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national emulations. Nor because, at times, we are somewhat tartly reminded by Europeans that we had better work on our own ground instead of pottering in their footsteps. Their criticism may or may not be worth considering. But because few, if any Europeans, are working systematically at American archæology; the field is comparatively unoccupied; and because a race of the grade we will call partly civilized (for need of a term more accurate), like the Indians of Mexico and Peru, leave behind them as a rule memorials that are extremely perishable, whether from the rudeness of their art, or the peculiar traits of the climate under which they are found.

Arguments or suggestions similar to this must have been brought to bear on the committee, for in their recent report the need of setting vigorously to work on this continent is fully stated. It is great satisfaction to read: "The work is anything but one of barren antiquarianism. We are dealing, it is true, with savage and barbarous tribes, and aggregations of tribes, who have done nothing for the higher progress of mankind; but the questions involved are as broad and far-reaching as any in the whole field of inquiry

concerning man. "The vast work of American archæology and anthropology is only begun." One may pardon the continued insinuation about the "higher progress of mankind" for the pleasure of seeing the right spirit appear. Other archæology need not be neglected, but American work should absorb the chief powers of the Institute.

We are surprised to find that less than two hundred members were reported at the third meeting of the Institute. The annual dues are only $10.00, but in America it would seem to be easier to obtain large sums from rich men to put up separate college-buildings, or to carry on separate charitable or other institutions, than to obtain numerous annual subscribers in help of a purely scientific object,—men who will be content, as their reward, to enjoy the interesting special publications of a society, and the consciousness that they are helping on a good cause. It is different in the older countries, and as culture is extended in America this sort of subscription will become more common. Meantime, we hope to see the membership of the American Archæological Institute doubled before the next annual report.

Sanborn's "Thoreau."*

LITERATURE.

Mr. Sanborn's "Life of Thoreau" will be a disappointment to those who expected a business-like and straightforward biography. He seems to have felt called upon to write the story of Thoreau's environment rather than of his life. Village anecdotes and the genealogies of Barretts, Ripleys, and other families of embattled farmers and parsons, fill half the volume. The book is readable and will have a personal interest for the frequenters of the Concord summer school of philosophy, and for others who have enjoyed the charming society of the transcendental Mecca,-intellectual without stiffness, and simple, yet not provincial. But it is to be feared that readers who have no associations with the town will find the author's pleasant gossip somewhat irrelevant. Three men of genius have illustrated the annals of Concord, and it is as the home of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau that the town is interesting. But a thorough-going Concordian always finds it hard to understand that the world is not equally interested in every other person and thing connected with the sacred soil.

Emerson's little sketch of Thoreau, introducing the latter's "Excursions," remains still the best interpretation of his life and genius, outside his own writings. Of the two other lives that have been written, that by "H. A. Page," a British writer, is mainly a rescript from Thoreau's books, and is stupidly mistaken in its critical positions; while Mr. Ellery Channing's is a study rather than a life, and is, moreover, so disfigured by affectations that it can hardly be read without pro*Henry D. Thoreau. By F. B. Sanborn. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (American Men of Letters Series.)

fanity. Mr. Sanborn's book is unlike these, in being at once appreciative and sober. But the slenderness of its material suggests a doubt whether his subject's outward life was eventful enough to support a regular biography. A man who stayed at home, who never married, who shunned the society of men for that of nature and his own thoughts, and who has recorded the last quite fully in his journals and published works, leaves his biographers very little to do.

The most individual note in Thoreau was his in

humanity. He tried to free himself from man and to realize the unconscious life of nature,-to get at the heart of it. "What are the trees saying?" "Man is only the point where I stand." It is therefore a little amusing to learn from Mr. Sanborn that Emerson, with an artistic instinct for unity of impression, objected to the insertion, in the collection of Thoreau's letters printed in 1865, of passages containing " Some tokens of natural affection." A further disturbance of our ideal is this recitation of what befell in his last illness. "Once or twice he shed tears. Upon hearing a wandering musician in the street playing some tune of his childhood he might never hear again, he wept and said to his mother, 'Give him some money for me!'" Perhaps the journals which Mr. Blake means to publish will reveal still more of the tenderness underlying that "perfect piece of stoicism" which Emerson wished to exhibit. It is due to the memory of Thoreau, and creditable to Mr. Sanborn's friendship for him, to let us feel that warm side of his nature which he constantly turns away from his readers. But one can easily sympathize with Emerson's fear of by intruding upon the marring "his classic statue reserve of that fine and lofty spirit which was Thoreau.

