fore 1860 to those published since. But if we think of the best dozen or so of our living novelists-Mr. Meredith, of course, is hors concours-we are inclined to challenge any one to produce their equal from a single year of the nineteenth century, bar first-class genius. What earlier generation could show a mass of fiction equal to the work of Mr. Kipling, Mr. Wells, Mr. Barrie, Miss Barlow, Mr. Anthony Hope, Mr. Hichens, Mr. Zangwill, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Jacobs, Mr. E. F. Benson, Mr. Capes, Mrs. Clifford, Miss Mary Coleridge, Mr. Shorthouse, Miss Martin and Miss Somerville?-we might extend this list to four or five times its length without notably falling below the standard of good second-rate work that has been indicated. etry, again, we have no great writer; but we have sixty or seventy minor poets who would all have got into the collection of Chalmers if they had had the luck to be born a hundred and fifty years earlier. We do not think that Mr. Yeats or Mr. Dobson or Mr. Lang, Mr. Bridges or Mr. Henley, is as great a poet as Goldsmith or Gray; but each of them has written poems that would strike us as forcibly as the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" or "The Traveller," if we came on them in the midst of such a waste of prose as that of the age which considered Mason a poet and was amazed by Chatterton.

In po

To

go further into the consideration of our minor poets would trench too much on the preserves of Mr. William Archer and the late Mr. Traill, but we have said enough to make out our point. In other departments of literature the case is the same. Matthew Arnold used to complain, with great truth, of the miserable way in which the "journeyman-work" of literature, such as translation and newspaper work, was done in this country. Nowadays skill and conscience are brought to both tasks. We need only refer to such translations

as that of Balzac which Mr. Saintsbury edited, or Dr. Randall's "Marcus Aurelius," or Mr. Frazer's "Pausanias," to show how great a change has taken place. The reader of mature years need only ask himself how great an effect such an article as that which the "Times" published the other day from its correspondent in Morocco would have produced thirty or forty years ago, to see, when he remembers how much a matter of course such admirable writing now seems, what an advance we have indeed made in the diffusion of the power to write well.

It remains to consider whether the great increase in literary ability of the second order is a good thing. One's first instinct is to say unhesitatingly "Yes." Since reading is practically universal among the rising generation, it is surely well that the greatest possible quantity of good sound work should be given them to read. Those who deplore the increase of second-rate literature are apt to think that the choice for the young reader lies between Mr. Hope and Milton, and that if "The Prisoner of Zenda" were not so good, "Paradise Lost" would have a better chance. Undoubtedly that would be a strong argument against Mr. Hope; but as a matter of fact the choice is between a novel by Mr. Hope or Mr. Wells, or Mr. Kipling, and the latest sensational or "bitty" paper that gives "a norrible murder and a nillustration"

for a penny. There is no question of Milton in the first place, but we think that Mr. Hope is, on the whole, more likely to lead his readers on to Milton. Even if he does not, good, wholesome writing is always better than the bad, sensational and often noxious stuff which was so much more prevalent from the days when Sir Anthony Absolute banned the circulating library down to the last generation, but which is now almost killed by the greater popularity which-in the ultimate de

cency of things-attends on the better writers who now tell such good stories. We do not see how any one can seriously contend that an increasing percentage of good second-rate literary work can be harmful, but there is a good deal of cant still to be cleared out of some critics' minds on that subject. The other reason given for the dislike of this dead level of excellence is that it is likely to hinder the efflorescence of works of genius. This appears to rest on the curious theory that a man of genius will tend to assimilate his work to that of the majority; but the usual practice of men of genius is just the reverse. At the present moment the only novelist to whom the term "genius" might be applied without obvious absurdity is just the one whose work differs most distinctly from that of all his contemporaries, and owes least to the taste prevailing when he began to write. Experience shows, furthermore that great writers have appeared most freely-so far as there can be any classification of times and seasons-in the midst of a general literary movement of considerable excellence. The most striking instance of all is that of ShakeThe Spectator.

speare, who, as Hazlitt finely said, "overlooks and commands the admiration of posterity, but he does it from the table-land of the age in which he lived." Coleridge, again, wrote in much the vein of the critics whom we are withstanding at the moment when Keats and Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, and Coleridge himself were irradiating the age with the finest poetical constellation that has appeared in our skies since Elizabethan days. "Language," he said, "mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both the instrument and tune. Thus, even the deaf may play so as to delight the many." We are disposed to think with Mr. Lang, that no rules can be laid down for the appearance of writers of genius. The wind bloweth where it listeth-and de gustibus non est disputandum. But to assume that the general abundance of writers of talent is a hindrance to the appearance of geniuses is about as wise as to say that, because most women in France can cook, it must be peculiarly hard to get a supremely meritorious dinner in Paris.

Stephen Gwynn.

The assimilation of the Filipinos should be assisted by the publication of a Tagolog grammar for Americans, and a complete English-Tagalog and Tagalog-English dictionary, which have been prepared by Dr. J. H. T. Stempel, who lived in Manila as a tutor when it was under Spanish rule.

Mr. Hugh Clifford, the British Resident at Selangor, in the Malay Peninsula, who is agreeably known to the readers of this magazine as the author of interesting studies of native character, is engaged upon a novel called "A Free Lance of To-day," the scene of which is laid in Acheen.

