glimpse of the works of art that form the daily mental food of their judges.

The portly charlady, who rules despotically in my chambers, is an example. It has been a curious study to watch her growing interest in the obJects that have here, for the first time, come under her notice; the delight she has come to take in dusting and arranging my belongings, and her enthusiasm at any new acquisition. Knowing how bare her own home was, I felt at first only astonishment at her vivid interest in what seemed beyond her comprehension, but now realize that, in some blind way, she appreciates the rare and the delicate quite as much as my more cultivated visitors. At the end of one laborious morning, when everything was arranged to her satisfaction, she turned to me her poor, plain face, lighted up with an expression of delight, and exclaimed:

"Oh, sir, I do love to work in these rooms! I'm never so happy as when I'm arranging them elegant things!"

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And, although my pleasure in her pleasure was modified by the discovery that she had taken an eighteenth-century comb to disentangle the fringes of a rug, and broken several of its teeth in her ardor, that she invariably placed a certain Whistler etching upside down, and then stood in rapt admiration before it, still, in watching her enthusiasm, I felt a thrill of satisfaction at seeing how her untaught taste sponded to a contact with good things. Here in America, and especially in our city, which we have been at such pains to make as hideous as possible, the schoolrooms, where hundreds of thousands of children pass many hours daily, are one degree more graceless than the town itself; the most artistically inclined child can hardly receive any but unfortunate impressions. The other day a friend took me severely to task for rating our American women on their love of the big shops, and

gave me, I confess, an entirely new idea on the subject.

"Can't you see," she said, "that the shops here are what the museums abroad are to the poor? It is in them only that certain people may catch glimpses of the dainty and exquisite manufactures of other countries. The little education their eyes receive is obtained during visits to these emporiums."

If this is so, and it seems probable, it only proves how the humble long for something more graceful than their meagre homes afford.

In the hope of training the younger generation to better standards and less vulgar ideals, a group of ladies are making an attempt to surround our school children during their impressionable youth with reproductions of historic masterpieces, and have already decorated many schoolrooms in this way. For a modest sum it is possible to tint the bare walls an attractive color-a delight in itself—and adorn them with plaster casts of statues and solar prints of pictures and buildings. The transformation that fifty or sixty dollars judiciously expended in this way produces in a schoolroom is beyond belief, and, as the advertisements say, must be seen to be appreciated, giving an air of cheerfulness and refinement to the dreariest apartment.

It is hard to make people understand the enthusiasm these decorations have excited in both teachers and pupils. The directress of one of our large schools was telling me of the help and pleasure the prints and casts had been to her; she had given them as subjects for the class compositions, and used them in a hundred different ways as object-lessons. As the children are graduated from room to room, a great variety of high-class subjects can be brought to their notice by varying the decorations.

It is by the eye principally that taste

is educated. We speak with admiration of the "eighth sense" common among Parisians, and envy them their magic power of combining simple materials into an artistic whole. The reason is, that for generations the eyes of those people have been unconsciously educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses that poverty entails.

When we reflect how painfully illarranged rooms or ugly colors affect our senses, and remember that less fortunate neighbors suffer as much as we do from hideous environments, it seems like keeping sunlight from a plant, or fresh air out of a sick-room, to refuse glimpses of the beautiful to the poor when it is in our power to give them this satisfaction with a slight effort. Nothing can be more encouraging to those who occasionally despair of human nature than the good results already obtained by this small attempt in the schools.

We fall into the error of imagining

that because the Apollo Belvedere and the Square of St. Mark's have become stale to us by reproduction, they are necessarily so to others. The great and the wealthy of the world form no idea of the longing the poor feel for a little variety in their lives. They do not know what they want. They have no standards to guide them, but the desire is there. Let us offer ourselves the satisfaction, as we start off for pleasure trips abroad, or to the mountains, of knowing that at home the routine of study is lightened for thousands of children by the counterfeit presentment of the scenes we are enjoying; that, as we float up the Golden Horn, or sit in the moonlight by the Parthenon, far away at home some child is dreaming of those fair scenes as she raises her eyes from her task, and is unconsciously imbibing a love for the beautiful, which will add a charm to her humble life, and make the present labors lighter. If the child never lives to see the originals she will be happier for knowing that somewhere in the world domed mosques mirror themselves in still waters, and marble gods, the handiwork of long-dead nations, stand in the golden sunlight and silently preach the gospel of the beautiful.