American Archæologists in Greece.* THE third year of the Archæological Institute of America is not entirely barren of results, although the explorers working under its direction have hardly begun to realize the problems before them and to come to useful conclusions on the data gathered. A new and struggling organization, the Institute appears to be able to undertake at least two widely different tasks: the one being in the direction of early American civilizations; the other occupied with the classic land of Greece in Asia Minor. Whether it was wise to divert the energies of the Institute to directions so opposite remains to be seen. In 1880, the lamented Indian archeologist, Morgan, gave to the Institute the results of his life-long study of the architecture of the half-sedentary Indians of North America, particularly of the Six Nations, with suggestions as to the architecture of older and more sedentary tribes and gentes of Central America, Mexico, and South America. The same year Mr. J. T. Clarke, who had shown much taste for archæology in connection with the architecture of Greece, offered an interesting paper on the Troad. Mr. Bandelier took up last year the mantle of Mr. Morgan and gave the Institute some of the results of his studies of the great community houses or "towns" of New Mexico. He has pursued the same line elsewhere, and may be expected soon to offer further particulars in regard to Mexican and Yucatanese architecture. The present volume is given over entirely to the gentlemen who have been camping at the site of Assos in the Southern Troad, not far north from the island of Mytelene, and in full sight of Lesbos. The organization seems to have been unusually complete; the exceedingly interesting and well-written report is by Mr. Clarke, while Mr. W. C. Lawton furnishes historical and topographical notes on various sites and ruins in the Troad, and Mr. J. S. Diller notes the geology thereof. The appendix also contains the inscriptions found at Assos during 1881, in fac-simile, in ordinary Greek, and in translation. The most remarked sculptures unearthed, as well as a bronze inscribed tablet, are given in handsome illustration, and nothing is left to ask of the editors as regards maps, type, paper, and good taste in publishing. The profile and ground plan sketches may be noted for special praise. They put the scene before the reader in such a fashion that he is likely to understand more about the locality, the ruins, and the sculptures, than if he had visited Assos.

The chief explorer has the usual story to tell of Turkish evasions and delays, and fanaticism. With ability and clearness he describes and reconstructs the temple of Assos, noting the errors and extravagances of earlier explorers, and for the first time making accurate measurements of all the parts of which specimen stones could be found. The columns of this early model of a Doric temple had, strange to say, no " en tasis" or irregularity in the thickness of the drums, whereby the Greek architect (of the Parthenon, for instance) cheated the eye, and gained majesty and grace for his structure in the process. Moreover, though the temple shares with the recently discovered fane at Per

• Papers of the Archæological Institute of America. Classical Series 1. Report on the Investigations at Assos, 1881, by Joseph Thacher Clarke. Boston: A. Williams & Co.

VOL. XXV.-28.

gamon the unusual trait of being Doric in type, yet, surrounded by a full colonnade of columns, six in front, twelve on the sides, it did not have a symmetrical "epinaos" in the rear of the central fane proper, to balance the vestibule in front. The rear wall ran across without break for door-way and without the two columns that decorated the other or entrance end of the shrine. A mosaic pavement was found partly in place, and some very interesting friezes, in a rough and uneven style of art, were added to those already known to the world through the specimens in the Louvre. They consist of a Hercules shooting at three centaurs with human fore legs and equine quarters, a fragment of the central relief composed of sphinxes, rude figures of two men fighting, and of a man pursuing a woman, several lions, etc., etc. The restorations of an ancient Greek bridge of stone near Assos are highly valuable. Less important are Mr. Clarke's endeavors to connect the reliefs found here with the art of Assyria. Not that the theory is likely to be wrong, but that the materials are not abundant or important enough to stand the weight of the theory. Mr. Clarke cannot claim the popular interest that entirely new and unexplored ruins awaken. He is on the ground of French and English excavators, who have left him only the toilsome part of the work, the measurements and verifications, the weighing of evidence and the collation of authorities. As to this last point the book is most valuable. But in archæology the race nowadays is not to the swift. The greatest pains and the strictest probity in dealing with apparently unimportant facts are needed now, unless the excavator wishes to see his fondest theories upset, and his own fame as a man of honor impugned. In spite of the apparently meager return of this expedition, in reality, the results are, so far, excellent. Mr. Clarke has shown his fitness for such tasks, and the further work he has laid out, namely, the examination of the Roman and mediæval parts of Assos, more especially of the fortifications, will be looked for with eagerness. To architects and to those who love to examine the architectural creations of man, the work he is doing cannot easily be overpraised.

Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History.

IT is characteristic of Mrs. Oliphant, as being both a novelist and a woman, to take a personal view of literature. Her book is one to be put on the same shelf with Thackeray's “English Humorists," and we give it high praise when we say that it is not unworthy of such neighborhood. Very much what Thackeray did for the generation of Pope and Swift, she has done for the Georgian era, and with this addition, that while Thackeray dealt almost entirely with the man, she has dealt also with the author. It is true that life and character interest her primarily, but the books that issued from them receive more attention than in the lectures of the great humorist-whose estimate of some of his eighteenth century forerunners was altogether too high. Her book may be described as a biographical history of literature, if we may borrow a title from Lewes. It is something midway

*The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. By Mrs. Oliphant.

New York: Macmillan & Co. 1882.

between a systematic, objective history of literary tendencies and products, and a collection of anecdote and gossip about literary people. The defect of a literary history written from this point of view is apt to be that the writer overlooks or slights that large class of works which have little explainable connection with their author's own personalities. Mrs. Oliphant's method is quite satisfactory when applied to Cowper, Wordsworth, and Byron, who put themselves into all they wrote; but is noticeably unsatisfactory when Shelley, Keats, and Landor are under consideration. Poets often lead a double life, and their poetry must be examined independently. Landor's writing, for example is a thing quite apart from his personal career. The former is high, stately, calm as an antique marble; the latter was full of rages, extravagances, and all manner of whim and unreason.

Mrs. Oliphant has not, of course, the brilliant, satiric style of Thackeray, but her feminine penetration into the weaknesses of character, and her soft irony are almost as effective. Her portraits, if not so highly colored, are more delicately shaded. None but a woman could have written the chapter on Cowper, with its sympathy for all that was womanly in his nature, and a woman's contempt for all that was unmanly in it. This is quite a different touch from By. ron's masculine disdain of Cowper as "a coddled poet." As we read Mrs. Oliphant's keen but kindly analysis, we feel that she is of the sex which coddles and yet half resents the weakness of the coddled object. Perhaps the best that has been said about this invalid genius has been said by women; witness the famous lines of Mrs. Browning, herself an invalid.

Remembering Mrs. Oliphant's novels, we are prepared to find that the pleasantest and freshest parts of her literary history are those in which she sketches some one of those humbler schools or coteries of literati which flourish briefly in provincial cities. Of such a kind is the delightful chapter on "The Swan of Lichfield," in which are quaintly and lovingly portrayed the small pomps and affectations of a constellation of now forgotten genius, consisting of the great Dr. Darwin, Miss Anna Seward (the Swan), Arch. deacon Vyse "of Prioric talents in the metrical impromptu," Mr. Day, the author of "Sandford and Merton," "the ingenious Mr. Kerr," "the accomplished Dr. Small," and many other lettered gentlemen and ladies who lived under the shadow of the Episcopal towers, and "most of whom could make agreeable verses.'

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Mrs. Oliphant slightly overpraises the rather drab and old-maidish novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier. She is herself a scholar of that school, and in the case of Miss Ferrier her national feeling as a Scotchwoman probably comes to reenforce the similarity in sex and taste. But, on the principle that a critic is always best worth hearing when criticising what he best loves and understands, the chapter on the three lady novelists is one of the most readable in the book.

