excellences. He cannot know or describe a bad man truly. Rowland Scudamore and Amanda Serafina Fuller are the merest lay figures, foreordained to be bad, the latter in a commonplace conventional fashion, the former in a strained and unnatural fashion, and wherever the story touches them, it becomes stagey and unnatural. Even Lord Herbert sinks to a pompous actor when he has to do with them.

The lesson of the story, taught nowhere in words, but everywhere in the spirit of the story, is that heroism, truth, God-service, may exist under the most dissimilar creeds, even when those who hold the creeds are contending one with another. One cannot help loving the Catholics in Raglan Castle, nor the Anglican heroine, nor the brave Puritan Dick Heywood; and one cannot, as MacDonald shows them, love one of them more or less because he is Puritan, Churchman, or Catholic.

MacDonald's "A Double Story."

WE are tempted sometimes to class the composition of the Fairy Tale pure and simple among the lost and irrecoverable arts. Our best writers try their hands upon it one by one, and one by one they fail. The reason is obvious. Each feels bound to make the pretty thing useful. Each has a reform to suggest, a “meaning” to embody, and they pile these utilities on their thin, shining wit, till it rends and collapses. The elves come in duly winged and wreathed; they carry wands and say "Mortal!" like their old-fashioned prototypes, but their conversation is as moral as Mrs. Trimmer's, and as dull as Mr. Gradgrind; and children, turning their backs in disgust, clamor for stories about real boys and girls, as a relief from the pert infallibility of these small Mentors who have usurped the place of their oldtime favorites.

There is one writer of fairy-books, however, who furnishes exception to this rule. No childish back will be turned upon Mr. George MacDonald's fairies. Not that they are innocent of meaning, for to grownup eyes a subtile and beautiful intention is visible on every page. But this intention is so veiled by the grace and freshness of the writer's style, and so lit by the charm of his friendly fun, that small readers overlook or forgive it.

This is particularly true of the latest published, "A Double Story" (Dodd & Mead, New York). It is a tale of two naughty little girls, the Princess Rosamund and the Shepherdess Agnes, and their adventures with a certain Wise Woman. The allegory is fanciful and beautiful, and the story so interesting, as to excuse the fact of an allegory. Here and there is a touch of quaintness which borders on poetry, as, for example, the episode of the little enchanted maiden, who flings flowers from her lap upon the ground, when they instantly take root and grow. Rosamund complains that when she picks the flowers they wither. The little maiden replies: "But I don't pull the flowers-I throw them away. I live them."

Miller's "The Ship in the Desert."* To enjoy this new poem adequately, one must put himself in a peculiar and sympathetic mood. Mr. Miller has a rather pronounced accent, which will repel some, as it will attract others; but those who have known and liked his earlier books will find no difficulty in surrendering themselves easily to the singular, dreamy spell of this one. The situation which Mr. Miller has chosen is a strong one, and gives opportunity for a good deal of epic impressiveness. And yet this can hardly be called a stirring narrative. The action is slow and extended, and there is nothing of the dramatic in its process; but even this contributes to the unique general effect. The whole poem unrolls itself before us much as some dark upcoiling mass of smoke lifting slowly over a burning prairie; for, through and under the gradual, somber drift of the verse we catch sight of a strong, consuming glow of inspiration. How far a poet should rely on the direct blaze of inspiration and how far he should depend on the indirect result, which we have likened to a smoke, is a matter open to discussion. But, however it may be decided theoretically, we must accord Mr. Miller considerable praise for his bold and (according to his method) successful rendering of his conception in the present case. There are some extremely powerful passages in the book. The following is a spirited outline:

"A man whose soul was mightier far
Than his great self, and surged and fell
About himself. as heaving seas

Lift up and lash, and boom, and swell
Above some solitary bar

That bursts through blown Samoa's sea,
And wreck and toss eternally."

Then, in that desert which he depicts as the bed

of some dried-up sea, what a weird scene!

The Marquis of Lorne's "Guido and Lita."* THE Marquis of Lorne issues with a claim for bay-leaves from the obscurity into which he has sunk through his marriage to a daughter of Queen Victoria. In spite of the rank of the claimant, it must be confessed that his claim is modestly put, and impresses the reader very favorably as to the personality of the noble author. With scenes laid in or near Provence, and the time that of the earliest chivalry, the poem could not well be otherwise than romantic in nature; but it is also romantic in treatment; it belongs thoroughly to the romantic school of which Byron is generally considered the chief. Romance and modesty so often clash, that one gets to feel that there exists a permanent incongruity between them, but, if rule there be, "Guido and Lita" violates it. Without raising the problem of how much of a poet the Marquis of Lorne is, it will be enough to say that he is not only poetical, but poetical in a clear and sweet voice. Subject and versification recall the poetical ventures of George Eliot.

