Miss Lucy Maynard Salmon has been for ten years collecting facts and material for the study of the servant question, and the results of her prolonged investigation are presented in "Domestic Service." The volume contains the most considerable collection of data yet made on the subject and its discussion is more complete and conclusive. The statistical basis presented, 2,545 employés in a country where 1,454,791 persons are in domestic service is not large; but it is larger than any gone before and sufficient for sound deduction. Miss Salmon, a professor at Vassar, has co-ordinated a wide range of discussion, and her conclusion that the remedies for domestic service are to come from the disappearance of caste-as shown, for instance by the use of the first name in address,—an increase in the domestic work done out of the house, greater readiness to let domestic servants live their own lives and better training have been often suggested, but are here presented logically and comprehensively. Yet the real center of the whole difficulty Miss Salmon does not meet. The substitution of contract for status is at once the object and method of modern civilization. Domestic service owes nearly all its difficulties to the fact that it is based on status. The reason why it has not been transferred to contract is because it is part of family life, and no one has yet shown how the family can be preserved as an institution if its members rest their relations on contract and not on status.

*

* *

"Household Economics," by Mrs. Helen Campbell, is an altogether different book. Its preface is a plea for higher and better education in the work of the household, a plea with which Miss Salmon ends. The body of the book is a series of loosely constructed essays on the successive phases of the house, from its plan and building to its food, cooking and service. Each of these essays ends with a list of author

The essays

If

ities, most valuable in all ways. themselves rest on a wide range of travel, observation and experience. They are sound enough; but they are general and say things everyone knows and which no one will do, as is the case with much preachment. any woman keeping house, however, really desires to cover the entire field of her work, to know its literature, to study its problems and to see its needs, this book will be an excellent guide, not by reading it, but the authorities it cites.

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"Day Before Yesterday was once pronounced by Thiers the hardest part of history to learn anything about. It is particularly difficult for those who are teaching history or who have an intelligent interest in history to see in their relations recent events. Major C. E. Callwell is an English artillery officer who has written the "Effect of Maritime Command on Land Campaigns Since Waterloo,' in order to prove the necessity of a strong fleet for Great Britain. He has applied to the wars of the past century, Captain Mahan's familiar formula that command of the sea will in the end give command of land, because the reduced friction in movement by sea leaves more energy in conflict and greater freedom in the choice of attack. His book has much of the spirit of a political pamphlet. But it sketches with accuracy, the aid of small maps and in very brief compass, the leading military operations of the past ninety years. It will surprise any one reasonably familiar with the events of this period to find how much aid Major Callwell's work, not large and easily read, is in setting the events of the century in clear perspective.

**

Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has chosen to serve democracy rather than scholarship-the many instead of the few. As new

volumes appear of the essays in which he has done this, the last is " Book and Heart," some regret must inevitably be felt as one remembers his "Epictetus" and "Malbone " with other signs and letters of a devotion to pure learning for their own sake; but no one can re-read their pages without a new thrill of satisfaction at this sober constant loyal service to the American ideal, this lifelong determination that the stream of national tendency towards the liberty which equalizes opportunity for fraternal service shall not lose itself in the sands and shallows of current social chances It is easy to belittle this work unless one regards its end and aim the first of life's duties.

Dr. George Angier Gordon is to day the leading liberal divine in the Congregational Church. His position on disputed theological issues is apparent by his declaration in his last work," Immortality and the True Theodicy" that the doctrine of election as taught by Augustine, Calvin and Edwards, "and faith in a moral deity are conceptions mutually and eternally exclusive." Believing this, Dr. Gordon cuts loose from old grounds in his presentation of the presumption in favor of immortality, a demonstration, he pronounces impossible. "The three grand positions from which faith in a hereafter for man would seem to follow are the moral perfection of the Creator, the reasonableness of the universe and the worth of human life." It is not probable that a good God in Dr. Gordon's opinion would create sentient beings through a process of evolution for them to end at death. Gordon in short applies to the future the method Butler and Poley applied to the past. Scotch by birth, house-painter by calling, Dr. Gordon was graduated at Harvard in 1881, supported by those who saw his worth. He turned aside from Unitarianism which was urged on him, and he is to-day the coming man of his school and denomination. Some think he has come.

*

**

Dr.

