tion. Mr. Vincent speculates as to the origin of this colossal temple and the race of its builders with learning and discrimination, though his conclusions seem to be at marked variance with the opinions of other archæologists who have written about it.

HOW IT MIGHT BE DONE.

A SOCIAL DEPARTURE. Or, How Orthodocia and I went Around the World by Ourselves. By Sara Jeannette Duncan. With 111 Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

It

This bright and vivacious story of adventure is fully worth the reading. One hardly knows whether it is based on personal experience, or spun out of that knowledge of distant regions which can so easily be commanded in this age of many books. On the latter assumption, the more probable one, it is but meet to acknowledge the charming ease and vraisemblance of the narrative and the realistic cleverness of the style. It belongs to a high order of genius to attain such a truth to nature and probability as to make fiction appear like history, or history read like the chronicle of an eye-witness, such a genius as immortalized Daniel De Foe in "Robinson Crusoe," and the History of the London Plague." is not needful that Miss Duncan should be credited with the imaginative power and grasp of one of the great classical names in English literature. But she indicates some of the same kind of quality with a great lightness and ease of touch. Yet the story which she records is not necessarily beyond the reach of two adventurous spinsters in an age when steam and electricity have welded together far-distant continents with a closeness of practical reach surpassing the intimacy of contiguous regions a century ago. The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea" is now almost a poetic metaphor. Within a few months two young ladies of journalistic ambition have put a girdle round the world in the hope of surpassing the fictitious feat of Phineas Finn in Jules Verne's novel, and have succeeded. What is more to the point, they emphasize the fact that during the whole of this race against time they met nothing but courtesy and helpfulness from the numerous people of various classes with whom they came in contact. The simple fact is that a woman, in spite of her being young, pretty, and unprotected, can to-day, if she deports herself with ordinary prudence and dignity, journey alone around the world without difficulty.

ure.

We

The amusing and interesting adventures of Orthodocia and her companion are told with spirit, wit, and freshness of fancy. The supposed itinerary includes many elements of romance which, strictly speaking, would hardly come to the ordinary traveller. "Adventures come to the adventurous," and one can hardly fancy unprotected females in strange lands deliberately putting themselves in the way of meeting romantic and striking adventBut we need not speculate on such probabilities. It is enough that the story is told with great naturalness, as well as brightness, and it is pleasant to be carried out of the beaten track of the commonplace. can hardly fancy any one who would fail to travel most agreeably in the companionship of the spirited Orthodocia, who hardly justifies her name in the dashing and resourceful way in which she takes the most unusual happenings. That there is a little undercurrent of sentiment cropping out of the story amid all its fun and graphic liveliness of description before we part with the heroine, will not be a drawback for most of us. The charm of personal narrative and adventure is happily mingled with admirable description of countries, scenery, and people. The book will prove a most entertaining companion of idle summer hours and ought to meet with a most cordial reception from the reading public.

A NOVEL OF CANADIAN LIFE.

A Novel. GEOFFREY HAMPSTEAD. (Appleton's Town and Country Library.) By Thomas S. Jarvis. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

64

A fresh issue in the "Town and Country Library" is to be expected with some interest by novel-readers. The books have been so uniformly good that the presumption is always favorable. Geoffrey Hampstead" mingles so much of strength with some features that are crude and unnatural as to awaken a feeling of perplexity. The entourage of the characters and the genial spirit of out of-door life with which the story is charged are much in its favor. The description of athletic games and of yachting are lively and enjoy. able, and many of the personages who move in the drama are in accordance with the healthful spirit of the surroundings amid which they are set. Geoffrey Hampstead, a Titanic sort of man, mentally and physically an athlete, is a being without a conscience, so superbly indifferent to the ordinary restraints of humanity as to believe that all

others, men and women, were made for his good will and pleasure. The author, in making Geoffrey a man of high and cultivated intellect and keenly alive to moral excellence in others, seems conscious of a radical confusion of thought. He therefore gives his hero a savage mother, of Tartar race, with a father of noble rank in England. The two strains of heredity, the one charged with the brutal, rapacious instincts of barbarism, the other by which is inherited the cumulative training and aspiration of a magnificent race, flowing side by side and unmingled, are supposed to account for the contradiction. It is a fresh version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The strain on one's ordinary observations of human character is so enormous as to be painful. Geoffrey Hampstead is even more monstrous a violation of psychological fact as observed in human beings than Stephenson's tour de force, where an all-potent drug is supposed to sink the one personality into the other. In the light of the surroundings under which this character is presented to the reader, we conceive it to be, if not impossible, so radically improbable as to be open to the most serious criticism.

