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less line; and nowhere in the rapid poetic narrative is there a serious discrepancy from Rowlandson's vigorous Hogarthian plates, which it was written to accompany.

If, during this ambrosial night and long potation of the pride of life, any reader feel sharp compunction stir within

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sible to conceive. Nor will Bibliophilus find the book lacking in temperament, for the soft, intricately stamped leather cover and quaintly conceived title-page agree most harmoniously with the exquisite humor, poetic fancy, and all the other kindred qualities of that light fantastic pen which they embellish. The reader who has drunk his fill of him, he may find penitential reading in Peacock's inimitable distillation the Bay Psalm Book. It was a sublime wish to round out the night by applica- adventure that called "the thirty pious tion to the good English ale of other and learned ministers" then in New Eng Early Victorian and Late Georgian hu- land to set all the Psalms of David over morists. Nothing can be more apt for into English metre; and it is a worthy the purpose of such an one than a series ambition that leads the present publishof reprints whose sleek red bodies and ers to call in the aid of Old Sol — subwhite labeled backs chime most conso- tlest of printers in reproducing the nantly with their rubicund contents.1 The first volume printed in America. The Memoirs of John Mytton, the Napoleon metrical versions, not smoothed "with of English eccentrics, are as valuable to the fweetnes of any paraphrafe," breathe students of the Byronic mood as they are more piety than poetry; but they are full diverting to lovers of curious reading. of the very quintessential spirit of quaintFor collateral reading with this veracious ness, and the page lacks only the savor memoir nothing could be more fit than of must in the nostrils of being an ideal the high-spirited sporting fiction wherein setting. Yet the last impression we bring R. S. Surtees set forth, in the ample away from the book is not that of rediction of his sub-title, "The Hunting, moteness and queerness, rather it is a Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eat- feeling of the actuality and sempiterniing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits ty of what the men of those times were of that Renowned Sporting Citizen, Mr. pleased to call the motions of the Soul. John Jorrocks of St. Botolph Lane and Thus we are pleased to learn by the first Great Coram Street." The amazing ac- words of the preface of the pious and tivity of those beefy times is still further learned ministers, that even in those and more strikingly shown in the Tour days church music was not always a of Doctor Syntax, and the other poems cause of congregational concord. of William Combe, where his poetic fac- they tell us: "The finging of Pfalmes, ulty is seen to be no mere trickling rill in though it breath forth nothing but holy a Castalian meadow, but a spring freshet harmony and melody: yet fuch is the and inundation. Yet in all the prodi- fubtilty of the enemie and the enmity of gious submerged area of his doggerel ver- our nature against the Lord, & his wayes, sifying there is hardly a dull or a nerve- that our hearts can finde matter of dif

1 Memoirs of the Life of John Mytton. By NIMROD. With colored plates by H. ALKEN and T. J. RAWLINS. The Life of a Sportsman. By NIMROD. With colored plates by H. ALKEN, The Tour of Doctor Syntax, The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax, The History of Johnny Quae Genus, The Dance of Life, each 1 vol. The English Dance of Death, 2 vols. All with colored illustrations by THOMAS ROWLANDSON. Handly Cross. By R. S. SURTEES. With col

For

ored plates and woodcuts by JOHN LEECH.
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. By R. S. SUR-
TEES. With colored illustrations by H. ALKEN.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1903.

2 The Bay Psalm Book. Being a facsimile Reprint of the First Edition Printed by STEPHEN DAYE At Cambridge in New England in 1640. With an Introduction by WILBERFORCE EAMES. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1903.

cord in this harmony, and crotchets of divifion in this holy melody."

IV.

To pass from the pleasant, busy landscape, through which the reader of the books we have been considering progresses so wholesomely, to the devious coverts of spiritual dismay which await him in the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a parlous affair. Yet the present publication of a notable edition of Rossetti's poems,1 illustrated from his own designs, forces an issue which even a peace-loving man like Bibliophilus cannot dare to shirk. Let us follow him as, pulling the bolt upon his books, he grasps a stout staff, — which may be useful,—and fares to his adventure.

In nearly all of its mechanical and editorial details this edition is admirable. The page is tall and noble-seeming, the paintings excellently reproduced, and the binding in commendable taste. Miss Cary has done her work well. One wishes that more of Rossetti's paintings might have been offered, and that some of those given us might have been disposed in a little easier contiguity to the poems they carnify. The propriety of printing introductory notes continuously with the poetical text and in the same type is questionable; but the notes themselves are more than commonly intelligent and sensible. All in all, by virtue of the presentation of both poems and pictures, the chronological arrangement of them together with many earlier versions, and the judicious statement of significant biographical details, this is the best edition that we know of, to be studied by a person wishing to get at the actual Rossetti. It is, precisely, this Actual Rossetti that will engage Bibliophilus and his stout staff.

