Marvin includes some forty short essays on topics of literary or ethical interest-Treasures of an Autograph Collector, The Tomb of Abelard and Heloise, Forgotten American Poets, Heroes of Humble Life, The Taunery at Moudon, The Modern View of Death, and the like-followed by a series of paragraphs entitled "Chips from a Literary Workship." Dr. Marvin has a store of curious lore at command, and writing with earnestness and sincerity has impressed strongly upon these essays the marks of his own personality. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

"The Divining Rod" of Francis N. Thorpe's new novel points out his hidden source of wealth to a thrifty farmer in the early days of the Pennsylvania oil-fields, and the scramble for rights, the competition and growing monopoly, with the rivalry and hate engendered, furnish a rapid succession of incidents for a story which has some fresh and striking features, and which more skill in character-drawing might have made really noteworthy. A young chemist and inventor, in love with the daughter of his employer, contributes the romantic interest. Little, Brown & Co.

Miss Lilian Whiting's latest contribution to the literature of religious hope and aspiration, "The Joy that No Man Taketh From You," is one of the best, though the briefest, of her books. It emphasizes the reality of spiritual things with an intense conviction and in a glowing style, and it lifts a voice of serenity and trust which, to a generation largely given over to the material, must sound like a voice crying in the wilderness. It may be read through in half an hour, but the impression which it makes will linger longer as an influence making for spiritual consolation. Little, Brown & Co.

Good biographies do not grow old, provided that their subjects are worthy and of importance. There should, therefore, be many readers of the present generation to welcome the compact Library of Standard Biography, of which A. C. McClurg & Co. are the American publishers. The series opens with Lockhart's Life of Scott, abridged: Lockhart's Life of Burns, to which is added Carlyle's essay on Burns: Carlyle's Life of Cromwell, abridged: and Missickland's Life of Queen Elizabeth, also bridged. All of the volumes are newly edited and annotated, and they are of attractive appearance and convenient size.

"The Brothers' War," by John C. Reed (Little, Brown & Co.) is an attempt to present some of the causes which led up to the civil war and some of the consequences which followed it, from the southern point of view. The author is a Georgian, who fought on the side of the Confederacy in that great struggle, and who has since had personal experience of the problems of reconstruction and the existing order of things. His book is overloaded with details and quotations, but no one can doubt the author's sincerity, however widely he may differ from his conclusions. Kindly bluepencilling would have made the book more effective.

Mr. Fisher Unwin will publish very soon a volume entitled "The Siege of Port Arthur: Records of an Eye-Witness," by Mr. David H. James, special war correspondent with the Third Japanese Army for The Daily Telegraph. Mr. James took the field at Dalny at the beginning of August, 1904, and remained with the headquarters of the Third Army until the end of January, 1905. Living under canvas in the actual centre of the besieging line, he saw every action of impor

tance, was present at the capitulation, and witnessed the meeting of Stoessel and Nogi, the march out of the Russian garrison, and the entry of the Japanese. Mr. James's acquaintance with Japan dates from his childhood, and he has an intimate knowledge of the Japanese and their language.

He must be a pessimist indeed who makes moan over the scarcity of good reading in a season which brings from one publishing house two such books as Agnes Repplier's "In Con ent Days" and Samuel McChord Crothers's "The Pardoner's Wallet" A few of the essays in Dr. Crcers's volume have already delighted the readers of "The Atlantic," but more than half of them are new. "Unseasonable Virtues,” “An Hour with Our Prejudices," "The Cruelty of Good People," and "The Difficulties of the Peacemakers," satirize individual and social foibles with that keenness of wit, deftness of allusion, and facility in the use of the incongruous which makes all Dr. Crothers's work so piquant and quotable; "How to Know the Fallacies" introduces a disgruntled logician of the old school attempting to popularize his theories by presenting them in the language of the current "nature-study"; "A Community of Humorists," and "The Land of the Large and Charitable Air," are sketches of Western life, and "The Man Under Enchantment," and "A Saint Re-canonized," studies of Hawthorne and Saint Francis of Assisi. Rarely do brilliant talent, shrewd common sense, and large-hearted sympathy combine so generously for the pleasure of the reader as in these fascinating pages. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Professor George Herbert Palmer, who has devoted years of loving and painstaking study to a minute, not to say microscopic, consideration of the