"The Bibliography of Art," which has been prepared by Messrs. Sturges and Krehbiel, for the series of annotated bibliographies, edited by Mr. George Iles, gives in the fine arts and in music a well selected series of authors with accurate notes, such as has been long needed. There are all over the country a large number of clubs engaged in studying “Art.” There is not one of them whose scanty purchases will not be greatly aided by this Bibliography, and in brief reading and references it will prove of constant value. Mr. Russell Sturges is a scientific and exhaustive student of the Fine Arts. Mr. Krehbiel, the music critic of the Tribune, has long been

known for his capacity to combine criticism and erudition.

**

Story

Mr. James Newton Baskett, in the of the Birds," has written a summary of existing knowledge in regard to the bird, which covers the whole ground for the young boy naturalist who has begun to take an interest in bird life about him. The important thing in directing an interest of this kind is to take the channel of observation and not of destruction. A good deal of the interest in Natural History is based on the desire to gratify the instinct of destruction on the part of the hunter, and of acquisition on the part of the collector. To a number of people who are killing and gathering, whose study is small, this book which takes up the generic origin of birds, sketches their habits and families in many lands, and is full of carefully-told fact, is likely to stimulate observation, and education has won the battle when it has done that.

"The Essays of Bacon," as printed in the Temple Series, is about as perfect a shrining of a classic at a moderate cost as has recently been seen.

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Mr. Israel C. Russell fifteen years ago made the first thorough investigation which had been conducted of the Glaciers of the Sierra Nevada. He published this in the fifth annual report of the United States Geological Survey, and he has since been constantly engaged in the study of glacial action. With most American geologists this means the study of the remains of the great glacial age in the pleistocene and earlier periods spread over the Northern States. Mr. Russell instead has devoted himself principally to living glaciers in Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, in Alaska and in Greenland. Only about thirty pages of the two hundred and ten, in his new work on " Glaciers of North America," are devoted to this ice sheet, the rest take up the glaciers in these different regions and describe them with maps and illustrations, while a closing discussion treats of the movement of glaciers. Mr. Russell's method is lucid. His work will be more valuable in California than in the East. There the living glacier is of the most interest. In the East, the remains of the ancient ice sheet. He has brought together a wide area of facts and no other one volume covers the field he has made his own as well.

* **

Mr. Hubert Crackenthorpe ended suddenly and sadly a life of brilliant literary promise, last year, with suicide, due to the saddest of all tragedies which can cross the path of a man.

Mr. George Haven Putnam, foremost in this country in the struggle for the recognition of literary property through international copyright, has used the last of his three volumes on "Books and Their Makers," to sketch the growth of property in literature. This began in the privilege of printing certain books for a certain time granted by sundry Italian cities. These grants were succeeded by a censorship which was the natural correlative of the protection given this privilege. In England these conditions broadened into the copyright law, from which we have derived our own phase of literary property, and in which English common law is decidedly behind civil law. This portion of Mr. Putnam's volume on "Books and Their Makers," from 1500 to 1709, is a highly original and valuable discussion. The earlier part of the volume, while it brings together much that is of interest, is mainly a compilation, in regard to Plantin, the Elzevirs, Caxtons, and the Italian publishers of the sixteenth century.

**

Poland in the past twenty-five years has had a literary renaissance-no unusual phenomenon when a brilliant race is secluded by events or its own character from political action. In education, art, letters, and the stage, the Pole has suddenly flowered of late. Mr. Henryk Sienkiewicz (pronounced as nearly as maybe Sángkivikz) is the Scott of this national revival. He has the historic power in romance, and makes both throng and central figure live, though his finest work is in his short stories, of which one-the light-house keeperis a very picture of the Pole. "Quo Vadis " is no better than his previous works and at some points unequal to them; but its subject has caught the public eye, and being a foreigner to English-speaking convention, the Polish novelist has spared nothing of the accumulated horror of the day. To the careful student of his reign, Nero becomes a nightmare and Sienkiewicz leaves this impression on his readers in a book whose popular interest is considerably above its real literary importance. Other volumes from his pen, Without Dogma," and " Yanko," bespeak the man of the first rank whose arms can bend any bow and his hands wing any shaft.