Again the heroine, Nina, who becomes Geoffrey's victim, and is made the indirect instrument of the retribution which ruins him, is no less offensive a violation of social law. One cannot fancy for a moment that a

beautiful and accomplished woman, the heir of great wealth, a pet of society, engaged honorably to another man, would deliberately yield herself body and soul to the lusts of one whom she knew did not care for her and was devotedly in love with another woman. The fact is monstrous, repulsive, and unnatural to the last degree. Mr. Jarvis seems to be uneasy over this absurdity, also, so he gives the reader the implication that Nina's downfall is caused by something like hypnotic influence. It is a pity that a clever writer should be reduced to this foolish machinery of plot to im. port dramatic interest into his story. The novel is too striking in other respects to justify such lack of self confidence.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.

THE thirty-first volume of the "Histoire Littéraire de la France" will contain among other matter an elaborate essay on the "French Rabbis of the Fourteenth Century," as a continuation of the twenty-seventh vol

ume of the same publication. The articles on the poet Jedaiah of Béziers, the translator Kalonymos of Arles, the mystic Joseph Caspi of Largentière, the mathematician Samuel of Marseilles, and the philosopher and astronomer Levi ben Gershom (Maestro Leo of Bagnols) will form the prominent part of the work.

A LARGE mass of De Quincey's correspondence has been lately unearthed, which throws new light, it is said, on his character and career, and Mr. Heinemann is preparing to bring it out in two volumes before long, edited by Dr. Japp. There are letters from Coleridge and Wordsworth and many others lotte Brontë, the first signed “Currer Bell,” of his contemporaries, and some from Characcompanying a presentation copy of the lishers tell her, she says, only two copies have poems of the three sisters, of which the pubbeen sold. The correspondence, it is declared, redounds to De Quincey's credit, showing that his claims to be on familiar terms with more than one man of rank of his time were not fictions of a vain imagination. Even the "De," for which he was quizzed, was not of his manufacture. Its use appears to have been his mother's doing. It seems the world has not yet heard the last of the unpublished works of De Quincey. A number of papers have turned up which contain the manuscripts of " The Dark Interpreter " and "The Spectre of the Brocken," mentioned in the first part, and supposed to have been burned. In all, five of the lost papers have been recovered, and will be published in course of time by Mr. Heinemann, along with a list now discovered of the intended thirty-two papers that were to have formed the complete work.

THE following are the pensions which have been granted on the Civil List for the year ended June 20th, 1890, making a total sum of £1200 To Dr. William Huggins, £150; to the widow of the late Major-General Henry Scott, and the widow of the late Rev. Dr. Edwin Hatch, £100 each; to a daughter of the late Martin F. Tupper, a daughter of the late Major General Sir H. W. Barnard, the widow of the late J. T. Wood (of Ephesus fame), and the widow of the late Judge Motteram, £75 each; to Lady Wilde, £70; to Mr. John Absolon, the Rev. Dr. E. Cobham Brewer, Dr. William Spark, the widow of the late E. L. Blanchard, the widow of a son of Dr. Livingstone, a daughter of the late Richard Shilleto, and the widow of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, £50 ;

to two unmarried sisters of the late Dr. Thomas Maguire, of Trinity College, Dublin, £25 each; and to the four unmarried daughters of the late Rev. M. J. Berkeley (the botanist), £20 each. It will be observed that by far the larger number of pensions this year are in the nature of compassionate grants to the surviving members of the families of deceased men of letters or science.

AMONG forthcoming linguistic publications, a primer of the dialect of the Eskimo tribes

living north of the Mackenzie River districts, on the Alaska border, within the Arctic circle, is being prepared under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. A syllabic character has been devised

to express the language phonographically, closely resembling that which a native missionary of the Cree tribe of North American Indians invented, more than one hundred years ago, for the transcription of the Cree idiom, and which has been successfully adapted to the Chippewya, Tinné, and other Red Indian tongues of North-West Canada.

