The presiding genius of the Hôtel de Rambouillet is the personage of chief interest in Leon H. Vincent's interesting study, "Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Précieuses," published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The characteristics of the Marquise and her salon, the first in France, are charmingly set forth, and the growing up from within the Hôtel of the cult of the Précieuses, which later broke loose from the traditions of its old home and became the butt of Molière's wit, is traced with skill. The book, as a whole, is one to arouse further interest in seventeenth century life.

No one appreciates better than Mr. Herbert Spencer the difficulties which

his writings present to the person known as "the average reader." He remarked recently of his "Principles of Psychology" that, instead of calling it "Caviare to the General," he used to call it "Cod-liver Oil to the General,” for he felt sure that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, if allowed to choose between taking a spoonful of cod-liver oil and reading a chapter of his book, would take the oil without a moment's hesitation.

The newly-organized Boston publishing house of Noyes, Platt & Company is to publish editions in English and in French of the Official Illustrated Catalogue of the Fine Arts Exhibit of the United States at the Paris Exposition. This new house is the result of co-operation between Messrs. Curtis and Cameron, publishers of the Copley Prints, and Small, Maynard & Co., but it does not affect in any way the general business of the two co-operating houses.

A Revolutionary tale, which has the usual complement of Tory and patriot heroes, but whose heroine is a shallow

minded coquette of the “Anglo-maniac" type, is "Philip Winwood," by Robert Neilson Stephens. The story abounds in exciting incident, and it is Winwood's selfishly-ambitious wife who is responsible for much of the plotting against and spying upon the Colonial army in which Winwood is a trusted captain. After the failure of an attempt to capture Washington and send him to London, the disgraced wife betakes herself to England, and Winwood, who is represented to be a sort of American Bayard, follows her in due time. L. C., Page & Co.

The corruption of society life in Madrid is unsparingly pictured by a Jesuit priest, Luis Coloma, in a novel published by Little, Brown & Co., entitled "Currita, Countess of Albornoz." The Countess is the most prominent figure in a circle of degenerates, whose chief end is to satisfy endless ambitions, political or otherwise. Side by side with the intrigues of the Countess are set the experiences and the spiritual development of her two children, whom she has left to the training of priests and nuns. The portrayal of these child lives is exquisite as well as strong and searching, and serves to balance the too heavy shade of the other picture by lights that are very tender and often sad. The intense moral purpose of the romance is evident throughout. The book is admirably translated by Estelle Huyck Attwell.

A wholesome and inspiriting book, which deliberately sets out to increase the measure of Christian faith in the world, and will undoubtedly be of use in that direction, is "Man and His Divine Father," by the Rev. John C. Clarke, D.D., which A. C. McClurg & Co. publish. It is an attempt to solve some of the theological problems of the day, to establish the authoritative position of the Bible by an interpretation

of its meaning which is neither too conservative nor too liberal, and to make the harmony between science, philosophy and religion distinctly apparent to the average mind. On such points as the use and logical effectiveness of prayer, for instance, this book speaks with no uncertain sound.

A collection of half a dozen short stories which will attract attention, not only for their timeliness, but for a decidedly graphic and spirited style, is Caryl David Haskins's "For the Queen in South Africa," published by Little, Brown & Co. Most of the heroes who figure therein are young Englishmen, but one is an Irishman in Johannesburg, whose vindictive feelings toward England lead him to a conference with Kruger which has a certain comic element about it, but who, when the crisis comes, finds himself marching up a hill in the face of the Boers to the cry of "Hooray for Old Ireland and the freedom of the Uitlanders." Perhaps the most striking tale of all is "Judge Not," a study in cowardice and courage, as painful as it is effective.