It seems peculiarly natural and human that a romance of the old and now gilded days of chivalry should be lovingly told by a modern bearer of a title, a thing in itself as antique, out of date and moth-eaten, in this nineteenth century, as any Bayeux tapestry, and that, too, by a member of a family which has been conspicuous for its courage in accepting the situation. It is only human that some member of a house which has given its sons to commerce should take refuge in the golden feudalities of the imagination as some offset to the harsh facts of existence. 'Guido and Lita" is sure to delight many thousand honest readers in England and America, and will harm no one.

Wilson's "The Abode of Snow."t

THIS is another volume of travels which has weight in two senses, and none in a third. A ponderous little book, excellently edited, it has the drag which comes of following a traveler's route up and down hill for the sake of gleaning here and there a stray bit of valuable stone or a rare Alpine plant. But it is light enough when weighed in the scales with the book which the strange land and stranger

* Guido and Lita: A Tale of the Riviera. By the Marquis of Lorne. New York: Macmillan & Co.

+ The Abode of Snow: A Tour through the Upper Valleys of the Himalaya By Andrew Wilson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,

When Mr. Wilson first wrote there may have been reason for skimming along the crags and snows of the Himalaya, and telling us chiefly where he slept, how he slept, and what he had to eat. The readers of "Blackwood" may relish letters of a family nature, where the writer's personal convenience and safety are the real points to be brought out. But a book reprinted from "Blackwood" might at least be boiled down to half, if the writer has not the time or ability to tell something worth listening to about an unusual corner of the earth, for hapless readers would thus be saved many profitless hours, which might have been spent with a better author.

These exceptions being taken, we can recommend Mr. Wilson's book as interesting through the novel scenes of which it treats, and a certain ease and geniality with which it is written.

John Coleridge Patteson.

AMONG the saintly characters which, even in this nineteenth century full of prevailing materialism in science and in morals, the Church has produced, the name of Bishop Patteson, of Melanesia, must surely be conspicuous. Of a nature alike soldierly and scholarly, he showed himself able, with equal zeal and skill, to conquer the prejudices of a savage and heathen community, or the difficulties of a strange and rude language, and to reduce both to order and put them in the way of systematic and regular improvement. The man who makes a good missionary is the man who, if he had been called to that vocation, would have made a good soldier, able to endure hardness, and bringing all the faculties of his nature and all the opportunities of his position into subjection for a single purpose. It is not always, to be sure, that this heroic nature is conspicuously displayed, in the modern missionary. There are some missionary fields in which the work to be done is of a quiet sort, not greatly unlike the work of a busy, selfdenying minister in any Christian land; fields into which Christian civilization and the authority of Christian governments have so far penetrated that there is little more of peril or of hardship in the work of the missionary, than there is in the work of a faithful pastor in an English or an American parish. But the field into which Bishop Patteson entered was of a very different sort. It was not only uncultivated, but it was even to a great degree unexplored. The faithful cultivation of it required, on the part of the missionaries, uncommon fortitude and self-sacrifice. It was necessary to spend a great part of the year in perilous cruising among the various groups of islands lying to the north-eastward of New Zealand, in a little and not very comfortable schooner, which was often inconveniently crowded. It was necessary to visit islands on which no white man had ever landed; to acquire languages of which not a single word was familiar; to subsist on coarse and insufficient food. It was necessary to conciliate, by tact and patience and fearless kindliness, the suspicious and sometimes hostile natives; to run risks and endure hardships constantly, and in the greatest

variety. For the first few years of the Mission, the plan was adopted of bringing pupils from various islands to New Zealand, where the Bishop and his assistants could teach them the rudiments of knowledge, and train them in the customs and the morals of a Christian land. It frequently happened that the change to that colder climate worked disastrously to these boys and girls, accustomed as they were to tropical conditions of life. Again and again, in times of epidemic, or in instances of isolated sickness, the Bishop watched, with unfailing faithfulness, the sick-bed of the sufferer, making himself a hospital nurse, without the slightest sense of condescension or unworthy shrinking from such irksome drudgery. Indeed, it is by the hardest that, in reading his letters, one gets a glimpse of the selfsacrifice in little things to which the Bishop constantly and uncomplainingly submitted. He would not talk about such things if he could help it. And he had small patience either with missionaries who complained of hardship, or with those who boasted in it.