For our final impression of the book is that it contains the mongrel art of a man whom a mixed ancestry had deprived of 1 The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with illustrations from his own designs. Edited by

the deep-rooted imaginative energy of racial integrity, at the same time that it endowed him with the wistful, brief fecundity which so often appears in the hybrid. In Rossetti's work, poetry and painting were strangely interfused, and in this arrangement of it the pictorial quality of his writing is strikingly manifest, and the relation of the quality of his art to the quality of his mind becomes clear. Despite Miss Cary's and other evidence of his bursts of epistolary animation, we do not get over the notion that he was a moody, preoccupied man. Through this very preoccupation his passionate dream of the world became deeply colored and rich in beautiful detail. The depth of coloring and beauty of detail appear equally in his pictures and in his poems. But in his pictures these qualities are adapted to the development of a composed theme, while in his poems save in sonnets where structure is given in the form, and in a few tales like the King's Tragedy where it is given in the subject we have only a series of picturesque moments of arrested expression, slackly joined by an under-running mood. The crystallizing heat of the true poetic fire is not there. We hear his sad music with its ravishing division; we are subjected to the witchery of a spell as seducing as Lady Lilith's; yet, with all its glamour, no poetry of this sort, so devoid of initial poetic energy, has ever proved more than a beautiful, short-lived hybrid.

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The reader of this new edition will not see in its queer interfusion of poetry and painting any conscious and premeditated Anderstreben, or Wagnerian striving after the effect of mingled arts; rather he will see a mind in which the visualizing faculty of the painter and the sentimentalizing faculty of the poet are inextricably tangled in a mystical and unhealthy temperament; in which neither is of sufficient independent vigor to be applied quite independently. As the ELISABETH LUTHER CARY. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1903.

result of this he will find a dispropor- have startled the recluse of Woodbridge tionate amount of imagery in the could he in his retired and unlaborious days have foreseen such a monument erected from the materials of his daily literary diversions. One who, already knowing his FitzGerald well, is lured by the dignified page and artfully contrived temperament of the set into a thorough re-reading, so to taste again and re-measure his joy in the Actual Books, will be not so much startled as more deeply delighted and impressed.

poems, and an equally disproportionate amount of sentiment in the pictures. Where the poem and the picture are closely linked together the effect is startling and phantasmagoric; and this will be the interesting and characteristic, if not the attractive thing about Rossetti to the men of the more classically minded age which is likely to succeed our own. To romantic sensibilities easily touched by the wistfulness of beauty, or to shadowy souls who go mournfully adown the world,

"Ripae ulterioris amore,"

the appeal of the Blessed Damozel is the same whether she be painted in words or in pigments. The malign light, as of another world than ours of the sun, in which Beata Beatrix sits ugly, unwholesome, and forlorn is the same that baffles and distorts our vision in the House of Life, -the same that Dr. Johnson in his Elysian conversation with Mr. William Watson reprobated so severely.

V.

"The faces of the Madonnas are beyond the discomposure of passion, and their very draperies betoken an Elysian atmosphere where wind never blew." So wrote Edward FitzGerald in one of his casual, imperishable letters; and how good it is to come up out of the dim and troubled places, whither our pursuit of Bibliophilus has led us, into the upper air, the calm and quietude of high art, there to hear one discoursing of great things simply, in a style as pure and living as ever mirrored the mind of a man of genius :

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Beginning with the four volumes of the letters, it is pleasant to notice that the letters to Fanny Kemble have been disposed in their proper chronological places, thus giving to the collection something of the completeness and continuity of autobiography, and compensating in a measure for Mr. Wright's extreme reticence in the matter of biographical annotation. Of the irresistible personal charm of the letters it is as needless to speak here, as it is impertinent to discourse at large of the reality of learning, the precision and intensity of taste, the lively humanity, which everywhere inform them. It is enough to say that they are of the priceless Actual Books of the world.

