a charming volume both to the eye and the mind, a study in pure literature, and of one of its most delightful forms, the sonnet. Under the fable of a series of afternoon walks and talks between the Professor and the pupil there is a fascinating survey upon the progress of English poetry, from the point of view of the sonnet, making a complete manual of that form of verse. But the work is full of shrewd and agreeable comment upon the general char it recorded. It is the Only One, like Jean Paul. It is what Achilles was among heroes, or Helen among beautiful women. The precise number was one hundred and thirty-six, and all other alleged numbers are fables. When Bryant, the poet of the gentian, and familiar with it as he was with all plants and flowers of his hills, was asked how many blossoms he had ever seen upon a single stalk, he answered, "Perhaps twenty or thirty." He was a man of truth and honor; but the precise num-acteristics of the poets of whom it treats, and ber of blossoms, of the fringed flowers, open and partly open, upon this memorial and unique stalk, worthy to be raised to a constellation in the northern skies, was one hundred and thirty-six. All over the fields and high upon the hillsides the stooks of corn are like Indian wigwams. As the spectator looks off from some convenient point upon the solitary landscape, he will observe how frail a hold the houses and works of man seem to have upon it. Indeed, it is not hard to eliminate them, and see the country as the Indians saw it. Nature, too, is silently watching and waiting to reclaim her old sway. Here is a high-road, discontinued two or three years since, and already the grass and the thicket have pressed in upon it, and tangled it so that it is quite impassable. Nature has thrown her web over it and caught it, and will consume it and assimilate it at her leisure. The distant hills are tawny with the dry June-grass, and the tinkling of cow-bells in the high pastures on the still, drowsy afternoon fills the loiterer's mind with memories of Switzerland, and he seems once more to hear that long-silent music of the Alps, and pauses to catch the muffled thunder of the avalanche and the echoing ranz des vaches. But he hears only the dropping of nuts on the dry leaves, and smiles to see how neatly the touch of Jack Frost has opened the burr and revealed the glistening chestnut. It is a realm of faery and splendor and pensive memory through which he walks, and looking upon the scene familiar to the poet's eye and dear to his heart, he recalls among Bryant's hills Bryant's sonnet: "Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun! One mellow smile through the soft vapory air, the reader is conscious that he is taking part in conversation with a thorough student of English poetry, whose memory is stored as full of its sweets as a hive near a clover field of honey. The richness of our literature in the sonnet, and the great beauty of many of the speci mens cited in this book, will surprise many readers who are accustomed to think that it is an artificial and pedantic kind of verse. The sonnet which we have just quoted from Bryant, and which Mr. Deshler includes in his selection, is surely a most simple and fitting frame for the thought and feeling of the poet; and every Wordsworthian, every loving and honoring reader of the great poet whom Matthew Arnold has so well celebrated in a recent article, remembers, as Mr. Deshler says, that he wrote no less than four hundred sonnets, and that among them are some of his finest works, many of which decorate the pages of this book. Indeed, to all who are familiar with him, Wordsworth's sonnet upon the sonnet, beginning, "Scorn not the sonnet," instantly recurs when the doubt and dislike are expressed. The sympathy of "the Professor" with the poets of whom he discourses and with the whole range of English poetry is delightful and inspiring. His estimate of Herrick, for instance, is high, but very just and discriminating, and we know not where in a few pages a reader who has his studies in our poetry yet to make could find a truer estimate of his value and charm. The appreciation of Longfellow's mastery of the sonnet is also admirable. Few English poets have filled the sonnet with feelings so tender, and made its lines so exquisitely subtle and flexible, as Longfellow. The force of the feeling and the clearness of the And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast, thought are never lost in the sweet symmetry And the blue gentian flower that in the breeze Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last. Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way, The cricket chirp upon the russet lea, And man delights to linger in thy ray. Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear of the form. Mr. Deshler mentions among the sonnets of Longfellow the last of the series to "Three Friends of Mine," which is a strain of exceeding pathos. They are addressed, we believe, to the memory of Sumner, Agassiz, The piercing winter frost and winds and darkened air." and Felton, and there are few tenderer or ON such a saunter as we have just mentioned one of the pleasantest companions that could be chosen, as well as for the bright evening hearth at home, is Mr. Deshler's book recently issued, Afternoons with the Poets. It is more beautiful sonnets, or verse of any kind, in literature, and they are very characteristic of the poet. Indeed, these Afternoons with the Poets may well be prolonged into the winter nights, and they will give fresh loveliness and zest to the spring mornings. NE of the most important events of the and Riddle is swollen in parts, as under J and ance of a new Latin Dictionary,' which has been eagerly expected by teachers and students of the