Eight years of hard work in his chosen field had made Patteson old before his time. They had been successful years,-successful in the laying of foundations, in the removing of obstacles, in the perfecting of preparations for future evangelization. The first-fruits had been gathered. One at least of the native youth had been ordained to the ministry. Had the Bishop's life been spared, he would, according to all human probability, have seen, before long, great victories for the Master whom he served so faithfully and followed so closely. The shocking calamity of his death has given to his work a temporary check. But even if it should lead to an abandonment of the Mission for a season, such a life as that of which Miss Yonge has given us the record would not have been lived in vain.

Miss Yonge has done her work as biographer with skill and good taste. A tone of "churchliness" pervades the volumes, but it is seldom offensive. It is fine to see how Patteson himself, who, if he had lived in England all these years, instead of in Melanesia, might easily have grown narrow and exclusive in his prejudices, magnifying unduly small matters of ritual or of dogma, finds no time for controversies on such matters when pressed upon by the exigencies of practical work.

A smaller volume, prepared by Frances Awdry, gives in a more compact form, and with omission of much detail, the story of the Bishop's life,-and is extremely well suited for the libraries of Sundayschools. Both books are issued by the house of Macmillan & Co.

French and German Books.

La psychologie sociale des nouveaux peuples. Philarète Chasles. $1.50. New York: Christern, 77 Univ. Place.-A posthumous work, with some of the defects of such publications, this last drop of ink in Chasles's pen must be read with something of the interest one gives to the words of a dying man. A patriot, his last cry to his country is for internal

peace for a stop to the eternal jealousies and hatreds that have always deformed France; as a writer, he finds literature the real test of a nation's strength or weakness, the most potent engine for good or bad; as a Frenchman-that is, an admirer of the other sex,-he gives woman a high rank among the causes that affect the fate of nations. If this volume has not the connectedness and polish we may suppose it would have reached had the writer lived, yet the generalities boldly thrown down are at least brilliant, and among them many are true. It impresses one as the work of a very versatile man not far off from his grave, who strives to gather together into genera and species the isolated facts of which he has become impressed at various times, in various lands, among the books of various peoples. As far as Social Psychology is concerned, it can be only said to form a sketch. Like so many another earnest striver after truth, Chasles lacks material to fill out his schedules. His ideas may be good, his generalizations magnificent, but there needs a laborious collection of facts on which to build firmly many of his most daring structures. It will surprise Americans to find him say concerning the new literary genius of America in general:

"What is less ideal in appearance than this American genius? what less literary? It is not disinterested. It sits on a bale of cotton, brandishes a revolver, travels from East to West like a bullet, without looking around; has virtues, but sketchy ones; violent, turbulent, furious, savage, often gross. It is not homogeneous. Puritan in origin, with a reminiscence of the royalist cavaliers of Charles I.; Quaker at Philadelphia, Chinese and Japanese in the direction of the Sierra Nevada; polygamous near Salt Lake; mystic among the trappistes and spiristes,—it has created a true sect, that of the Ku-Klux-Klan, which professes assassination like the Thugs, or like the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain. And yet the American adores Franklin, and makes a holiday for Washing. ton. Point of unification!"

After this we are not so much surprised to find that Joaquin Miller is the only American poet whose figure possesses sufficient saliency to catch the eye of Philarète Chasles. He is the representative of that literature which is to exemplify the New World, of which Mr. Chasles says:

"Disdain of anything at rest; nothing roofed over and suppressed; few inveterate hatreds between fellow-citizens, but many bloody violences; no grudges, but many hot fights. In fine, the contrary of our Latin Europe, where salons still reign, where parties greet each other, hiss each other, spit on each other mutually; polite, ulcerated, full of rages and implacable hatreds in the midst of their hidden maneuvers."

But if our author is now and then a little led away by rhetoric, the grand lines of his arguments are of the soundest. The great point he makes throughout, whether by reasoning or by appeals to the nation's heart, is that Frenchmen must unite-must love each other; for it is only love that builds cities; hate pulls them down.