MR. WHITTIER has written the following letter to Mrs. A. O. Boyce regarding her pleas ant book "Records of a Quaker Family," which we reviewed last February:

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS., 7 Mo. 1, 1890. MY DEAR FRD.: I have read thy beautiful book with great satisfaction. As a truthful picture of the old Friendly life it seems to me perfect, and I give thee my heartfelt thanks for the privilege of reading it.

Our dear Society seems changing and be. coming more and more like the Calvinistic and other Dissenting Churches, both in doc. trines and testimonies. But the good work it has done, and the simple exterior of its lives in the past, will not be forgotten by the world

it has made better and sweeter.

Gratefully, thy aged friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER,

WHAT a triumph must it be considered for the poetical fame of Shelley that his centenary is to be celebrated by the publication of a Lexical-Concordance to his poems, which, from the complete and exhaustive mode of compilation, will equal in bulk Dr. Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon or Mrs. Clarke's Concordance to Shakespeare! By a sort of strange irony, moreover, this tribute to the greatness of the expelled Oxford student of 1811 is to be printed at the University Press, with a type specially cast and a paper made express

ly for the book. Strange, too, will it be thought that so laborious and costly a work should be undertaken by two publishers. Yet so it is; for while Mr. Ellis is content to spend six of the last years of his life in the close and arduous application necessary for the preparation of such a book—which involves not only the arrangement but the careful and anxious consideration of 125,000 references to the poet's writing-without any hope of reward or benefit to himself beyond the pleasure he finds in the study of the author, his whilom business antagonist, Mr. Quaritch, has undertaken to invest his capital in the production of the volume, which is assuredly a speculation from which many a great publishing house would shrink. It is intended

that the book shall be issued on the hundredth

anniversary of the poet's birth-August 4th,

1892.

THE last member of the Schwäbische Dichterschule has just passed away in the person of the poet Gustav Pfizer, who died a week ago at his native place, Stuttgart, at the age of eighty-three (not eighty, as some German chiefly extended, like that of Uhland, over the Pfizer's poetical activity papers have it). first period of his life only. In 1838 he was bold enough to publish a severe criticism on Heine, for which the latter took merciless revenge in his "Schwabenspiegel."

CONTINENTAL papers report that the wellknown Spanish writer and politician, Señor Emilio Castelar, being engaged on a "Life of Jesus," will shortly repair to Palestine, thus following the example of M. Renan, who had also made himself practically acquainted with the scene of Christ's preaching before writing his "Vie de Jésus." Señor Castelar's work

will, however, unlike the latter, be rather of a descriptive kind than critical and philosophical. It is said that he is also engaged on a history of Spain.

M. RENAN's third volume of the "Histoire du Peuple d'Israël" will appear at the beginning of October.

FOREIGN exchanges record the death of Professor Ivan Pavlovich Minayeff, which occurred on June 13th at St. Petersburg. The deceased scholar was well known among Orientalists as a Pali scholar of many years' standing, and a writer on subjects connected with Buddhism. Professor Minayeff had also several times visited the chief Buddhist countries, where he made collections of MSS.

MISCELLANY.

NONSENSE ABOUT BUDDHISM.-Mr. Graham Sandberg concludes an article on philosophical Buddhism, from which we quoted some paragraphs the other day, with the remark that among modern admirers and exponents of Buddhism "meanings are given to words and doctrines such as would occur to the Christian trained mind, but they are such as the Buddhist author and Oriental reader would neither conceive nor, uninstructed, understand." Had he read a lecture Sir Edwin Arnold delivered before the Japanese Educational Society at Tokio a few weeks ago, he might have added that a scientific meaning is now being read into Buddhism which has no existence there except in the imagination of the enthusiastic disciple. "I have often said," observed Sir Edwin, " and I shall say again and again, that between Buddhism and modern science there exists a close intellectual bond. When Tyndall tells us of sounds we cannot hear, and Norman Lockyer of colors we cannot see; when Sir William Thomson and Professor Sylvester push mathematical investigation to regions almost beyond the Calculus, and others, still bolder, imagine and try to grapple with, though they cannot actually grasp, a space of four dimensions, what is all this except the Buddhist Maya, a practical recognition of the illusions of the senses? And when Darwin shows us life passing onward and upward through a series of constantly improving forms toward the Better and the Best, each individual starting in new exist ence with the records of bygone good and evil stamped deep and ineffaceably from the old ones, what is this again but the Buddhist doctrine of Dharma and of Karma ?" This is something very like nonsense. If there is one idea more alien than another from the spirit of modern science, it is that of the illusiveness of sense. Men like Professor Sylvester and Sir William Thomson realize in spirit and in fact the Baconian ideal of servants and interpreters of nature; and for that reason their method is not to get above sense-the hopeless task Buddhism imposes-but to ask sense questions by experiment. What Sir Edwin Arnold would call illusion is to the scientist as real as anything else, though it may be recognized as having less permanence or, in relation to the evolution of the world, moral and intellectual value. It is the function and glory of the poet to discern similitudes, and Sir Edwin Arnold is a poet; but when he sets down his similitudes as historical analogies scientifically demonstrated, he goes beyond his

