The book itself is, as Holmes once wrote, " a very heavy quarto," bulky and fatiguing to hold, but handsome and legible in type, liberally and relevantly illustrated, and has a bibliography, together with an ample and excellent index.

Howard M. Ticknor.

It would be small praise to say that The Moorish Mr. Scott's books' contain the Empire in Europe. best account in English of the rise and fall of Muhammadan dominion in southwestern Europe; for these three well-made volumes, the result of twenty years of study, will find few and poor competitors in English. This is the more remarkable when the importance of Arab empire in Spain and Sicily is properly estimated and the degree of influence exercised on Medieval Europe by Islamic civilization is adequately measured. Unfortunately, many writers have still to realize that the influence of Asia on Europe has been greater than that of Europe on Asia. Indeed, speaking in the broadest sense, the history of the world has been chiefly the history of the intercourse religious, intellectual, political, and economic between the two continents. The most interesting, perhaps the most important, period of this intercourse is marked by the rise of Islam, the double attack on Christendom by Muslim kingdoms at both ends of the Mediterranean, and the continued existence in Europe of a Muhammadan empire which, in the domain of arts and sciences, and in material civilization, was long the superior of any state in western Europe. The problems arising from the intimate contact of Latin and Semitic institutions, and the variety of matters in which Europe was debtor to the Arab, will lead the student far afield.

The whole story of that contact in

1 History of the Moorish Empire in Europe. By S. P. SCOTT. 3 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1904.

with panoramic effect; and though the method is discursive and the style at times diffuse, the results are interesting. After warning the reader that Muhammad has endured varied and for the most part unjust treatment at the hands of biographers, he concludes: "If the object of religion be the inculcation of morals, the diminution of evil, the promotion of human happiness, the expansion of the human intellect; if the performance of good works will avail in that great day when mankind shall be summoned to its final reckoning, it is neither irreverent nor unreasonable to admit that Muhammad was indeed an Apostle of God." Side by side with such praise should be set a reiterated prejudice against Roman Christianity in the Middle Ages. Arab culture needs for its defense and praise no such contrast as is presented by an unmeasured condemnation of the whole course of European civilization from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Indeed, the desire to secure dramatic effect has in some respects impaired Mr. Scott's accuracy. For this, however, the reader is partially prepared by an examination of the elaborate but poorly arranged bibliography. Much of the best in original and secondary sources is to be noted, but surprising omissions as well as curious inclusions are apparent. Macaulay knew much, but his History of England can scarcely rank as an authority on Moorish Spain. These facts are indicative of what becomes certain as doubtful questions are examined. Matters long seriously disputed are treated with such confidence and such obliviousness to the difficulties which have taxed the ablest scholars that hesitation instinctively arises on the part of those who are asked to accept some of the author's conclusions. Yet, when all is said and done, this interesting and ardent if somewhat uncritical presentation deals with events and conditions too long neglected by

English and American students. The ultra-Teutonic tendency of many of our histories is perhaps partly responsible for this neglect. We need, in fact, to

be told more frequently that Europe has not always fronted to the Atlantic. This Mr. Scott does most successfully.

A. L. P. D.

WHAT queer variety of things we someThings times come across in books Found in Books. long undisturbed besides what the authors and the printers put there! I have just opened that delightful book, Murray on the Origin and Growth of the Psalms, and there stares me in the face a number of blue prints taken by one of my sons on the gulf-side and on the bayside of Galveston Island, — pictures that bring back many reminiscences. Lovely sea-and-cloud views some of them are, with the clumps of tamarisk in the foreground, and the beach, below the sanddunes on which these grow, stretching down to the surf. These call to mind a breeze-blown summer spent partly in that fatal Lucas Terrace, in whose ruins the storm of 1900 buried so many, and partly in a tent close beside one of those jungles of salt-cedar. Ah! those days and nights! The bay-side sketches are of Bremen steamers and Galveston wharves, and speak not so strongly to the memory.