language for many years. This great work, just published simultaneously by the Clarendon Press of Oxford University in England and by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in New York, bears in its transatlantic form the names of the American scholars Lewis and | Short, who have reconstructed it according to the demands of contemporary learning, upon | the basis of Dr. Andrews's translation of Freund's Latin-German Lexicon, which has been for thirty years the principal standard of the language in both England and America. English lexicon published since the two great quartos of the London Forcellini, the additions are distributed throughout the work apparent saurus of the language in a shelf-ful of volumes, while most of the work is a substantial reprint of Andrews's Freund. The great French quartos of Theil contain a vast number of long articles on botanical and geographical subjects, which are not incorporated with it, but scattered through it as independent treatises, and which are confusing even to special students, and valueless to all others. The valuable work of Georges omits nearly always the detailed references to the passages cited, so that the usefulness of its full grammatical analysis and illustration is seriously limited for the student, who can not test its accuracy by turning to the A detailed review of such a book would be original; while its errors of typography, though of little interest to the general reader. It is not so numerous as those of Klotz-of whose meant for a hand-book of reference for all stu- references about one-fourth are wrong-are dents and readers of Latin; and the measure still many and annoying. In Harpers' Lexiof its value is the degree in which it succeeds con all such startling irregularities are avoidin presenting, in an accessible form, whatever ed. Every part and every branch of the work information they will expect to find in it. With | seems to have received its fair share of attenthis standard in view, we have examined it tion. While the amount of matter given in carefully, side by side with the best known | the aggregate exceeds that of any other Latinworks of its class-the famous Latin-German lexicons of Freund, Georges, and Klotz, the translation into French of Freund's great lexicon by Professor Theil, the English transla-ly without partiality or neglect. tion of Freund by Andrews, and the revision of Andrews made by White and Riddle. It is gratifying to be able to assure our readers that, whether for the use of the young student or of the mature scholar, it is, on the whole, far superior to any one of these, and that its possessor is better furnished for the mastery of the Latin language, and the interpretation of its authors, than if he possessed all the others without it. Each of the books named has its own great merits, and they are all so well known to scholars that a comparison with them is almost necessarily the first test which will be applied to a new competitor in the same field. Perhaps the most obvious remark suggested by such a comparison is that Harpers' Latin Dictionary is distinguished from all the rest by the uniformity of its plan and execution. In most lexicons some one part of the work has received an extraordinary degree of attention, while other parts have suffered. Thus the lexicon of Klotz is distinguished by fullness of illustration of meanings under certain words, particularly in the early letters of the alphabet, the letter A, for example, being constructed on a scale which, if carried out to the end, would have filled several folios. Thus, too, the English revision of Andrews by White Harpers' Latin Dictionary. A Latin Dictionary Founded on the Translation of Freund's Latin-German Lexicon. Edited by E. A. ANDREWS, LL.D. Revised, Enlarged, and in great part Rewritten by CHARLTON T. LEWIS, Ph.D., and CHARLES SHORT, LL.D., Professor of Latin in Columbia College, New York. Royal Svo, pp. 2033. New York: Harper and Brothers. Among the characteristic features of this book which mark the epoch of its appearance as one of distinct progress in scholarship must be mentioned the reformed orthography of Latin words, the embodiment of the results of comparative philology, the accommodation of the texts of citations to the latest authoritative editions of classical authors, and the unprecedentedly full and thorough treatment of certain classes of words which are of peculiar importance in grammar, such as the principal prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and pronouns, as well as many of the simple nouns and verbs whose variety of use is greatest. Perhaps the most striking difference between this and older lexicons to most students will be found in the reformed orthography. A summary of the changes in this respect adopted by the best recent editors will be found at the beginning of the book, in an "Orthographical Index." This forbids us to write or to look for such familiar forms as cymba, epistola, futilis, genitrix, hœdus, herus, inducia, litera, negligo, quum, seculum, Virgilius, and many more, and instructs us that in the classic age cumba, epistula, futtilis, genetrix, hædus, erus, indutiæ, littera, neglego, cum, sæculum, Vergilius, etc., were alone in use, and that these are alone proper. The editors are, of course, right in boldly adopting all the established restorations of ancient spelling, and it can not be long before the texts used in our schools and colleges will be as free from middle-age kakography as those of the Germans already 2 | are. It was necessary that the true standard, | ity of a future and spiritual existence, and as accepted by the leading scholars of Europe, thus takes away from life everything that to should be authoritatively set forth here. But wise men hitherto