Morning in Virginia and Mr. Inness's Medfield landscape - could have been painted nowhere else but in America. The rest are mythological, Bavarian, Egyptian, Breton, and Heaven knows what. M. Tardieu's tone is patronizing, and a little insolent, as he had the right to make it upon this showing; and we cannot complain of it when he "roughs" Mr. J. McL. Hamilton, who has profited by his voluntary exile to paint the indecent doze of an improper Parisian, with her parrot, and her champagne, and her Journal pour Rire, and her stocking; as Tardieu suggests, that sort of thing might have been studied in Philadelphia. But where M. Tardien is clearly wrong is in his treatment of Mr. Vedder, or rather, L'Art itself is wrong. This journal, as we learn from Mr. Vedder's protest, especially requested him to furnish designs for engravings from his Cumaan Sibyl and his Young Marsyas, and these are made the occasion by M. Tardieu to reproach him with a "misdirected classicism," of which "his education is not thorough enough to enable him to assimilate the tradition," while his "native originality is not strong enough to renew it." M. Tardieu goes on out of his way to insinuate that whatever pleasure the illustrations may give is attributable not to the painter, but to the engraver. L'Art had the right to express an unfriendly opinion of Mr. Vedder with any severity, but it had no right to ask him to prepare its text. The whole performance is what we untutored outlaws of the Western World, whose manners Mr. Harte has painted, would call shabby. L'Art has, by way of compensation, an excellent letter on artistic matters in the United States, treating largely of the New York Metropolitan Museum and the Cincinnati Women's Art Association. It has of course, also, the usual array of articles, agreeably written and wonderfully illus trated, on the artistic interests everywhere. One of these, especially rich, is on Contemporary Ceramics of the Exposition; another is the second paper on the Grosvenor Gallery; another, in several parts, on the Prado Museum at Madrid; others on Dutch, Swiss, Greek, and Russian art at the Exposition; another, curiously interesting and extremely valuable for the finely etched portrait, on the Mary Tudor (bloody Mary) of Antonio Moro at Madrid; another on Japanese Art at the Exposition; another

The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By

on Belgian Art there, with a delicious etching of Les Visiteuses of Alfred Stevens, and a wood-engraving of his extraordinary Sphinx Parisien, -"angel or demon, girl or wife, one knows not," but an inscrutable marvel of cunning, audacious, self-sufficing, mysterious vapidity, alluring, repelling, altogether discomforting and discomfiting. A young face, with two fingers of the left hand at the corner of the small mouth, short nose, wide-open eyes, and hair en caniche stares at you from the convolutions of a fur boa; it is, as we said, extraordinary, and the most notable thing in this volume of L'Art.

- Miss Young, in her Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain has done a man's work in the modern woman's fashion. Recent experience of woman's work in this and in kindred fields of the practice and observation of art has already furnished us with such a high standard of performance that the sex can no longer be sheltered by la politesse from the rigors of criticism. In the republic of letters and art she claims and is held to a man's responsibility. This especial department she is certainly qualified to occupy with peculiar fitness and grace, and Miss Young's work on The Ceramic Art goes far to realize the just demand and expectation of the critic.

The main point of originality and interest in this volume resides in the fact that the subject is viewed from an American point of observation; and although we have no right to expect and do not find in the book any new discoveries in the general history of the art, yet the new stand-point seems to offer certain advantages in fresh groupings of familiar facts, and in presenting in the foreground a view, by no means so familiar but in every way interesting and instructive, of our own national achievements and prospects in the art, and their relations to its various developments in other countries. To many readers it will be a surprise that we have, as a people, gained a position in the manufacture of faïence and porcelain worthy to occupy so much space in a general history. Our position, it is true, is one rather of promise than of performance, and our wares cannot of course compete as yet with the higher class of productions from the best workshops of Europe; but in the better class of common household table service we are already producing work so JENNIE J. YOUNG. With 464 Illustrations. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1878.