Mrs. Oliphant's critical summaries are usually good. Her taste is seldom at fault, and yet as a critic she is not original or authoritative. She seems deficient in grasp and insight. The essential character of a book or a writer often eludes her, and she dwells on the accidents of the thing,-manners, income, personal

appearance, etc. Here is a poet like Byron, for example, whose works have become a part of the intellectual consciousness of the race, and who voiced certain thoughts that came uppermost in his generation more fully and intensely than any other man. It is well, doubtless, to know that this Byron had a dread of growing fat, and that he shaved his front hair to make his forehead look high, but there is a certain triviality in insisting too much on such details. Mrs. Oliphant has a woman's distrust of "classical" literature, and she speaks repeatedly in a petulant tone of the small obligations of literature in England to the universities. À propos of a gift of "a handsome rosewood chair," sent to Miss Jane Porter from admirers in America, Mrs. Oliphant writes, not without bitterness: "In default of other acknowledgments, perhaps some of the writers of the present day would not object to similar testimonials from that great transatlantic audience which British writers are expected to minister to, like Spenser's angels, all for love and nothing for reward."" By the way, our author attributes to Cary's Dante "a lasting value which no other translation has attained." Scholarly opinion, we think, holds that there are at least two American translations better than Cary's.

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There are occasional reflections in Mrs. Oliphant's pages so acute, or so broadly true, that they put her for the moment on a higher plane of thought than that which she habitually occupies. Thus, in speaking of the reception given to the "Lyrical Ballads " she makes this really profound remark: "It happens sometimes that under the great outcry of indignation or dislike, raised by a certain work or act, there is a subtle, indescribable deposit left by its mere contact with the mind of the reader, which is the foundation of the fullest and truest fame." Have we not seen this verified in the instance of some countrymen and contemporaries? There is Emerson, for example. It is curious to read nowadays the blasphemies uttered in the "Southern Literary Messenger" and other defunct organs of literary opinion, when his first volume of poems was published. And there is Walt Whitman. The armies of the reviews have passed over his body, heavy artillery, baggage-trains, and all; yet still there is that "deposit " sticking obstinately to the minds of many who have not quite made up their opinion whether he is a great genius or a great humbug.

Nadal's "Essays at Home and Elsewhere."*

WE are always glad to get hold of an essay or book by Mr. Nadal. There is a quality about his writing that is peculiar and personal. He sometimes flattens, -says things in a surprisingly tame or vague way;— he very often fails to round out his theme in a perfectly satisfactory manner; he sometimes seems to be writing with an amusing air of patronage,— with a very decided "look from above downward." These traits in Mr. Nadal's writings irritate certain critics, particularly English critics, in an astonishing manner. One sometimes sees his work ridiculed in an English journal with an elaboration that makes one wonder at the inconsistency of the critic who can

* Essays at Home and Elsewhere. By E. S. Nadal. London and New York: Macmillan & Co.

spend so much time in fixing the status of so inferior a mind as that of the author criticised. One is inclined to ask: If the writing is so poor, why do you find it necessary, O critic, to say so many severe and bright things about it? Why don't you dismiss it with appropriate contempt? Why do you return again and again and again to the charge?

For our part, we believe that the reason the adverse reviewer pays so much attention to Mr. Nadal is that there is something vital in his writingssomething, too, that may be called even fascinating. As we have said, it has faults: notably a certain lack of restful completeness. Some of his essays seem rather to cease than to come to an end. But there are plenty of people that can give you a fully rounded opinion on various literary and social subjects, who, after all, are merely summing up what they have learned from others. But Mr. Nadal, in his slightest sketch, is sure to say something original,—something that is apt to be novel and penetrating; something that will leave a permanent impression upon the mind. Of the thirteen pieces here associated, about half were first printed in this magazine, so that our readers may be supposed to be acquainted with the flavor of the writer, as shown in such papers as the "The Old Boston Road," "Artemus Ward," "A Day or Two in Sussex," "A Trip to a Political Convention," etc., etc. From an essay, on Matthew Arnold, which appeared first elsewhere, we quote a passage which seems to us to contain a great deal of timely truth:

"It is not fair that the Philistines of the two countries should be confused. In so far as an American is a Philistine at all, his Philistinism is accidental and ignorant. He is an amiable being. You may go into his camp; he will let you play with his spear and helmet. He errs solely through ignorance, and is very teachable. Your way of thinking may be a little beyond him, perhaps, but he would not oppose you. Now, Mr. Arnold would no doubt assure us that the quality of an English Philistine is a certain angry resistance to everything which he does not comprehend. There are traces, too, that he does not understand the distinctive character of the people of this country. He does not understand that we have one. I do not believe that there is any country in the world which has a more distinct type of individual character than the United States. I know the reverse of this is the common opinion abroad. Lord Beaconsfield said that there is nothing in our manners original and indigenous. Very well, if we select the best of all other peoples and nations, perhaps we need not fret on account of our want of originality. But the common opinion abroad is not true. There is a great deal that is original in the individual American character. What is peculiar in that character does not lie upon the surface, and, I think, is too delicate for the comprehension of the foreigner. It is best understood and quickest recognized by Americans themselves. There may be nothing in his speech, nothing in his accent, manner, dress, or mien, to distinguish him, but you may quickly recognize the man whose mind has received the social education of this country."