People who enjoy low bookcases, with their tops adorned with bric-àbrac, will be interested to know that in one of Professor Lanciani's discoveries, a genuine Roman library of the fourth century was found, the books in which. were arranged in low cases, while above them were placed cameos and busts of famous authors.

The Pushkin Prize, which is given by the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg every second year, has been awarded. It is given for excellence in translation as well as in original work. The full prize of 1,000 roubles was voted this year for a translation of Shakespeare, upon which the translator had been engaged for nearly thirty years.

Apropos of the announcement of a new edition of the writings of Charles Reade, "The New York Evening Post" remarks that the man who takes up today "The Cloister and the Hearth" may well doubt whether a better historical

novel has been written in the last four decades, and may find reason to assert that, in comparison the "brilliant successes" of the last few years are, as George the Third said of Shakespeare, "sad stuff."

The "unit system" of publishing, long familiar in Germany, is being experimented with in England. It consists in fixing the price of a book by the number of pages it contains. It is proposed to publish a number of standard books on this system. The unit is twenty-five pages, and the price per unit is one half-penny. The paper cover will cost one penny in addition to the total number of units. The cloth binding will be five pence additional. This will bring the cost of a cloth-bound volume of three hundred pages to only eleven pence. A preliminary list of a hundred books, which are to be included in the series, has already been issued.

At the furthest remove from those exquisite sketches of country folk which won Alice Brown her standing among contemporary novelists is "Margaret Warrener," a brilliant, overcrowded picture of that complex citylife in which art, business and society blend so bewilderingly. The "other woman," by name Laura Neale, a newspaper reporter, beguiles the reader's interest through the first half of the book, as she does Landaff Warrener's, and her portrait remains the most distinct to the end-a powerful, repulsive study in effective, uncompromising egotism. But Margaret herself is finely drawn, in spite of her failure to take first place, and her story is a notable contribution to the fiction

which is accumulating around the modern "marriage question." The scene is laid in Boston, and the local color adds to the interest. The minor characters, too, are remarkably well done. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

"Literature" scoffs good-humoredly at the following instructions as to "How to open a new book," which it finds in a slip in a book received from an American publisher:

In order to open a new book so that its back will not be broken, the following instructions will be of value:-The book should be held with its back on a smooth table, then the front board cover should be let down, the leaves being held in one hand. Next, the other board cover should be let down. Following this operation a few leaves should be opened at the back, then a few at the front, and so on, alternately opening back and front, gently pressing open the sections until the centre of the volume is reached. The best results will be obtained if this is done two or three times. If the book is violently or carelessly opened in any one place, the back will very likely be broken.

"Literature" remarks that this seems to combine the chief features of a conjuring trick, a scientific experiment and a religious ceremonial, and adds that after a reviewer has performed this ceremony with a book and cut its pages he will probably have just time to write the review of it. Perhaps the process described does exact too much of reviewers. Probably it is not intended for them. But if it were generally followed, real lovers of books would be saved from witnessing the agonizing spectacle of the ruin of a binding by a careless stretching back of the covers.

There should be no lack of material for gossip in Paris during the next generation. The Bibliothèque Nationale has the diaries and correspondence of

Edmond de Goncourt, which are not to be opened until twenty years after his death. The same institution possesses also the papers and manuscripts of Edgar Quinet, which are held back until 1910; the love letters of de Musset, written to a lady who had promised to destroy them, but failed to do so when it came to the point; and some bulky parcels containing the correspondence and other unpublished papers of Renan and Thiers. De Mus: set's letters will be unsealed in nine in years' time, Renan's 1920, and Thiers's ten years after the death of the lady who has presented them. There are also fourteen volumes of unpublished letters from Louis Philippe, his son, several European monarchs and distinguished politicians and men of letters.

The substantial volume of five hundred pages, edited by J. B. Larned and entitled "A Multitude of Counsellors," contains extracts of sufficient length to be of real service to the reader who wishes to learn something of the ethical development of the race as shown in its wisdom literature, as well as to refresh and re-inforce his own spirit and purpose. Egyptian, Hebrew, Hin

du, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Persian and Christian civilizations are represented here by selections carefully made from such sources as the Precepts of Ptah-Hotep, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Buddhist Beatitudes, the Dhammapada, the Maha-Bharata, the Precepts of Confucius, the Sermon on the Mount, and the writings of Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, Zoroaster, Wyclif, Erasmus, Bacon, Shakespeare, Quarles, Descartes, Fuller, Locke, Penn, Swift, Burns, Richter, Wordsworth, Zschokke, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Emerson and Thoreau. The omission of the Koran will be noted. There is a full index of subjects as well as sources. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

shroud,

And Spring's first darling, the anemone, And gold-eyed daisies, whose simplicity

Mocks at the sun within his station proud.

Bring violets like drops of purple rain, And shear the earth of all diurnal flowers,

Pluck up her blossoms, and break down her bowers,

Since on her bosom lies our loved one -slain.

*

Supernal sleep, what better thing for thee,

While deep within the hollow of our hearts

We hide our pain, and, till our life departs,

Burn there the quenchless flame of memory!

Sleep, dost thou sleep? Perchance
Death's trenchant light
Darkens our eyes and blinds us, lest

we see

What was before our birth, and what shall be

When we set sail upon the sea of Night.

G. Constant Lounsbery.