When one comes to the volumes of the translations of Æschylus and Sophocles and Calderon he is newly filled with admiration for the mingled unction and grandeur of an English dramatic style, which in its harmonious union of racy, homespun speech with poetic phrases that go like arrows to the gold is nearer to the inapproachable Shakespearean style than that of any other dramatic writer in English for a hundred years. Nor will he complete the reading without an admiration still more profound for the intellectual force that would convey into English both the pathos and the ethos of alien drama, so fully and firmly, and with so little loss. It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of such work. For all the long list of admirable translations that have appeared in our tongue

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It is a fair question whether, from the suffrage of the centuries, these free dramatic translations may not appear to be a service to English literature greater than the perfectly phrased and musical rendering of the blasphemous Persian Horace, greater than the faultless Euphranor, with its exquisitely drawn picture of young English manhood, greater, even, than the incomparable letters. At any rate, these two volumes, with their dozen of plays, serve to put FitzGerald quite out of that polite company of literary idlers to which he is so often relegated. Despite his modest disclaiming, they give evidence of a scholarship beside which slovenly and ill-assimilated learning is seen for what it is, and of a vital imaginative realization which could only have been attained by the strictest and most searching thought in a mind of unusual native power. Furthermore, it is a good subject for psychological inquiry by some earnest young man, whether there is not actually as much volitional energy - as much overcoming of organic inhibitions - involved in translating a difficult play from Greek or Spanish as in taking a city.

The character of Old Fitz emerges from this monumental collection of his classic "scribblings " less eccentric, more human, more melancholy than he has sometimes seemed to essayists and bio

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graphers who have not been forgetful of the popular appeal of lettered eccentricity. We know him for a sturdy sentimentalist, who could ignore Rossetti and rail at Mrs. Browning, yet weep over Sophocles, Virgil, and Crabbe. If he was "eccentric" it was largely because he preferred a breezy human talk with the captain of his schooner to being bored in a parlor; the first-rate in literature to the third-rate; God's country to man's town.

As we by aid of the letters share his mood from his ardent, friendly youth down to his serene and solitary old age, we notice how tenaciously he held to the old friends and the old books; how, as death and inevitable estrangement did their mortal work, he more and more found in these old books support against the failing and angustation of his life.

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The Contem

of Letters Series.

THE editor of the Contemporary Men of Letters Series announces porary Men that its purpose is to provide brief but comprehensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers and of those who, though dead, may still properly be regarded as belonging to our time. European as well as English and American men of letters are to be included, so as to give a survey of the intellectual and artistic life of a cosmopolitan age. It is too soon to hazard a guess whether this new venture will seriously dispute the territory now occupied by the well-known English and American Men of Letters Series. Externally, as compared with them, the new volumes are evidently to be much more brief, containing scarcely more than twenty to twenty-five thousand words. Their typography is unusually attractive.

The critical work of the authors of the first two volumes issued is already familiar to readers of the Atlantic. Mr. Boynton's easy command of the resources of sound objective criticism is seen to good advantage in his study of Bret Harte. Independence of attitude, clarity and precision of treatment characterize it throughout. The skillful, if somewhat over-generous use of illustrative quotations supports his position, and as an assessment of the value of Bret Harte's stories, Mr. Boynton's book leaves little for the Judgment Day to complete. For it is doubtless true, as Mr. Boynton remarks, that Bret Harte's talent was not quite of the first kind, and that "he had one brilliant vision and spent the rest of his life in reminding himself of it." One cannot quarrel with the essential justice of this estimate. But in sketching Bret Harte's personality, Mr. Boynton's right eous and almost petulant resentment of the elder author's idleness, extravagance, and irregularity seems to blind him, mo

1 Contemporary Men of Letters Series. Edited by WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY.

Bret Harte. By HENRY W. BOYNTON. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.

mentarily, to other traits that also belong in the picture. Less truth would have been somehow more true. Hazlitt had a friend who bound Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and Paine's Rights of Man into one volume, claiming that together they made a very good book. If by some lucky accident Mr. Howells's delightful reminiscences of Bret Harte in the December Harper's could be bound up with Mr. Boynton's study, we should have an excellent composite portrait of the author of Dickens in Camp and the Outcasts of Poker Flat.

Compared with Mr. Boynton's cool expertness in walking around his object and making swift sketches of it, Mr. Greenslet's book on Walter Pater represents criticism of the "laborious orient ivory" order of workmanship. It is wrought with true inwardness, consummate refinement, a happy ingenuity, and the merest touch, here and there, of preciosity. Like Pater's own writing, it is intended for the judicious and attentive reader, for "modern young men of an uncommercial turn." The little book invites and rewards the very closest scrutiny. If in certain passages there are traces of a preference for the "humanistic" rather than the human, and for the superfine rather than the fine, these are faults which in our day of dictated composition and of blurred sense for literary values may almost pass for virtues. The third and fifth chapters, devoted to Criticism of Art and Letters and The New Cyrenaicism, contain especially valuable contributions to the intelligent study of Pater. Mr. Greenslet does not lack audacity, as witness his clever defense of his paradox that Pater is essentially a humorous writer. Of his many felicitous passages this description of the "African" quality of Pater's prose must serve as a single example :

Walter Pater. By FERRIS GREENSLET. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.

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