snake-charmers and a woman's ascent of Fuji; articles on the Post Office and the Fire Brigade, the Bank of England and the Mint, all gossipy and anecdotic, with a careful avoidance of real information or criticism; articles on golf and billiards, "ski-ing," and salmon-fishing; articles on "A Day in the Life of a CallBoy," or on "My First Speaking Part," by Miss Birdie Montmorency-articles, in short, on everything that can pass the time for an idle brain, and cannot possibly matter either to the individual or to the nation. The most serious papers ever admitted to these miscellanies are a few pages of illustrated statistics and an occasional peep into popular science. Nor, in the past ten years, does one notice any symptom of a drift towards better things.

Now, in America there are plenty of magazines of the same or even lower calibre—“all story" magazines, and repositories of mere intellectual slush. Also there are the old-established, finely illustrated, expensive, and-to put it frankly-somewhat conventional magazines, such as Harper's, Scribner's, the Century.1 But between these two classes-ranking in price with the lower class, in matter, to my thinking, at least on a level with the higherstands a group of some half-dozen periodicals of extraordinarily vital and stimulating quality, which must be reckoned, I think, among the most valuable literary assets of the American people. There is nothing quite like them in the literature of the world-no periodicals which combine such width of popular appeal with such seriousness of aim

1 The unillustrated monthlies, the "Atlantic," the "North American," the "Forum," are of the type of our reviews, or of the older magazines now represented almost solely by "Blackwood."

and thoroughness of workmanship. None of them costs more than sevenpence-half-penny, yet their difference in intellectual value from our sixpenny magazines is not to be measured in money. In England it never occurs to me to buy a sixpenny magazine, unless it be to read a new Sherlock Holmes adventure or a sketch by Mr. Jacobs. In America there are at least four magazines which, if I lived there, I would buy every month, certain of finding in each of them some three or four articles of absorbing and illuminating interest. The range of their topics I shall indicate later; meanwhile I state for what it is worth this fact of personal experience.

It is difficult, and not very important, to settle points of precedence; but I be lieve that the bare idea of producing an illustrated magazine at sixpence or thereabouts originated in England. The Strand Magazine was probably the pioneer of the whole procession; and in America the Cosmopolitan, edited by John Brisbane Walker (now one of the Hearst group of publications), was early in the field. But the special character of the American cheap magazine as we now know it is mainly due to one man-Mr. S. S. McClure. He it was who invented and developed the particular type we are now studying. Mr. McClure is a very remarkable personality. He has been genially lampooned by Stevenson in The Wreckers and by Mr. Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes. There is, indeed, something that lends itself to caricature in his feverish fertility of ideas, his irrepressible energy, his sanguine imagination. But besides being an editor of genius, he is a staunch and sincere idealist. When he determined to make his magazine a power in the land, he also determined that it should be a power for good; and he has nobly fulfilled that resolve. He has a keen instinct (though this he himself denies) for "what the public

wants" "-what is the opportune subject on which people are ready to accept information and guidance. He knows that it is neither good business nor good sense to try to force upon his readers topics which are either dead or not yet alive. Yet his view is far from being limited by the demands of the passing hour. He has his eye upon the topics of the future, no less than upon those of the present. He garners material for the men who are to work upon them; he leads up to them sedulously and adroitly. He does not edit his magazine from his desk,. but will run all over America, to say nothing of crossing the Atlantic, in search of the matter he requires. While he is, as I have said, a staunch idealist, it is equally true that the new note he has introduced into periodical literature is the note of sedulous, unflinching realism. "Thorough" is his motto, and the motto he imposes on all his staff. It is in facts, as distinct from opinions, that he deals-not dead and desiccated facts of the Gradgrind order, but live, illuminating, significant facts. You need not go to his magazine for views, paradoxes, partisan arguments, guesses at truth. The style of article which has made its fame, and which may fairly be called the invention of Mr. McClure, is richly-documented, soberly-worded

a

study of contemporary history, concentrating into ten or twelve pages matter which could much more easily be expanded into a book ten or twelve times as long. If "Thorough" is the first of his maxims, "Under-statement rather than over-statement" is the second. He abhors exaggeration and sensationalism. His method is to present facts, skilfully marshalled, sternly compressed, and let them speak for themselves. And they have spoken for themselves, to the no small enlightenment, and to the lasting

2 I have heard him declare that he is unconscious of ever giving a thought to public demand-but this merely shows that "instinct" is the true word for his gift.