We should like to quote many passages,-happily descriptive of natural scenery, or notable for beauty of expression, or for moral insight and bravery,—but must content ourselves with a special recommendation of the concluding chapters to all writers for the press, and a "general recommendation" of the whole book to all thoughtful persons.

Mallock's "Social Equality."

MR. MALLOCK has developed an original talent for constituting himself the champion and apologist of causes against which the tide of modern opinion sets with unmistakable strength. Were his style more enthusiastic and captivating, and were his arguments franker, one would be much readier to applaud; for the task might appear chivalrous. He might then be called an intellectual knight-errant, doing battle for the losing side on the broad ground that a fight ought to have some show of evenness on the opposing sides. But it is hardly possible to accept that view of him. He has intellectual force enough to stir one's curiosity, and perhaps stimulate one to think; and, when that is said, very great praise must be understood; for how few writers are capable of so much! There is a taint of the partisan about almost all his books, and of the partisan, moreover, who is not so much enamored of his cause as interested in it after a dilettante fashion. Yet it may be also true that Mr. Mallock represents after a somewhat willful fashion a large and still influential portion of the voters of Great Britain. Whether they recognize him or not, he speaks in his own way as a mouth-piece of the upper classes of Great Britain and Ireland, whether it be in regard to their hankerings after and coquetry with the Roman Church, or their somewhat Parisian code of morals, or their natural aversion to democracy in most of its forms. In this his last venture Mr. Mallock, while basing his arguments mainly on the ground prepared by his opponents for the time being, appears as a fighter for the great cause of caste. He ought to have on his side all the people who aspire to or believe themselves members of "society" in all the civilized nations of the world. He may concede more to the spirit of the age than most of them would allow. He may proceed on lines of argument hardly possible without accepting the ground-work patiently laid by Darwin, and may give more honor to Spencer, while seeking to criticise him, than the orthodox and respectability-preaching Englishman cares to hear. But he is nevertheless one of their fighters, and no mean dialectician withal, considering the dearth of good writing on their side of the quarrel.

Mr. Mallock wishes it known that he has come upon a truth so imperfectly touched upon by political economists that he can call it his own. It is a "missing science," and consists in the fact that human nature, not society, demands social inequality, must have it, will have it; unless it gets it, a stop will be put to the advance of civilization. The maintenance of civilization, indeed-for to stop is to retrograde-depends upon two processes: the constant development of the higher forms of labor and the constant intensification (increase in severity) of the lower. And in each case equally the cause that operates is inequality. In the first it operates by producing a desire for itself in the laborer; in the second it operates by exerting a certain pressure upon him. In the one case it attracts, in the other case it propels. But in both cases, in one way, what it does is the same. In both cases it endows

*Social Equality. A Short Study in a Missing Science. By William Hurrell Mallock, author of "Is Life Worth Living?" London: Richard Bentley & Son. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

the laborer with powers which, in its absence, would be wholly wanting in him. In its absence there could be no continued industry, just as in its absence there could be no developed skill. Man's power of producing more than a livelihood depends upon causes that are without him, and not within him; and these causes consist essentially, and they always have consisted since the earliest dawn of history, in some arrangement more or less effective of marked social inequalities.

Mr. Mallock shows his address as a dialectician in this, that he nowhere distinctly formulates the creed which he attacks. One does not know whether it is that of the wildest communist, or of a picturesque grasper of a partial truth, like Henry George, or a laborious fashioner of a system of "philosophy" like Herbert Spencer, or a commoner of the stamp of John Bright. He is much too clever to give the reader so much foot-hold. He attacks democracy (with a large D), and the democrats. But one might as well point out a particular wave in the ocean with one's finger. Few believers in democratic and republican systems hope or wish for the dead level of social equality that Mr. Mallock attacks with so much skill. Few will deny that differences must occur, and by their occurence create a healthy interchange of efforts, and, moreover, keep up the stimulus indefinitely after the first successes are attained. But that is not saying that the old spirit of caste, which lingers on in islands like Great Britain, and until recently in Great Britain's geographical counterpart in the Pacific, Japan, is a desirable thing in itself, or good for either the upper or lower ranks of a commonwealth. For it is that of which Mr. Mallock's book is really the defender. In his attempt to prove that inequality of conditions was the mainspring of all past progress (and therefore of progress hereafter) he denies to general benevolence any place.