It is occasion for thankfulness that there are such wise, brave and inspiring books as "The Arts of Life." The author, Richard Rogers Bowker, aims to make clearer the underlying principles which ought to be insistently kept in mind in the shaping of life. The four "arts" which he considers are "Education," "Business," "Politics" and "Religion." It is an optimistic, not an easy-going faith that influences the treatment of these subjects, and the chapter on "Politics" is noteworthy in its firm and brilliant handling of the significance of our American form of government, with its mistakes, perils and triumphs. The essay on "Education" will give valuable and stimulating suggestions to a multitude of inquiring theorists. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

"Sour Grapes," instead of "Unleavened Bread," might have been the title of Robert Grant's new novel. The woman with social ambitions is not a new figure in fiction. But the woman who conceals such ambitions under the pretence of devotion to higher things, affecting to despise the distinction she covets, and achieving in philanthropy and reforms the éclât she would fain have won in social life, is less often met there. Judge Grant has drawn her portrait, as well as that of her third husband, the politician, with a merciless realism-caricature, some of his critics will call it. Certainly a few kindlier touches would have made the book pleasanter reading. But it is clever and stimulating, and contains wholesome truth. The adherents of the various causes which Selma White "espoused" must not take Judge Grant too seriously, and fume and fret over him in hot weather. Charles Scribner's Sons.

A multitude of Emperor Nero's victims have received the sympathy of the indignant modern world, and now it is Nero's wife who makes her appeal for justice in Wilhelm Walloth's exciting romance, "Empress Octavia," which Little, Brown & Co. publish. The story opens with a harrowing description of the sports at the Circus and the death of a band of Christians, but its main interest centres around the Emperor's household, and about the pitiful figure of Octavia, surrounded by a few staunch friends and a host of intriguing enemies. The hero is a young sculptor, who is Nero's unconscious tool, and who believes for a long time that the Emperor is a sincere patron of the fine arts, and actually desires the bust of Octavia which he has ordered the artist to make for him. It is a graphic study of an utterly degenerate time. The translation is well done by Mary J. Safford.

That it must have been "great fun" to write it is the irresistible conclusion after reading Arlo Bates's "Love in a Cloud." It is an ingenious, cleverly complicated and delightfully droll bit of comedy, with flashes of genuinely serious character study now and then. "Love in a Cloud" is the title of a novel whose authorship is unknown to most persons, and there are in the book, besides the rising young author himself, the people who are not denying that they wrote it, the wrathful individuals who think they have been written up, the admiring debutante who sends notes to the unknown genius by way of the publisher, the fortunehunting count, the girl who will not marry him and plenty of other diverting men and women, some of whom will be well remembered as figuring in "The Puritans." Houghton, Mifflin &

Co.

A story of modern Italy, with a plot increasingly exciting, is Dr. William Barry's "Arden Massitur." It is a book whose every word must be read, sometimes for the subtle beauty of description, again for the rare quality of the thought, but always because the onrush of the action will not allow any slighting. The hero is an English journalist, with strong socialistic theories, who goes to Italy with a vague idea of learning a great deal, and does learn it in an unexpected fashion, for he incurs the displeasure of the Camorra, and is a marked man, obliged to take refuge with friends in the castle of the Sorelli. The conflicting tendencies of the Vatican, the Government and the Camorra involve both Massitur and the family of the heroine in dire perils, and lead to dramatic situations. The book must be classed as decidedly one of the most impressive of the novels that deal with Italian problems. The Century Co.

The great prominence which the High Church movement has assumed in the ecclesiastical history of England, during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, and the extraordinary success with which it has permeated the Established Church by its influence, have led some writers to exaggerate not a little the place which it occupied in the general intellectual development of the time. In the universities, it is true, it long exercised an extraordinary influence, and Mr. Gladstone, who was by far the most remarkable layman whom it profoundly influenced, was accustomed to say that, for at least a generation, almost the whole of the best intellect of Oxford was controlled by it. It possessed in Newman a writer of most striking and undoubted genius. In an age remarkable for brilliancy of style he was one of the greatest masters of English prose. His power of drawing subtle distinctions and pursuing long trains of subtle reasoning made him one of the most skilful of controversialists, and he had a great insight into spiritual cravings and an admirable gift of interpreting and appealing to many forms

Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. A biographical sketch by his son Arthur Milman, M.A., LL.D. London: 1900.