Schnaken und Schnurren. III Theile.-Max und Moritz, eine Bubengeschichte.-Schnurrdiburr oder die Bienen. Wilhelm Busch. $1.25 each. Schmidt, 24 Barclay street, New York.-Those who were brought up on Slovenly Peter, the little boy who was soused in the inkstand, that other boy who refuses to eat and pines into a shadowy line, as well as his converse of a gastronomical tendency, who ends by literally "bursting with richness," will take kindly to these laughter-provoking sketches of Busch. A very limited knowledge of German is needed to the enjoyment of such broad farce as the discomfiture of Diogenes in his tub by certain urchins, whom an avenging fate, in the shape of the tub itself, flattens into exact likenesses to Lebkuchen. In the pictures which chronicle the reward of such early piety as prompts two small boys to scale a lofty crow's nest with a ladder, the artist has instructed the eye of the triumph felt by the unfledged crowlets at the boys' disaster, just as fully as the mind is appealed to by the inimitable lines:

Die Raben in dem Raben-nest,
Sind aber kreuz-fidel gewest.

Max and Moritz are still other small boys of marvelous grotesqueness and devilish ingenuity, whose adventures have long amused a wide circle of friends. Everything happens to them. They fall down chimneys, are smothered in grain, thrown into the hopper of a mill and ground fine, baked into strange cakes of a singularly human outline, and generally used up by way of pointing a moral. These may be called antidotes to a surfeit of over-pious Sundayschool books on the old plan. The doings of the irritated bee form the delectable scenes of Schnurrdiburr. The pictures of the illustrated A B C in Schnaken and Schnurren are distinguished for a child-like directness in the verses which accompany them, as for instance in one reading:

The chamois stays out doors all night;
We kill our geese St. Martin's night,

where, upon a mountain in the background, the prudent chamois has pulled a sheet over him to keep off the dew. The very names of Busch's books are enough to raise a smile.

Das Büchlein Tausendschön, $1; Peter der Mohren-König, $1.50; Was willst du werden? $1.75; Bilder für artige Kinder, $2.50. Schmidt, 24 Barclay street.--If Germans are famous for children's books of a jovial and humorous sort, they are not less remarkable for a quieter means to the entertainment of small eyes and brains. We can mention only a few of the Christmas children's books sent out from the Fatherland, for the list is too long. While the comic picture-books are distinguished for the hideousness of their drawing, the reverse is true of the serious ones; they are published with such excellent drawing and coloring that they will certainly please all who fear the effect, morally and æsthetically, of ugliness on children. The text accompanying them is in most cases of so little importance, that children of any nationality would be as well pleased as any sturdy little Teuton.

Transatlantische Streifzüge von Max von Versen. L. W. Schmidt, 24 Barclay street, New York.-A commandant of the Twelfth Thuringian Hussars, Lieutenant von Versen writes very much the sort of travels one may expect from a person occupying his honorable position. A man of ordinary caliber, ordinary powers of observation, and, withal, a decided honesty of statement, while the pictures he draws are not much colored, they certainly require no very elastic credulity on the part of his readers. The sketch of the United States, which occupies over three-quarters of the book, gives continuous proof of this sobriety of judgment. South America, which to North American readers becomes the only novel and interesting portion of his work, is reduced to a poor hundred pages of rapidly sketched travel, and from those more entertaining lands he springs over to California and our own affairs.

"Besides Cooper, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,' a few novels and one or two essays on the last War of Revolution, I had read nothing about North America. I had no conception of California, except that the only attraction it possessed was gold mines. These I wished to see."

Nevertheless the Lieutenant judges quickly and well, benefited, it is very likely, by the advice of the many educated Germans he met in San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York, but even more so by the opportunity of returning to this country after the last great war, and revising his opinions on things American. Of brilliancy there is nothing, but he will give Germans in Germany a clearer and more temperate idea of the United States.

Catalogue of Foreign Periodicals.-Mr. L. W. Schmidt has done a good work for education, science, and all the professions, by digesting into a catalogue, with prices attached, the infinite number of German, French, English, Italian, and other foreign reviews which now stand ready to assist men in every art, science, and occupation. Modern division of labor is nowhere more apparent than in these periodicals, treating of every imaginable topic separately and to the best of each editor's ability. Mr. Schmidt's careful catalogue deserves success.

The Art Collection of Vassar College.

WHEN the late Matthew Vassar consecrated the earnings of his life to the education of women, he projected an institution of which every American is proud. His liberal provisions have resulted in a college for women, which, on the whole, surpasses any other in this or any other country.