"Actions motived by benevolence have been sufficiently marked in history to show us clearly enough their constant limits and purpose. This purpose has never been the creation of new forms of wealth, it has been simply the alleviation of the existing pains of poverty." (Page 163.)

On page 180 he alludes to this unsupported statement as to an axiom.

"As to benevolence in connection with inventors and discoverers, we have dwelt upon that already; and we have seen that, by itself, even with those men it is utterly powerless as a motive.”

In fine, Mr. Mallock means to say that, if we take away from men all hope of bettering themselves by work, and do not allow the rich and powerful to force the unambitious to labor, civilization will fall off. We have given freedom to slaves. If now we stop capital from goading men to labor, and give the ambitious no prospect of raising themselves above the mass, the whole machine will come to a stop, or, which.is the same thing, anarchy will ensue. The natural inference is: keep up social divisions, rank, and titles. They are the corollaries and condition of the healthful working of the human hive. Mr. Mallock's book is full of half-truths which might have been supported better had he more heart in the work. It is not likely that it will make a profound sensation; but no one can read it without some of the pleasure that came from several other of his brighter and more popular efforts.

Asbjörnsen's "Folk and Fairy Tales."*

THE fairy tales collected by Asbjörnsen and Moe (the Brothers Grimm, of Scandinavia) are well known to the English-speaking public. It is many years since Dr. George Webbe Dasent translated the original collection, and since then the best of the tales have become fairly domesticated in our literature. The more ambitious, half-autobiographical "Huldre Eventyr," which Asbjörnsen published later under his own name alone, have never until now been much known outside of Norway and Denmark, and, as they are as charming in style as they are unique in character, they fully deserve to share the popularity of the earlier collection. It was, also, a happy idea to reproduce the illustrations of the Christmas edition of 1879, nearly all of which have a strong flavor of the soil, and are in the most delightful sympathy with the text. Full of the national spirit are, especially, the drawings by Mr. Otto Sinding, although he occasionally lapses from the strength and individuality of such work as The Lad and the North Wind (page 163), and the Foolish Men (page 203), into a more conventional romanticism; as, for instance, in the pretty figure of the weeping girl in the story "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." The fact that Norway has such a promising school of native artists is, really, in part due to these very tales and the national movement of which they were the first indication. Mr. Asbjörnsen, though his style is cosmopolitan, and has none of the Björnsonian marks of nationality, was, nevertheless, one of the earliest pathfinders in the wilderness through which his more famous successor has broken a broad highway. In his capacity of sportsman and government superintendent of forests, he roamed from one end of the land to the other, coming constantly in contact with primitive people of all classes, and noting with keen perception the characteristics of the national physiog nomy. The Huldre stories, which are interwoven with his personal adventures, have, therefore, a wonderful fascination, and one never wearies of following him on his long tramps through the woods in search of hares and trout and fairy tales. There is a deep poetic feeling, too, in his descriptions of nature; not the vague gorgeousness of William Black and his novelistic compeers, but a definiteness of color and detail, such as one finds in the essays of John Burroughs. Every bird and beast has its right name, and its habits are described with a vividness and felicity of phrase which betray the poet, and an affectionate minuteness which shows the trained eye of the naturalist. It is, therefore, a great pity that the translator has in these very passages adopted a vocabulary which very inadequately reproduces the combined effect of scientific precision and poetic insight which distinguish the original.

Mr. Gosse's introduction is descriptive rather than critical, and gives a very correct estimate of Asbjörnsen as an author, and of his influence upon Norwegian literature. The biographical data are simply and interestingly given. We may, however, be permitted

* Folk and Fairy Tales. By P. Chr. Asbjörnsen. Translated by H. L. Brækstad. With an introduction by Edmund W. Gosse.

New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son.

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