Another book, opened at random, will reveal a leaf or flower pressed long ago, "in the time of the Barmecides," after a tramp in the woods near Oxford, Mississippi, or along the banks of the Congaree in South Carolina, or beside the Kinchatoonee in Georgia. One calls up a black sluggish stream, in the reedy thicknesses of whose margin shone forth suddenly a gemlike flower, a full reward for heated cheeks and dusty feet, helping the dense shade of the woods to bring coolness and rest to the youngest of the wanderers. Another takes us back to the fern-covered bank, to which we so

often turned our steps to search for the earliest anemones, or to gather in the tiny glen near it our richest treasure of golden lady-slippers. Still another tribute of our travels recalls the slow voyage in fairy waters on the gulf-coast of Florida and the wonderful seaweed forms fished up from a coral sea-bottom.

Take in hand that bulky volume, so seldom lifted from its shelf, and it will open of itself at the place where was thrust long ago the wedding invitation of our lively and charming friend who helped to make a Shakespeare Club in Cuthbert, Georgia, so interesting. But the puccoon flower we showed her, as the earliest transport of spring in the woods beside the mill-pond, will be found in another book, — perchance in that Browning our eldest used to pore over with such zest.

It is a bad plan to hide away precious things thus, for our old loves so often cease to draw us to their pages. Long years have passed since I opened a volume of my once beloved Noctes Ambrosianæ. Shall I try the experiment now? Henry Rogers in the Eclipse of Faith mentions the curious circumstance of a large sum of money in bank bills being found in a family Bible where they had been hidden under the conviction that that book would be unlikely ever to be opened by any one but the secret depositor. Let me not be so fond as to imagine treasure in these lucubrations of Kit North. North. There will be no twenty-dollar bill found there, I warrant you never was there one of us so insensate as to slip

a

Is it my Greek books you are looking at? It is ages since I have touched them. Scholarship is out of fashion nowadays. There must come a need for a new Renaissance before Hellenic studies will come into vogue again. But do you imagine that anything striking will be found in these? Let me turn the pages of this Antigone and try a new kind of "Sortes Vergilianæ." Sure enough! there is a flutter of falling paper, cutting from an old Times-Democrat, I opine. It is one of the most imaginative of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston's lyrics. My daughter must have put it there, besides recording the verses in her memory, for I have heard her repeat them often. But why put them into the Antigone? It was the nearest book at hand, no doubt, and it was the merest chance that laid our poet's pretty fancies side by side with the tragic lines of Sophocles.

As yet I have said nothing of the marginal notes, the multitudinous scribblings, which now disfigure and now illuminate books. Who is not familiar with them? And with what different emotions do we come upon the different sorts!

When they are the notes of scholars, we welcome them as noteworthy, possibly precious commentaries on the text. I well remember a fine copy of Horace, once in my possession, which had belonged to that eminent scholar and essayist, Hugh Swinton Legaré, and was thickly strewn with notes in his handwriting. Alas, it is now no more, having perished in that Galveston storm already mentioned. I had given it to an appreciative scholar, whose life went out with the downfall of Lucas Terrace ; and all his possessions were buried under its ruins.

But, when the inscriptions on margin or blank page of the book you have in hand are the merest rubbish, the silly outpourings of a fool's too ample leisure, you fume with unuttered execrations on his memory, or laugh loudly at his idiocy, as the mood of the moment may move you.

I have an old French Bible, printed at Basle in 1760, which has some interesting matter inscribed on the blank pages of front and back. One of these inscriptions runs thus, I give the spelling of the original,

"Cette petite Bible est à moi Jean Bert Si je la viens a perdre Celui qui la Trouvera qui aije la bonté de me la Rendre je lui donneray une Raisonable Trouvieré [evidently a provincial word signifying 'finder's reward,' perhaps originally trouveuré] car c'est un Livre pour me conssoller et pour m'aprandre à quiter le vice et m'atacher à la vertú Cesser de mal faire apprandre à bien faire fuir le mal et m atacher au bien quiter lidolatrie du monde pour m'atacher au pur Service de Dieu."