life and writings of George Herbert, presents the fruits of his toil in three volumes which contain all of Herbert's writings in English, together with a sketch of his life, critical essays and prefaces and explanatory notes. Professor Palmer forestalls the criticism that three volumes are disproportionate for the treatment of a minor poet by the admission that he does not expect any one reader to read the whole, and by the further admission that he has aimed at lavishness, and that he has himself gained so much from the study of Herbert's character and writings that he could not die in peace if he did not raise a costly monument to his beneficent memory. Using a quaint phrase which Herbert himself might have employed, he describes his book as "a box of spikenard, poured in unappeasable love over one who has attended my life." Hardly another among the English minor poets would so well repay such close study as Professor Palmer has bestowed upon Herbert. Whoever knows Herbert but little will grow to know him better if he only browses through these pages; while he who knows him well will come to a fuller knowledge by following Professor Palmer's expositions of his subtle thought and delicately spiritual imagination. No one can linger long over these delightful volumes without sharing Professor Palmer's enthusiasm for the saintly man and true poet to whom they are devoted. The personal interest is enhanced by the illustrations, which include facsimiles of manuscripts, reproductions of old drawings and title-pages, portraits, and views of the school at which Herbert was educated, the churches with which he was connected, and places associated with his memory, to all of which Professor Palmer has made pilgrimages. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

SMALL YET SO GREAT.

II.

Lord, I am small, and yet so great,
The whole world stands to my estate,
And in Thine Image I create.
The sea is mine; and the broad sky
Is mine in its immensity:
The river and the river's gold:
The earth's hid treasures manifold;
The love of creatures small and great,
Save where I reap a previous hate;
The noon-tide sun with hot caress,
The night with quiet loneliness;
The wind that bends the pliar. trees,
The whisper of the summer breeze;
The kiss of snow and ain; the star
That shines a greeting from afar;
All, all are mine; and yet so small
Am I, that io, I needs must call,
Great King, upon the Babe in Thee,
And crave that Thou would'st give to
me

The grace of Thy humility.

Michael Fairless.

HOMER.

I.

It is not a little remarkable that the drama which is more immediately and intimately associated with Shakespeare than any other, the drama to which our memories so instinctively recur whenever his name is mentioned that that very name seems to connote it, should owe its main interest and fascination to the fact that it is a psy chological problem. Yet so it is; and Mr. Howard Furness does not exaggerate when he says:

No one of mortal mould (save Him "whose blessed feet were nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross") ever trod this earth, commanding such absorbing interest as this Hamlet, this mere fiction of a poet's brain. No syllable that he whispers, no word let fall by any one near him, but is caught and pondered as no words ever have been except of Holy Writ. Upon no throne built by mortal hands has ever "beat so fierce a light" as upon that airy fabric reared at Elsinore.

Nor is the fascination of the problem difficult to explain. As every man, according to Coleridge, is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, so there is no human being in whom some of the characteristics of Hamlet do not exist. In this marvellous creation is presented a mirror in which the most exalted and the most contemptible of our species may catch glimpses of themselves. Hamlet is not so much an individual as humanity individualized, not so much man in integrity as man in solution. Probably no poet, no artist, no philosopher has ever existed who would not recognize a kinsman in him, and who would not read more than one chapter of his own most secret history in this all-typical delineation. He is at once the type of those to whom life owes its richest possessions and of those who strew it with

wrecks. He exhibits, sometimes by turns and sometimes simultaneously, but always in excess, all that is implied in the emotional and æsthetic, and all that is implied in the reflective and philosophic temper; he is Sterne and Rousseau; he is Montaigne and Pascal; he is Byron, Clough, and Coleridge. Fatalist and sceptic, stoic and epicurean alike claim him and have reason to claim him. There is not a phase in the dread never-ending conflict between destiny and human will, and between the law in man's members and the law that is without, which has not its symbol in his story and in his conduct. It is this which has more than anything else brought his tragedy home to average humanity, engaged, too often, like himself in similarly unequal warfare. Thus it is that all whom failure and despair haye cankered into cynics and pessimists, all whom the "disease of thought" has. saddened and perplexed, see in him the reflection and little more than the reflection of themselves. It would, therefore, be difficult to imagine a human being to whom Hamlet would not be a creation of absorbing interest, and perhaps equally difficult to imagine any sympathetic student of such a creation who would not be in danger of inadequately interpreting it. The danger always lies in mistaking a part for the whole, in supposing that what happens to appeal to individual sympathy and insight is the sum of all.

The interpreters of Hamlet remind us of an amusing anecdote which Spence tells of Swift and Ambrose Philips. The conversation happening to turn on Julius Cæsar, Philips, who was a tall, slim man and very scrupulous about his dress, asked the company with whom he was dining what