has seemed to redeem it it will be found, we think, that the other fea- from vanity; that it confines its existence to tures of the work named above are of much this earthly passage from the cradle to the higher importance, and that in the amount grave, limiting it by the time that the human of valuable information concentrated in the race can exist, by the space it occupies in the smallest space, and made readily available by | universe, and by the capacities it possesses; every appropriate device of typography, this and that all this is defended by the assertion work presents a distinct advance on all that that these elements have been eliminated behas been previously done of its kind for the fore without injury to the worth of life. This service of classical study. Mr. Mallock traverses with force and cogency, insisting that the contention of the positivists Is Life Worth Living? is the profoundly in- is based on false premises; that these elements teresting problem that is discussed by the were never before eliminated as they are now author of The New Republic in an earnest vol- being done; that the positivists can find no ume which takes this question for its title, parallels for their reasonings in the ancient and in which he presents a strong indict- world; that there is an immeasurable gulf bement of the reasonableness of the assump- tween the nature of their materialism and that tions, deductions, and influences of the mod- of Lucretius; that his denials do indeed bear ern positivist school. To prevent misconcep- a strong resemblance to theirs, but that the retion, it should be said that in the use of the semblance ceases a little below the surface; that phrase "positivist school" the author does not the intervention of Christianity and its beliefs specially mean the system of Comte or his dis- was the introduction of a factor of which the ciples, but applies it to the common views and ancient materialists knew nothing; that those position of the whole scientific school, of which who now deny the supernatural deny it in a Professor Huxley is one of the most eminent way and with meanings under which it was members. Nor when he asks and undertakes to never denied before; and finally that the paralsolve the question that he propounds, does he lel to our present case pretended to have been merely institute the inquiry whether the pains found in Buddhism is absolutely false, there beof life overbalance its pleasures, or whethering no parallel between Eastern and Western any one has been or is happy, or whether life in the opinion of many has been found worth living, but discusses the proposition that life ought to be found worth living by all, and has some deep, permanent, and inherent worth of its own beyond what it can acquire or lose by circumstance-a worth which is part of its essence, which we can lose by no acts but our own, and which forms the treasure that is incorruptible. He then shows, first, that when wanting certain elements, and judged by itself and its merely earthly conditions, life has been declared by the wisest philosophers and by Holy Scripture to be valueless-a deceiving show and vanity. And he admits that if this world were the end of life, if its ways broke short aimlessly into precipices or hopelessly into deserts, and led to no suitable end, this would be a true estimate of it. As a matter of fact, however, this estimate of life has hadist conception of progress is not only visionary reference solely to its earthly and material conditions; but the mind of man has always been instinct with feelings, hopes, reasonings, and convictions that the ways of life do not end here, but lead to ends that are invisible, and to destinies that are spiritual and eternal, so that the most trivial actions become invested with immeasurable meaning, and life ceases to be vanity. Mr. Mallock's next position is that the school of modern positivist thought eliminates all the elements that give permanent worth to life; that it denies the possibil Is Life Worth Living By WILLIAM HURRELL MALLOCK. 12mo, pp. 323. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. positivism, the latter being the exact reverse of the former. Mr. Mallock's conclusion is that the life-problem of to-day is a distinctly new and as yet unanswered one. Having disposed of the supports relied on by modern positivists from the parallels by which they have re-enforced their reasonings, Mr. Mallock proceeds to examine, seriatim, the ideal theories of this school on the supremacy of morality without any aid from religion, on the illusoriness of religious beliefs, on the influence of sociology on morals, on the nature of happiness and goodness, and on the negation of the supernatural; and having exhibited their unsatisfactoriness in practical positive results, and having recapitulated the losses that would be inevitably sustained if the positivist theories were true, he sums up with a powerful argument in which he maintains that the positiv but far more illusory than the Christian ideals of faith and practice which the positivist scorns and rejects; that all the objections positivists urge against these Christian ideals apply with far more force to their own vaunted theories; that the positive system is really to a greater extent based on superstition than any religion its advocates contemn; that it professes to rest on experience, and yet no Christian legend was ever more flatly contradicted by experience; that it professes to be sustained by proof, and yet its proofs are the merest appeals to credulity; that it is colored by the characters and circumstances of its originators; and that its only practical operation is to deaden all our rejoinders so familiarly known in the world of controversy and disputation, which