A new quarterly, The Book of BookPlates, has been established in England for the special delight of collectors.

It is announced that The Spear will shortly cease to exist as a separate publication. The Sphere will go on. This removes a prolific source of confusion;

and it is, besides, an instance of the survival of the fittest.

An English judge, Mr. Justice Darling, has recently pronounced the law of "The Merchant of Venice" distinctly bad. He thinks it singular that the point was never taken that Shylock's contract was void; as it could not have

been according to public policy to allow pounds of flesh to be cut off living per

sons.

Mr. Thomas Nelson Page is dramatizing his story "Red Rock," which, published as a novel, has nearly reached a sale of 100,000 copies.

Longmans, Green & Co. announce as now ready Volume One of the series of memoirs in which various writers, under the general editorship of Dr. Nansen, present the scientific results of the Norwegian North Polar Expedition of 1893-6.

Charles K. Field, a nephew of Eugene Field, is part author of a volume of college stories, which Doubleday, Page & Co. are about to publish, the distinguishing feature of which is that they relate to western college life-at Stanford University.

The new edition of Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronté," with which the Haworth Edition of the writings of the Bronté sisters is concluded, includes nearly one hundred hitherto unpublished letters, and eleven new illustrations, besides portraits.

Mr. Hamerton's "Paris in Old and Recent Times," which Little, Brown & Co. publish in a new edition, with illustrations, has by no means been superseded by later volumes of the guide-book order; and it will find a place in the luggage of many visitors to Paris this summer.

A book made up of a series of addresses to young men, and speaking in no uncertain tone upon the qualities that go to the building of a strong character, is "Twentieth-Century Knighthood," by the Rev. Louis Albert Banks. The illustrations used are apt, the ground taken is a high one, and the

book is none the less useful for being small and compact. Funk & Wagnalls Co.

Four pages are devoted to the writings of the late Duke of Argyll in the catalogue of the British Museum; yet The Athenæum dismisses him somewhat curtly with the remark that outside of science he hardly made any contributions to literature which are likely to be of permanent value. The Athenæum finds him lacking the gift of expression in poetry, and perfervid in his economic and historic work.

Mr. Edward Smith is about to publish in London a work entitled "England and America after Independence," concerning which it is said that the author began it with a mind wholly free from bias, but that his researches convinced him that "the conduct of the successive Governments of Great Brit ain has been uniformly equitable, capdid and conciliatory." This should make the work pleasant reading-in London.

In a letter written to a friend, shortly before his death, Dr. Mivart said of his last work, "The Groundwork of Science:" "It has undergone no ecclesiastical supervision, my convictions, when I wrote it, being almost fully what they now are. I have no more leaning to atheism or agnosticism now than I ever had; but the inscrutable, incomprehensible energy pervading the universe, and (as it seems to me) disclosed by science, differs profoundly, as I read nature, from the God worshipped by Christians."

The Athenæum's characterization of M. Bourget is interesting:

M. Bourget is always agreeable to read, but he is never arresting. He writes adequately, but without any luxury of delight. He does not charm

us out of ourselves; he interests, instructs us; and he has his own place as a critic, a distinguished place among the too literary or too little literary critics of our time, because he never forgets that a book is not merely so many printed pages inside a cover, but a finer part of human speech, and with its appeal to what is most human in humanity as well as to that lower intelligence which browses contentedly upon the printed page.

In Grant Duff's lately-published "Diary" are several references to Matthew Arnold. Among them is this, regarding Arnold's notebooks:

They are small diaries, long and narrow. Sunday comes at the top of each page, and in the spaces devoted to that day, as at the beginning and end of the volumes, Mat. Arnold was in the habit of copying short passages which struck him in the authors he happened to be reading.