*

Mr. Henry de Bettgen Gibbins has shown in his "History of Commerce in Europe" a

marvel of condensation, and in his Social Questions of the Day" a capacity for the clear and well-balanced statement of intricate records. He has now expanded his "Industrial History of England," published seven years ago, into a compendious octavo on "Industry in England." In four hundred and seventy-four coarse print pages he has rapidly reviewed the entire field. The book is marred, as inevitably such books must be, by the personal bias of the author. He sees the past in a rosy light and finds comfort in artisan and rural conditions of two and three centuries ago, when the death-rate gives indubitable proof of deadly discomfort. If Mr. Gibbins had seen in the Orient the early industrial conditions he describes, he would know the misery they stood for. With this reservation his work is lucid, comprehensive, impartial and instructive. It is all second-hand. Gibbins is a compiler. He has more confidence in Thorold-Rogers than those who do original work feel; but he gives the best summary of his subject to-day accessible, and it is better to read facts in books like this than pages of theory.

Mr.

LONDON, April 5, 1897.

The volume that has received the heartiest welcome during the last month is undoubtedly the neat pocket edition of Colonel John Hay's "Pike Country Ballads and Other Poems," which Routledge and Company issued in happy hour simultaneously with the announcement of Colonel Hay's appointment as United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The poems are nearly all familiar to what may be called the "inner circle" of readers-we took "Jem Bludes" to our hearts long ago and now they have "caught on with the public immensely.

LONDON

corrected in proof. Despite these faults of style-a god-send to the carping reviewer who has fallen on them tooth and nail-" Lad's Love" is selling rapidly, and will probably be as popular as that dainty idyl, "The Lilac Sunbonnet." At any rate, slight as the story is, it is quaint, wholesome, and for the most part sprightly and amusing, far more pleasant and profitable to peruse than its predecessor, the gruesome Grey Man." Mr. Crockett, who has not been in good health, has just started on a walking tour through Pomerania, where the scene of his next novel, "The Red Axe," is to be laid.

66

Greece seems to be the Mecca towards which all our most enthusiastic young authors bend their steps. Mr. Allen Upward, author of that extremely clever but most impertinent series of romances, Secrets of the Court of Europe," set out for Athens to tender his services as a volunteer several weeks ago, amid the cheers and jeers, chiefly the latter, of his acquaintances, and several well-known pen-men assembled to see the last of Mr. Stephen Crane, who also left London for the front yesterday.

Allen Upward appears to be enjoying himself in a most peaceable manner.

He writes

"In the shops (in Athens) one is almost afraid to say one is an English volunteer, for fear they will refuse to take one's money." After this there will surely be a stampede of volunteers Greecewards!

Meanwhile Mr. Upward's "Secrets," originally published in Pearson's Magazine, and now brought out in one volume by Arrowsmith, have tickled the taste of the public, which always evinces a voracious appetite for scandalous stories concerning royalty, and prefers those that are most audaciously piled up on the slightest foundations of truth.

Mrs. Humphry Ward has leased the lovely old mansion, Levens Hall, in Westmoreland, a veritable store-house of historical antiquities and associations. The present owner is Captain Bagot, M. P., whose clever wife has contributed to this month's Pall Mall Magazine an interesting descriptive article on the splendid old house, illustrated with numerous photographs. Mrs. Humphry Ward is a woman to be envied !

A new and smart literary journal, The Librarian, that saw the light for the first time this week, laments the fact that Goldsmith's works are no longer considered as part of a literary education, but are read only by a very small company of the elect. There is alas, considerable truth in the assertion that Goldsmith's "beautiful writings are considered too tame to suit the higher classes, who read with prodigious relish the works of Hardy and Meredith. The middle-classes, the readers of Miss Braddon and Rider Haggard, have heard his name, but could not for the life of them say whether he was a painter or an engineer. The mob, who revel in the Police Budget and Miss Corelli's 'masterpieces,' have never heard of him. Such is the fate of genius in this country.

most reckless, aggravating and lovable of men, plays an important part in it.

Mr. James Bowden, for so many years associated with the well-known firm of Ward,

Kildrummie Castle.

This is crushing, but absolutely correct. As it was reserved to our American kinsfolk to show us how to appreciate Shakespeare, perhaps they will perform the same kind office once more, and create a Goldsmith "vogue."

Lock and Bowden, commenced business on his own account a few months ago, and has already many important books in hand. The very first book that he issued, Coulson Kernahan's inspired pamphlet, "The Child, the Wise Man and the Devil," achieved an instantaneous and marvellous success. It has sold like wild-fire, and has been ranslated into every European language, and into Sanscrit. Mr. Boden is now preparing an edition de luxe of the book, which will be exquisitely printed and bound in a special cover designed