At the back of the book in another hand and in paler ink, now almost illegible, are rhymed verses that constitute a confession of faith, the first line being:"J'abjure de bon coeur le Pape et son Empire," showing the writer to have been as sound a Huguenot as Jean Bert, the first owner of the book.

Sometimes one has surprises. In the textbook of one of my students I once hit upon a capital caricature of myself.

A BRILLIANT Irishman of Boston says Educated that New Yorkers accuse him Mispronun

ciations. of speaking with an "educated mispronunciation." The phrase characterizes excellently a kind of error of speech which is different from vulgar error in that it is proud of itself: vulgar error does not recognize itself as error, and when it does arrive at self-consciousness it is heartily ashamed.

No one objects to the mistakes of an

educated person; they do much to make him human. Often, too, the cultivated person wears his mistakes with a kind of distinction, just as a well-bred body carries with grace an ill-fitting garment. But most odious is the cultivated error that sets itself up — in print — as criterion for the mob. What intellectual snobbery! What narrow provincial urbanity! Some months ago I read a paper in one of the magazines by a cultivated English lady on what she called, with irritating assumption, "the trick of education." Her underlying thought was that between two forms equally correct, the educated person chooses the better. That is an old and obvious idea which I have read in about fifteen textbooks on rhetoric. And because it is old and obvious and still remembered, it is a good idea. My regards to the lady for her nice plea for fine distinctions! But, alas, she falls into the pitfall which was digged, by what Thomas Hardy would call the Spirit of Irony, for the aloof and highstepping few. Why should she crystallize as correct and preferable downright blunders, of which her particular social class happens to be uniformly guilty?

With easy assurance she informs us that "girl" does not rhyme with "whirl" and "pearl" and "curl." She is a poet, and she ought to know better. But no, she expects us to give up our beautiful lyric about the little girl who did not dress her hair in pompadour. How, then, are we to pronounce "girl"? Listen! "He who says 'girl' to rhyme with 'pearl' has less the trick of education than he who says 'girl' with the vowel of

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'care.' "The trick of education seems indeed to be fond of this vowel - the vowel of 'care' and 'girl.'" It must be a low-down trick. The vowel of "girl" and "care," a long " a," is pronounced like the long "o" in "teeth," and only a few English people can get it. A little more education (say, in a good university) and a little less "trick of education" would tell this lady that the "ir"

in "whirl" and the "ir" in "girl" are the same. A better ear for language, and some study of the physiology of phonetics, would show her that as a plain physical fact of vocal utterance the weak vowels become identical before "r." "R" is a sort of cotton fibre sound which muffles distinctions. Assertion for assertion, by the facts of phonetics, by the ineluctable physics of sound, "girl" must rhyme with "whirl and "pearl" and "curl." And so it does in all the poets. If there is a possible better pronunciation of "girl," it is that which I have heard from the strong throats of Scotsmen, who say the word exactly as it is spelled, "girl." It is difficult to manage; you begin as if you were to speak of the gill of a fish, and then stuff in between the "i" and the "1" a good hoarse “r.” This pronunciation is historical; it will show you how to pronounce the word "girles" in Chaucer. But here, again, though we have a more reasonable" preference," the natural physiology of sound forbids.

The same lady prefers " inexplicable," "indissoluble," "inacceptable," to “inexplicable," "indissoluble," and "unacceptable."

In the first two cases she is

right, except that it is not a question of preference. The only correct pronunciation is "inexplicable" and "indissoluble." In the third case she is embalming two errors. In the first place, the word "inacceptable" does not exist; she means "unacceptable." In the second place, it is accented only on the antepenult, and no other accentuation is correct. So she is preferring something which is quite wrong.

One

Cultivated people are delightful when they mispronounce; they give humbler · folk a comforting sense of equality. When, however, persons of culture insist on their errors, they are irritating. of the best readers and speakers I know prides himself on saying "middiff" for "midwife." He fancies that the least usual thing is the best, and he is beauti