excellent that a Staffordshire manufacturer, quoted by an English arbitrator at our Exposition, has said: "The boast of the Americans is no empty boast, that in ten years, at the rate they are going on, they will supersede British crockery in the United States." Indeed, the statistics show that the importation of Staffordshire ware has almost entirely ceased, the market being fully occu pied, according to English testimony, by American goods superior to the corresponding class produced in England, and at a much lower price. (Speech of Mr. McKinley, of Ohio, in the house of representatives, in the debate on the tariff in 1878.) Miss Young is more modest in her expression than this authority, but her vigilance has gathered sufficient evidence to indicate not only that the manufacture of faïence as a commercial commodity is already an important interest in our industrial arts, but that, in the higher grades of faïence and porcelain, such as that produced at the Greenpoint works in New York, at Bennington, Vt., at Trenton, N. J., at Jersey City, and at Chelsea, Mass., the artistic work may sometimes challenge comparison with the corresponding productions of the Old World. Painting over glaze is of course recognized as a common elegant accomplishment, and the more difficult technical work of decorating under glaze is carried on with a promise of success which may in time give characteristic expression to our artistic capacity as a nation. The illustrative wood-cuts of the American manufactures confirm our own observation that, although the work is full of promise, absolute excellence is phenomenal. Our higher efforts at design in this as in other arts is still distinguished by an absence of reserved power; by a want of that natural elegance which is the result of traditions loyally developed through a long series of experiments; by a hardihood of invention and an eagerness for originality which, unrestrained by the training of schools, has expression in a certain crudity and baldness, not to say vulgarity, which are the distinguishing marks of all our really vernacular arts. But surely this awkwardness is the awkwardness of undeveloped strength. We can wait.

But Miss Young carries us back from the porcelain of Greenpoint to the prehistoric pottery of the Mississippi mound-builders;

1 English Men of Letters. Edited by JOHN MORLEY. [Samuel Johnson. By LESLIE STEPHENS. Sir Walter Scott. By RICHARD H. HUTTON. Edward Gibbon. By JAMES C. MORRISON. Percy Bysshe VOL. XLIII. NO. 258.

35

from the elegant modern productions of Haviland and Copeland, Limoges and Lambeth, to the vases in the tombs of Curium and the sun-dried bricks of Egypt. The scheme of her book includes four main divisions, devoted successively to nomenclature and methods of manufacture, and to Oriental, European, and American ceramics. The first division is very full and instructive, and shows, if not a practical familiarity with the complicated processes of mixing and firing in the various wares, at least a very vigorous inquiry on her part among the best authorities in literature and practice.

As for the historical parts, our author displays a fruitful industry in her investigations, but she by no means blindly follows even such accepted authorities as Jacquemart or Brougniart; her deductions are frequently original and ingenious, and her narrative is always bright and interesting. Of the four hundred and sixty-four illustrations the greater part is gathered from accessible American collections, and as a general rule, represents the types and not the exceptions of the art.

It is a distinctive merit of Miss Young's book that the relations of the art to the people who practiced it are set forth with a vigor of research and an independence of judgment which are by no means common in works of this class. When one undertakes this subject who is not skilled in the art of combining facts and rejecting nonessentials, the excessive detail to which he is invited is apt to obliterate the impression of the preceding parts, and to produce a result of confusion. But Miss Young's book furnishes attractive and remunerative reading even to those whose tastes are not hospitable to pots and crockery, and may well be set down in reading courses as a valuable supplement to general ethnological and even political histories; for she rarely loses sight of the essential points of her subject, and rarely suffers herself to be led astray by technical digressions, which, though perhaps a necessary knowledge to the special student, are a fatigue and stumbling-block to the general reader.

The

ley, Goldsmith, and Hume, has in preparation by various hands the lives of Spenser, Bunyan, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, Swift, Burns, Byron, and De Foe. names of the biographers are hardly so interesting, though they include those of Messrs. Froude, Huxley, William Black, Thomas Hughes, and Goldwin Smith; but there is warrant in them, and in the manner in which the work already done is done, that a well-conceived enterprise will be well carried out. The volumes published are none of them brilliant, but they are of a good, honest, careful workmanship, such as the present processes of British literary manufacture nearly always turn out. They range in quality from Mr. Stephens's Johnson to Mr. Symonds's Shelley. The writers have not gone to original sources; they have necessarily used the material of former biographers; to the student of literature they bring no news, and they divine little that was not known of character already. But they speak with information, with just observation, and with sense, and they speak agreeably.

Mr. Black, in his pleasant monograph on Goldsmith, takes generally the ground opposite to that heretofore assumed by the poet's biographers, especially, his most voluminous and disagreeable biographer, the late Mr. John Forster. This writer, a mind of coarse fibre and of thumb-fingered per ceptions, perpetually beats himself into a passion of pity and indignation for sufferings which were at least as largely attributable to Goldsmith's unfortunate temperament as to his unfortunate circumstances, and Mr. Black's attitude is the natural revolt which the general reader makes from Mr. Forster's tedious commiseration. Indeed, Mr. Forster is himself from time to time wearied by it, and cautions people not to let his excited sympathy impose upon them; but mostly he promotes the mistake that Goldsmith was an ill-used man. He certainly lived in a time when the trade of letters was at its most unprosperous, but seldom has a man been so much and so often befriended. "Was poet ever so trusted before?" asks Johnson, referring to the two thousand pounds which Goldsmith died owing; and he says elsewhere," He had raised money and squandered it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense." That is the truth; and if he was not the less a genius, and not the less a most lovable man,