Among the many departments equipped with teachers and apparatus, that of art was not forgotten. The picture gallery was the feature of the magnificent building perhaps most attractive to the students and the public. But neither the noble founder, nor the students, nor the public knew precisely what the requisitions of an art gallery were, especially an art gallery appertaining to an institution of learning. We believe Mr. Vassar paid about twenty thousand dollars for the art collection which was exhibited at the opening of the college. As far as the pictures

were concerned, this collection was rather decorative than practically useful. It contained a few choice treasures, among the chief of which were three or four fine water-colors of Turner. But for teaching art historically, this early gallery was about as poorly provided as it is possible to conceive. Next in value to the Turners was a large copy of Raphael's "Madonna di Foligno," a work which cost enough to pay for a respectable gallery of large autotypes covering almost the entire range of art history. A fine life-size portrait of the founder, by Elliott, was an added ornament, and a just memorial of the large generosity which had devised so noble a benefaction to American culture. And thus, for the space of nearly ten years, the department of art remained the poorest of all as regards the appliances of instruction. A little more than two years ago, a retired pastor of Poughkeepsie, who had been making a long sojourn in Europe, returned for a short visit to his former home. During his exile he had made art history a subject of earnest study in the chief European galleries and under the tuition of German professors, and he brought home with him a conviction that not only Vassar College, but American colleges generally, were very deficient in a branch of instruction for which almost all foreign schools are abundantly equipped. The result of a few days' sojourn among old friends and neighbors in Poughkeepsie was a contribution of two thousand dollars, with which he was to purchase a collection of pictures and books applicable to a comprehensive course of instruction in the history of art. This sum, which does not look large in view of the object contemplated, was reduced to something less than eighteen hundred dollars, by a reserve remitted for Custom-House duties and contingent expenses.

Our readers may be curious to know how large a field can be covered in making up a practical art gallery for so moderate a sum, and the result attained should encourage every college and school in the land to attempt something similar, so that within the next decade the weakest department of American collegiate culture may be re-enforced, and brought up to a proximate level with other branches of literature and science.

branch of scholastic culture. This has created a demand for the requisite appliances, and the result is, that all sorts of copyists, photographers, engravers, lithographers, cast-molders and the like, do a thriv ing business.

For the most part, then, the material was at hand in the various art capitals of Europe, a world of wealth almost past computation; and the most difficult task was to make a judicious selection. For this purpose the vast learning and wise judgment of Professor Wilhelm von Lübke, of Stuttgart, were enlisted, to pilot the purchaser over these vast, and to a novice, trackless seas.

To detail the wide and varied explorations which were made in all the great capitals of Europe in search of the required copies would occupy too much of our space. Suffice it to say that, beginning with Egypt and coming down the ages through Assyria, Persia, India, Greece, Etruria, and Rome; through the early Christian age, the Medieval, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the present time, every great epoch and school of architecture, sculpture, and painting, is represented. Among the world-renowned monuments of art, copies of which may be seen here, we may specify the Elgin marbles, the great sculptures of classic Greece from the Louvre and Vatican museums, the paintings of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, and of Raphael in the Stanze and Loggie of the Vatican. These wonderful creations of the Periclean age and the golden era of the Renaissance well reproduced are enough to make an excellent art gallery without any auxiliaries. the Vassar collection tells pictorially the story of the infancy and childhood, as well as of the maturity, of art. And this every art gallery in every college and university should tell.

But

Besides a large bust of the Ludovisi Juno and a goodly collection of explanatory books and albums, there were purchased for the sum named over one thousand pictures. The greater number of these were the famous autotypes of Adolphe Braun, which are the most serviceable of all copies, combining the fidelity of photographs with the permanency of copper-plates.

Considering the ideal of an art collection, we are quite aware that modest words should be spoken of that which has just come over the sea to Vassar College. But for the purpose of teaching the history of art, we do not doubt that it takes first rank among American galleries, and it would be a boon to every American college to receive even a duplicate of this one, which, we trust, within a decade will

Solar Engine.

THE most recent contribution to the solar heat problem presents some features that are both interesting and promising. The apparatus consists of a cone-shaped reflector of polished brass, or silvered

sheet metal, mounted on an iron frame, with suitable machinery for keeping it adjusted to the movements of the sun. The cone opens, or flares, at an angle of 45°, and may be made of any convenient size. Supported in the center of this inverted cone is a