single out defects and flaws in the particulars of an op stantial impression on the general indictment. Its author directs his attention principally to the feeblest portion of Mr. Mallock's dissertation, namely, that which offers the Roman Catholic Church as a panacea for the doubts that assail man in his estimate of life, and as the only means for satisfying his spiritual and intellectual wants and longings; and although some of the points that he makes are incisive and telling, he too often commits the common mistake of substituting declamation and invective for argument. So far as we can perceive, the main positions held by Mr. Mallock with reference to the merits of the positivist philosophy of life and morals are left intact by his assailant. As regularly as they have appeared we have taken up the volumes of Shakspeare's plays edited by Mr. Rolfe for school and parlor use, with the apprehension that they would show signs of deterioration as compared with their predecessors. Invariably, however, we have present interests without creating any new ones, to deplore and not to remedy, to dethrone conscience, and to be enslaved by temptation. This sweeping arraignment is follow-ponent's argument, but fail to make a subed by strong chapters which discuss the logic of scientific negation, the relation of morality and natural theism, and the interesting question whether, if the intellect of the world should react toward theism, it will ever again acknowledge a special revelation. This last question is made the opportunity to assert that Protestantism equally with Positivism fails to satisfy the wants and longings of the intellect, the latter by its negation of the supernatural, and the former by its denial of infallibility to a religion that professes to be supernatural. From this point onward the author quits his distinctive attack on the modern scientific school and his refutations of its theories, to elucidate the position that the career of Protestantism is evaporating into a mere natural theism, and is losing all restraining power in the world; that we can not look to it for a revelation to satisfy the intellect and the conscience, nor can we expect it from any of the Eastern creeds; that the claims of the Roman Catholic Church are the only ones worth considering; that in theory she is all that the enlight-been agreeably disappointed. Each time we ened world could require, and that theoretically and historically her perpetual infallibility supplies a perennial stream of special revelation -more perfect even than the Bible-by which she is made a living, growing, self-adapting organism, forever selecting and assimilating fresh nutriment for faith to grow on, and is, in fact, the growing moral sense of mankind organized and developed under a supernatural tutelage. There is a marked difference in logical and argumentative power between all that first and larger portion of Mr. Mallock's treatise which places materialistic theories on trial, and the briefer concluding portion that offers the Romish Church as a universal panacea. The latter is in the form of emotional declamation rather than of close reasoning; and the capital fallacy that underlies its plausible assumptions and sophistries, and mars the force of its argument, is that man needs a series of perennial revelations to keep alive in the soul a belief in God and the supernatural, or that this belief would be really strengthened by such revelations if proceeding from no more authentic source than a quasi-infallible Pope. As a simple matter of experience it would seem that such reiterated visible revelations would leave no room for the exercise of that vital and all-essential faith which asks not for proof and sight, but is the "evidence of things unseen." have found that Mr. Rolfe has fully maintained the high standard with which he set out, and have risen from the perusal of the successive volumes with an increased respect for his abilities and learning as a commentator and editor of the great master. The good sense and sagacity that have presided over his interpretations and annotations have been conspicuous, as have also been the tact and discreet reserve of his expurgations of those indelicate or indecent expressions which render Shakspeare's plays unsuitable for reading in the school-room or to the family. These are restrained within the narrowest limits possible, and are never prompted by squeamish prudery, and seldom sensibly and never essentially mar or pervert the sense of the text. The fifteenth volume of the series just issued, being The Comedy of Twelfth Night,* has all the excellent qualities that we have commended in the preceding volumes. No one can more justly estimate the difficulty of entire impartiality and candor in the statement of political facts or principles than the man who is himself the most positive and earnest in his political convictions. And however keen a partisan he may be, no one more highly appreciates dispassionateness of this kind than the fair-minded man who is least able to practice it. It is impossible to be inThe Value of Life' is the title of an anony- sensible to the spirit of “ fair play," and though mous volume which is a reply, but not an an- one may be mean enough, in the heat of conswer, to Mr. Mallock's treatise. The perform-flict, to take advantage of unfair or perverted ance is one of those clever, off-hand, running representations that will cripple the cause of 3 The Value of Life. A Reply to Mr. Mallock's Essay, Is Life Worth Living? 12mo, pp. 253. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 4 Shakspeare's Comedy of Twelfth Night; or, What You Will. Edited, with Notes, by WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M. 16mo, pp. 174. New York: Harper and Brothers. an adversary and promote his own, yet in his | which Jean Ingelow has constructed the new "heart of hearts" he honors the man who will not condescend to depart from the even line of rectitude and fair dealing. One reason why so many really able treatises on politics have failed to make an impression on the public mind, and have only made a lodgment in the minds of those whom it was no gain to the writer's views to convince, is the simple one that they have been colored by partisan references, allusions, and assumptions that were unnecessary or impertinent. No mistakes of this kind have been committed by Mr. Alexan-hension of his release from prison, and of his der Johnston in the preparation of his clear, condensed, and dispassionate History of American Politics during the century from 1777 to 1877. His very satisfactory little volume traces in outline the history of our government, and of the more important formative events under it, through the Colonial and post-Revolutionary times, and also down through the two-and- | twenty successive administrations that have since conducted it under the Constitution; and in connection with this it gives a condensed account of the origin of political parties, their transitions, their distinctive principles and policies, and their influence by results accomplished through them. The design of the book is not to criticise party management, but to make the facts of our political history easily available, and to teach our younger citizens that true national party differences have a history and recognized basis of existence. The author has done his work intelligently, and with an impartiality that should invite confidence. novel which she has named, after one of its most amusing secondary characters, Sarah de Berenger." It is the story of the heroic endurance and repressed love of a mother for her two young and delicately nurtured daughters, whose father, after having been cruel and false to their mother, had deserted them in their infancy, had been convicted as a felon, and, as subsequent events reveal, had been guilty of a more heinous crime than the one he was punished for. In the daily and hourly apprereturn to claim a competency which she had inherited, and which she is devoting to her children's nurture and education, and in making provision for them in case she should die, and moved by the still greater dread that the man she had learned to loathe and fear will separate them from her, and drag them down to his atmosphere of shame and crime, the mother takes an assumed name and bears an assumed relation to the children, being known to them and to the world only as their nurse. The necessity for the repression of her maternal instincts and endearments, and the utter renunciation of the filial love that she yearns for, which this relation to her children involves, and the perplexities, trials, involvements, and anguish to which the mother is subjected from constantly occurring accidents and incidents which threaten to reveal the real facts, with all their shameful consequences to her darlings, are worked up into a story of sustained pathos and tenderness, in which we see how a resolute and loving woman can school herself to give up all things, even her own children, for their sakes, and could die holding her secret fast, not only unloved by them as their mother, but not known to them as such. To undertake to outline the plot of Mrs. Leith Adams's novel Madelon Lemoine in the space at our command would be unjust to her, and a tantalizing mockery to our readers. By turns serene and placid, or brightly gay, or GENERALLY, the minor prose fiction of the tenderly pathetic, but always pure, strong, and month is marked by no higher qualities than an wholesome, its narrative and dramatic power engaging grace and lightness. In The Bar-Maid and its literary merits generally are of a high | at Battleton Mr. Robinson displays his versatilorder. The opposite of sensational, its inci-ity in describing the coquettish blandishments dents are yet striking and effective, its de- brought to bear upon their youthful admirers scriptions glowing and picturesque, and its of the other sex by the bar-maids in attendportraitures of character, whether of lofty and ance in the big refreshment-room of an Engnoble ideals or of the humbler types of social lish railway junction, and the conquest by one life, finished and vigorous. Especially impress- of the least coquettish and most modest and ive, and almost magnetic in the emotional in- attractive of their number of a rich young terest they excite, are her delineations of the fellow, whose family were dreadfully scandallife-long repression, the ready self-sacrifice, the ized thereby. To extricate him from the net patient love and calm endurance, the fortitude, of this siren they enlist the services of the dignity, love, and sympathy, exhibited by her young fellow's uncle John, a stout old bacheleading actors. We can promise that the pe-lor and formerly a soldier, of whom he stands rusal of this sterling novel will afford genuine enjoyment. NOTHING could be simpler or more realistic than the treatment of the materials out of History of American Politics. By ALEXANDER JOHNSTON, A.M. 16mo, pp. 274. New York: H. Holt and Co. Madelon Lemoine. A Novel. By Mrs. LEITH ADAMS. 12mo, pp. 504. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co. in some dread. Uncle John's bluff and as he thought masterly strategy to separate the love-lorn nephew from his inamorata results in some very humorous scenes, in one of the 7 Sarah de Berenger. A Novel. By JEAN INGELOW. 12mo, pp. 415. Boston: Roberts Brothers. • The Bar-Maid at Battleton. By F. W. ROBINSON. "Harper's Half-hour Series." 32mo, pp. 76. New York: Harper and Brothers. |