1 Poems of House and Home. By J. J PIATT Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co. 1879

for his waste, he was certainly none the more so for it. He is forever dear to us for the breath of simple and humble love of home which he breathed into English poetry, and he was doubtless better than many a man who did not game, or cheat his tailor, or live loosely; still, for the great mass of mankind, it is better to be honest and chaste, and it would have been better for Goldsmith to have been so. Mr. Black's analysis of his character is good and clear without being profound, and his criticism of his literature is apt and clever without being at any time subtile, without giving the last touch of satisfaction. His book is like the other books of this series in being of a slight impressiveness while being very good. So far, they have treated of men so well known otherwise that it is quite impossible to say whether the books alone would make them intelligible. They are pleasant recapitulations, for the most part, of what has been already thought and said.

- In his new volume 1 Mr. Piatt has rearranged a good many poems already familiar to his readers, with others of like mood now collected for the first time. They are all poems that treat of the things of home in his characteristic way, and one cannot read them without feeling the charm of a rare and tender spirit, a sympathy which never dissolves in sentimentality, and a simplicity infinitely removed from commonness. They have to do with interests rather than incidents, with impressions, experiences, regrets, fancies; they are lyrics, not ballads. It is a book to be read by winter fires and under summer trees; but it will not yield its sweetness to the reader who comes to it impatiently. You must be yourself fond of the gentle and inartificial aspects of life, before you can enjoy it. As we have before expressed, it breathes the perpetual homesickness of a new land; it is Western in nothing so much as its tinge of melan choly.

Among the pieces not included in the Poems of House and Home is the fine and stately Ode written for the opening of the Cincinnati Music Hall, which, if here and there a little too closely wrought for public recitation, is all the better for the private perusal of such as can read twice.

- Mrs. Celia Thaxter's elegant little volume, modestly self-styled Drift-Weed, is really not weedy in the least. It is much more like a collection of shells from one of

2 Drift-Weed. A Collection of Poems. By CELIA THAXTER Boston Houghton, Osgood & Co. 1879

our Northern beaches, delicate in tint, simple and symmetrical in form, minute and light, exceedingly, and it must be confessed remarkably, like one to another. But a chain of sea-shells is always a pretty thing, and in certain of these one may catch, by intent listening, fragments of the murmur of the great deep.

-There is to us a peculiarly agreeable flavor in Mr. Winter's little book about England, the tone of a fine, gentle, and somewhat pensive mind. Mr. Winter's reminiscences of England are almost wholly confined to London, where he visits the objects which all tourists visit; when he goes out of London it is to go to Warwick and Kenilworth, and to Stratford-on-Avon; he has also a glimpse of France. What always breathes from his page is a loyal and manly love of English places, English manners, and English men. He belongs to the tradition of Irving, who took England and its inhabitants both to his heart; whereas most of us are agreed with Hawthorne that England would be very well but for the English people in it. But no one can help sympathizing with Mr. Winter's mood, nor help listening with interest to whatever he says of the haunts dear to history and biography and romance. His attitude is studiously unambitious and serious; there are no tiresome attempts at making fun; the literature of the little book is as sweet and pure as its spirit is sincere. You may be sure that the writer attributes nothing to himself that he does not feel, and there is such evident honesty in all his opinions that if he likes to call the righteous execution of Charles the First a "murder," we, for our part, like to have him do it.

-The edition of Macaulay's England1 which Messrs. Harper and Brothers publish in five volumes hardly affords occasion for comment on a work whose place is so securely fixed, and whose qualities are so well known. But the fit shape and aspect of the edition is to be praised: the volumes are of a handsome octavo; the type is very clear, and the paper is of a singularly agreeable tint and texture; the cloth of the binding is a decent black. The first volume has a forcible engraved portrait of Macaulay after a photograph by Claudit,—the clear, firm face of a man who has produced more good reading of a good kind than perhaps any other of our century.

1 The Trip to England. By WILLIAM WINTER. Boston: Lee and Shepard. 1879.

2 The History of England, from the Accession of

3

-In four discourses upon Socialism in General, Communistic, Anti-Communistic, and Christian Socialism, the author sketches some of the changes in social conditions produced by modern civilization, touching upon the employment of machinery, the extension of commerce, the creation of new wants, the transfer of most of the land to a few owners, and the increase of pauperism.

