clamp and half olive levant with marbled paper sides with roomy margin, and, in the latter shape there is a large paper edition. The page is a little narrower than the size of Tauchnitz editions, the type is fullerfaced and the paper while dull very fair. The result is a shapely volume and the list is of the best. The moralists are represented by Epictetus, Marcus, a'Kempis, Emerson and Drummond, Bacon's Essays, Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, and in fiction there are Vicar of Wakefield, Cranford and the Scarlet Letter. Where the works are by living men, they are none of them copyright and some are as recent and as salable Drosines, Kourtidos and Volkhovsky of special interest. The figured cloth binding, blue and white, is a little light for a child's book, but the type is good and the narrow page shapely. There are illustrations of very various value as they come from French, German or English sources. An Italian binding, white vellum-cloth back and sage green sides with gilt tooling on the back and one side, has been selected for the "Handy Volume Classics" of Messrs Crowell & Co. The type is clear, the small neat oblong 18mo page well balanced and the details of the book-making well thought out. There is a photogravure illustration and a colored title page of the sort more common 50 years ago than now and other illustrations, often taken from other editions, are fully used. A preface is provided where such is needed, Mr. Nathan Haskell Dole contributing one each to the selections from Burns and from Poe's Poems and Essays on Poetry. Prefaces by Mrs. Ritchie to Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford," and Mr. Austin Dobson to Goldsmith's "Vicar," are also used. Moore's preface to "Lalla Rookh" in his collected works is reprinted and there are other signs of intelligent editing. The illustrations are now and then disappointing and suggest the publisher's conviction that a picture is a picture. In addition to those already mentioned, the series has the selections made by Browning from his own poems, Tennyson's "Idylls," and a volume of shorter poems "In Memoriam" and the "Princess," and Ruskin's "Wild Olive," and Sesame and Lilies," Arnold's Wordsworth Selections, Sartor Resartus", and "Emerson." A new volume of original poetry by Francis Turner Palgrave, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and editor of "The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics," is in the press. It is entitled Amenophis, and Other Poems, Sacred and Secular." Mr. Palgrave published his first volume of verse, "The Passionate Pilgrim," thirty-eight years ago. Critic. =The following ladies have consented to contribute articles upon various lines of woman's life and work, to the National Exposition Souvenir, "What America Owes to Women," now being edited by Mrs. Lydia Hoyt Farmer for the Women's Department of the Columbian Exposition: Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, Miss Frances E. Willard, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Gail Hamilton, Miss Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Ellen Olney Kirk, Mrs. J. C. Croly (Jennie June), Mrs. Agnes B. Ormsbee, Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, Mrs. Jane G. Austin, Mrs. Frank Leslie, Mrs. Jessie Benton Fremont, Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, Miss Virginia F. Townsend, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, Mrs. Jenness Miller, Miss Lillian Whiting, Miss Susan E. Dickinson, Mrs. Amelia S. Quinton, Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells, Mrs. Charles Henrotin, Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, Mrs. Ada M. Bittenbender, Professor Anne E. Morgan, From "Zenobia." Miss E. H. Lord, Miss Maude Haywood, Miss Grace H. Dodge, Miss Lenora B. Halsted, Mrs. Frances J. Barnes, Mrs. Frances Fisher Wood, Miss L. T. Guilford, Miss L. Elizabeth Price, Mrs. Elroy M. Avery, Miss Jennie E. Hooker, Miss Helen E. Smith, and others. Zenobia.-Portrait in Reliet. of Goethe, Heine and Schiller. The Estes and Lauriat. type is small but clear, the paper thin but firm, and the cover after a figured silk Italian model. These small volumes exasperate the bookish but tempt those who read little and these are good examples of the variety. M. Jean de la Brète's "My Uncle and My Curé" is a French novel of French domestic life which can unhesitatingly be placed in any and all hands. Mr. Ernest Redwood has translated it and M. Georges Janet given it illustrations which match the text but which have suffered somewhat in revise for the Amercan edition. The Harpers publish "History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850," in two volumes, by James Ford Rhodes, which embraces, besides the history of the country from 1850 to 1860, an introductory chapter on the origin and growth of negro slavery and its influence upon American politics. N. Y. Times. WITH NEW BOOKS. BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS. When an American painter of note said to me the other day, that he had found in Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman's "Nature of Poetry" support, advice and comfort in his own art, it seemed to me that more had been said for the work than by any analysis or praise. If a critical exposition of poetry, the first of arts, so fits painting as to be of use to its professor it has plainly gone to that center of life and light from which all arts radiate like the glowing rays which spread from the head of the Pythian Apollo. For while religion crowns the head with a circling halo complete in itself, it is of the essence of the arts to part company at start, and to center only at their source. "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo." One may regret that a poet like, Mr. Stedman has given to criticism what was meant for creation; but one must be profoundly grateful for an analysis and summary which sets in order the critical spirit of a critical century. The work is, it is true, Alexandrian. It is not Attic. It looks backward, as all ages do when the sun is setting. It is an Eighteenth century we have just ahead, not a Seventeenth or a Nineteenth. The herbarium comes when the blossom is picked. It is not the garden. Dry it must need be to do its full accurate work. Overladen now and then with definition. A little prone to force classification, to adjust it to this and that particular parterre on Parnassus, forgetful that new sowing will scatter strange bloom in some brief hour of genius on those ancient and sacred slopes. Houghton, Mifflin and Co. "Down the long street she passed." (Reproduction from etching.) Mr. William Edward Hartpole Lecky has given nineteen of his fifty-six years to writing his "History of England in the Eighteenth Century" in eight vol (Reproduced from photogravure.) Houghton, Mifflin and Co. From "At Sundown." one-sixth the cost at which it was originally published in England. Compressing a century into the space usually given to a period-the history could be printed in three copies of the Sunday Press Mr. Lecky has been turned towards the essay rather than the continuous narrative. Much is omitted. Al lusions are constantly made to events which a man like myself for instance, has to look up to understand fully. Yet even with this drawback, a clear, vivid and well-balanced idea is given of England in the last century. Mr. Lecky believes that men make history as well as nations. Of Quaker ancestry, he gives much space to the legislation on religious subjects. Morals and the general state of society get more than their usual share in previous histories. Dramatic portraiture he does not give. His Pitt is lifeless by the side of Macaulay's effigy From "Evangeline." Darley Edition. |