Some of these entries are of peculiar interest. In the blank space belonging to Sunday, April 15, he had entered these words from Ecclesiasticus:

"Weep bitterly over the dead as he is worthy, and then comfort thyself, drive heaviness away; thou shalt not do him good, but hurt thyself."

On the opposite page stood, of course, Sunday, April 22. Under it he had entered:

"When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest, and be comforted for him when his spirit is departed from him."

It was on the first of these days that Arnold died.

A valuable adition to the Cambridge Edition of the poets has been made in a volume edited by Horace E. Scudder, "The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott." It is unusually complete and well-arranged, the poems being given in chronological order, with introductory passages of exceeding interest, which are either of Mr. Scudder's own writing or selection, and cast new light upon many of the verses.

!

A brief biography, covering the period of Scott's greatest poetical activity, is decidedly sympathetic. The real lover of Scott will take particular comfort not only in the grouping together of the short poems from the novels in their order, but also in the full collection of those beguiling mottoes from that once mysterious but now wellunderstood source, the "Old Play," these last being part of a fascinating appendix, which also contains an abundance of notes. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The name of Florence Converse will remind many readers that they found in "Diana Victrix" last year a first novel of unusual quality and promise, and they will take up "The Burden of Christopher" with anticipations which will not be disappointed. This second story is marked by the same brilliancy of style and delicacy of fancy that made the earlier one so attractive, while it shows a gain in force, purpose and emotional power. Its problem is the familiar one of the relations between capital and labor, employer and employed, but the treatment is distinctly fresh. No new light is thrown on the economic perplexities involved, but their effect on the characters brought face to face with them is described with an intensity which grows almost painful as the slender plot nears its close. It is no disparagement of Miss Converse's talent, but the contrary, to say that her book does not quite realize the ideal one feels she had for it. Her character delineation sometimes results in types, not individuals, and the multitude of her epigrams and allusions detracts from the concentrated impression she should make. But the first of these faults she shares with many novelists of unquestioned standing, and the second is easily corrected. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

S. C. Thompson. Funk & Wagnalls Co. Price, $1.50.

Burden of Christopher, The. By Florence Converse. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.50.

Cricket in Many Climes. By P. F.
Warner. Wm. Heinemann.
Currita, Countess of Albornoz. By
Luis Coloma. Translated by Estelle
Huyck Attwell. Little, Brown & Co.
Price, $1.50.

Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption. By
W. H. Mallock. A. & C. Black.
Edinburgh, Romantic. By John Ged-
die. Sands & Co.

Empress Octavia. A Romance of the
Reign of Nero. By Wilhelm Walloth.
Translated by Mary J. Safford.
Little, Brown & Co. Price, $1.50.
Evolution and Theology. By Otto
Pfleiderer, D.D.. A. & C. Black.
For the Queen in South Africa.
Caryl Davis Haskins. Little, Brown
& Co. Price, $1.00.

By

France Since 1814. By Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Chapman & Hall. Garden of Eden, The. By Blanche Willis Howard. Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $1.50.

Hotel de Rambouillet. By Leon H. Vincent. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.00.

Immortality, The Conception of. By Josiah Royce. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.00.

Ladysmith, The Relief of. By John Black Atkins. Methuen & Co.

Parsonage Porch, The. By Bradley Gilman. Little, Brown & Co. Price, $1.00. Passion-Play at Ober-Ammergau. By the late Isabel, Lady Burton. Hutchinson & Co.

Philip Winwood. By Robert Neilson Stephens. L. C. Page & Co. Price, $1.50.

Quest of Mr. East, The. By John Soane. Archibald Constable & Co. Red Blood and Blue. By Harrison Robertson. Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $1.50.

Robert Tournay. By William Sage. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.50.

Scott, Sir Walter, The Complete Poetical Works of. Cambridge Edition. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $2.00. Shakespeare the Man. By Goldwin Smith. T. Fisher Unwin.

Slave, The. By Robert Hichens. Herbert S. Stone & Co.

Tales for Christmas and Other Seasons. By François Coppée. Translated by Myrta L. Jones. Little, Brown & Co. Price, $1.00. Unleavened Bread. By Robert Grant.

Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $1.50. Ways of Men, The. By Eliot Gregory. Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $1.50.