He thinks that the average European peasant was better off, relatively, in the fourteenth century than his successor in our own time; that is, his work would obtain more food then than now. Our civilization, though nominally Christian, is distinctively materialistic. The inequality in the distribution of wealth cannot be wholly justified, but as civilization advances the distance between the upper and lower classes becomes greater, and this inequality of conditions the author regards as permanent and inevitable, as most of its causes are permanent. Philanthropy concerns itself about the whole nature and destiny of man for time and eternity; socialism deals with the environment, and ends with time. It dreams of regenerating society without regenerating the individual, or insists upon beginning with society. This is its failure. The result of communistic socialism would be equality of social conditions enforced and reënforced from generation to generation, and this would lead to anarchy, the destruction of art, religion, morality, and civilization, and the prevalence of unmitigated animalism.

The author's conclusion is that labor "must for the most part look out for itself." He does not approve the organization of a labor party in politics, nor of any action on the part of the government for the relief of labor difficulties, except the establishment of a bureau to collect and tabulate statistics. He advises that job work be substituted for time work wherever it can possibly be done; thinks the study of political economy is of great importance to theological students, and that the entire problem of Christian charity needs to be thoroughly overhauled; and believes that we may hope for Christians enough by and by to make the commerce of the world more sane and sober. That Christianity

will hold its own I do not for a moment doubt. Always it has been the best thing James the Second. By LORD MACAULAY. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1879.

& Socialism. By ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D. D. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Co. 1879.

The discourses are highly rhetorical, and there is much historical and literary allusion, but there is a lack of vigorous reflection. The book may be regarded as a tolerable introduction to the subject of socialism, but the discussion is painfully inadequate. The confidence that our farmers can be trusted, and that no communistic engineering can barricade a prairie, is a queer basis for optimism. This is much as if the Yellow Fever Commission should triumphantly report that New Orleans is not in danger of ruin by volcanic eruptions. What is needed, if there is anything grave in our social conditions, is not a new eulogy of Christianity, but patient and resolute analysis of the phenomena of our civilization, and the suggestion of methods for the application of remedial or improving influences. It is not a time for eloquence, but for thought.

This volume, which contains an exact account of the grounds and buildings of the Centennial Exhibition, will be of more interest, possibly, a hundred years hence, when our descendants will quote from this list of measurements the petty dimensions of the buildings we thought so grand only three years ago. Meanwhile, a complete description is good, and there is no doubt that the statistics in this volume are accurate. The engravings, however, are not so satisfactory, although they are exact enough. This is a book that will be more sought for by public than by private libraries.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.

It is late in the day to say anything about Cherbuliez's L'Idée de Jean Têterol,2 for those who have not read the book in French have done the next best thing and read it in English, and congratulations on the excellence of the novel come in after the feast is long since devoured. It shares with many other of Cherbuliez's stories the merit of being of his best, and that best is very good, for there is no novelist with a clearer vision of what he undertakes to describe, and a greater power of representing things clearly, than this author. To speak of his wit is to talk platitudes; his invention is always

1 Grounds and Buildings of the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876. Edited by DORSEY GARDNER, Assistant Secretary United States Centennial Commission. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.

novel without any such lapse of taste as mars some of his stories, in which in his effort to be touching he becomes melodramatic, as in his Ladislas Bolski and La Revanche de Joseph Noirel. Fallible man must fail somewhere, and Cherbuliez delights his readers, but it is by his appeal to their intelligence; he never touches the heart, except possibly in Paule Méré. Fortunately, however, there are different kinds of good novels, and Cherbuliez stands at the head of the writers of his kind.

The plot of this story is as simple as possible; it is the account of the way in which the man who has become rich tries to revenge himself on his former master. The hero, Jean Têterol, is the self-made man, and the drawing of his peasant nature is admirably done, as it is put into contrast with the most worldly and fascinating lack of character of the thriftless nobleman. The account of the struggle between the two men almost hides the excellence of the part about the two young people, the charming daughter of the nobleman and Têterol's accomplished, but unpriggish son. In a word, the story is as bright as possible. Cherbuliez is never dull, and here he has excelled himself. His wit is constant; every paragraph, with its epigram at the end, is a model of good writing. Those are to be envied who have yet to read this capital story.

-Louis Ulbach is by no means a writer who deserves to be compared with Cherbuliez, but some of his stories are well worth reading. A recent one of his, Simple Amour 3 by name, is almost charming. It is the sequel of another novel, but there is not required for the enjoyment of it any more knowledge of its predecessor than is given in a few pages of the present volume. The main merit of the story is the drawing of a radical, a village tailor by trade, and of his daughter, Marcelline, who are bound by various ties to an aristocratic family of the neighborhood. The heir of this family falls in love with Marcelline, and his youthful passion is well described, as is her conduct. There are various other persons introduced who are not the conventional people of the French novel, and about the whole story there is a pleasing air of novelty, which in too great a quantity might

2 L'Idée de Jean Têterol. Par VICTOR CHERBULIEZ. Paris: Hachette. 1878.

3 Simple Amour. Par LOUIS ULBACH. Paris: C. Levy. 1878.