province, and places Buddhism in an altogether false and delusive light.-Allahabad Pioneer.

THE FUTURE OF LITERATURE.-Your thorough-going journalist blinks like a sleepy owl; much night-work has made him permanently drowsy. Now all literature tends to-day to become more and more journalistic in type and method. I don't mean merely that it is produced to a great extent in periodical form; nor even that it is more or less ephemeral in its interests and objects. I mean something deeper and more essential than that it is produced under somewhat the same cramping conditions of stress and hurry as journalism generally-so that the leisurely quality, the fine literary aroma, the scholarly habit of rolling the delicate morsel daintily on the critical palate, are each day becoming more and more obsolete and forgotten among us. Even a great writer would find it hard to supply us with masterpieces at fifty or sixty, if he had been constantly employed for thirty years previously in grinding out a couple of novels a year for a mercantile syndicate, the head of which frankly acknowledges in print that "high-class romances" have never been known to pay for provincial newspaper purposes. But this is just the mill through which the aspiring young author of the present day has to be passed against his will, as a mere literary grindstone; in one way or another he must write to order so many pages a day, at least until he has achieved sufficient distinction to be able to say what he pleases anywhere, and to say it boldly. The date in his life at which that happy hour will strike for him must henceforth, from generation to generation, be steadily postponed ever later and later. Carlyle got his say in middle age; Herbert Spencer by the exercise of extraordinary self-denial, managed to secure it in early manhood; George Meredith is only now beginning to catch the public ear. But most young men of this and the coming crops may expect to find themselves free to follow their own bent in life at sixty or thereabouts. Now, excellent work, we all allow, may be done at sixty, but mainly by men who have been accustomed to do similar excellent work with a free hand for many years beforehand. A high authority on hosiery has lately informed us that a man seldom changes the cut of his collar after he has passed the middle term of thirtyfive; he is certainly very little likely to change the cut of his style and his habits of writing when he has got much beyond the grand climacteric of fifty.-Grant Allen, in the " Daily Graphic."

THE late Mr. Bagehot used to remark that the United States was a country for exemplifying by experiments on a large scale the old truths of political economy. The people were indifferent to experience gained elsewhere, while they were protected from the most serious consequences of mistakes, that would be supremely disastrous in old countries, by their magnificent resources. They were thus constantly renewing old experiments under favorable conditions and confirming, if not adding to, our knowledge of the principles of political economy. The latest experiment of this kind is the silver legislation, of which we have all heard so much during the last few months. Of all things in the world, "money, ," which can least bear tampering with, or anything but scientific treatment, is being made in America the bone of party contention, under the influNEW SERIES.-VOL. LII., No. 4.

ence partly of a mining interest which desires strongly to get a better price for silver, and partly of a soft money interest, which desires to have abundant money of some kind if it cannot have inconvertible paper. The resulting legislation, which has in fact been accomplished, is certainly of a singular character, and raises questions of immediate practical as well as scientific interest, not only to Americans but to other peoples as well. Some account of the matter, then-of the fantastic ideas which influence the event, of the results which must ensue as distinguished from those hoped for and predicted, and of the consequences to wider interestsmay thus be of some use. The facts are highly complex and little known and understood even in America. Two articles which have lately appeared in the American Quarterly Journal of Economics, one