But though he

of religious emotion. was a man of rare, delicate and most seductive genius, we have sometimes doubted whether any of his books are destined to take a permanent and considerable place in English literature. He was not a great scholar, or an original and independent thinker. Dealing with questions inseparably connected with historical evidence, he had neither the judicial spirit, nor the firm grasp of a real historian, and he had very little skill in measuring probabilities and degrees of evidence. He had a manifest incapacity, which was quite as much moral as intellectual, for looking facts in the face and pursuing trains of thought to unwelcome conclusions. He often took refuge from them in clouds of casuistry. The scepticism, which was a marked feature of his intellect, allied itself closely with credulity, for it was directed against reason itself; and though he has expressed in admirable language many true and beautiful thoughts, the glamor of his style too often concealed much weakness and uncertainty of judgment and much sophistry in argument.

Many of those who co-operated with him were men of great learning and distinguished ability. No one will question the patristic knowledge of Pusey,

the metaphysical acumen of Ward, the genuine vein of religious poetry in Keble and Faber, the wide accomplish ments and scholarly criticism of Church. But, on the whole, the broad stream of English thought has gone in other directions. In politics the Oxford movement had brilliant representatives in Gladstone and Selborne, but the ideal of the relations of Church and State, and the ideal of education to which the Oxford school aspired, have been absolutely discarded. The universities have been secularized. The Irish Established Church, which it was one of the first objects of the party to defend, has been abolished by Gladstone himself, and although the English Established Church retains its hold on the affections of the nation, it is defended by its most skilful supporters on very different grounds and by very different arguments from those which were put forward by the Oxford divines. Among the foremost names in lay literature during the fifty years we are considering, it is curious to observe how few were even touched by the movement. Froude is an exception, but he speedily repudiated it. The mediæval sympathies that were sometimes shown by Ruskin sprang from a wholly different source. Macaulay, Carlyle, Hallam, Grote, Mill, Buckle, Tennyson, Browning, and the great novelists, from Dickens to George Eliot, all wrote very much as they might have written if the movement had never existed. An unusual proportion of the best intellect of England passed into the fields of physical science, and the methods of reasoning and habits of thought which they inculcated were wholly out of harmony with the school of Newman, while both geology and Darwinism have made serious incursions into long-cherished beliefs. Even in the Church itself, though the High Church movement was stronger than any other, great deductions have to be

made. The school of independent biblical criticism, which in various degrees has come to be generally accepted, certainly owed nothing to it, and several of the most illustrious Churchmen of this period were wholly alien to it. Thirlwall and Merivale were conspicuous examples, but they devoted themselves chiefly to great works of secular history. Arnold-who was one of the strongest personal influences of his age, and whose influence was both perpetuated and widened by Dean Stanleyand Whately, who was one of the most independent and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, were strongly antagonistic. In the field of ecclesiastical history it might have been expected that a school which was at once so scholarly and so wedded to tradition would have been pre-eminent, but no ecclesiastical histories which England has produced can, on the whole, be placed on as high a level as those which were written by the great Broad Church divine whose name stands at the head of this article.

Milman was, indeed, a man well deserving of commemoration on account of the works which he produced, yet it is, perhaps, not too much to say that to those among whom he lived the man seemed even greater than his works. For many years he was a central and most popular figure in the best English literary society, and he reckoned most of the leading intellects of his day among his friends. He was in an extraordinary degree many-sided both in his knowledge and his sympathies. He was an admirable critic, and the eminent sanity of his judgment, as well as the eminent kindness of his nature, combined with a great charm both of manner and of conversation. Few men of his time had more friends, and were more admired, consulted and loved.

Mr. Arthur Milman has sketched his father's life in one short volume, writ