alone for a time, frequently recover their original usefulness, or discover an adaptability which they were not before known to possess? The dull knife still is dull but it's better worth whetting than it was; the faded carpet is passably good yet, indeed it is quite bright on the other side, and we resolve to turn it; the old coat or gown, for a long time slighted, is found still to possess so much “ wear " and comfort as to warrant our investing in it again; besides, for our conservative eyes it has a sort of veteran, proved nobility that sets its value far above the pretension of any merely new garment. Those who affect blue in their apparel may have observed that the sun also has an affinity for this color, and steals it from the dyed fabric; but if the garment be kept in a dark closet awhile, the color returns in a marked degree. Now, is this effect due to chemical action, or to the interval of grateful desuetude permitted to the garment?

Almost every house, whatever its dimensions, architecture, or age, sometimes gets tired of its occupants. If it can manage to convey to them the fact of its tedium, or if the occupants chance to discover the fact for themselves, they will, if judicious, determine upon giving their rooftree a month's or a week's vacation - at least a half-holiday. On

their return they will be delighted to remark the cheerfulness that reigns in place of the old discontent. I have known a house to recuperate wonderfully during the brief time the householder has been abroad for a morning walk.

One hesitates to class books as among inanimate things; yet the protests sometimes made by our friends in black and white are much like those entered by the other objects herein specified. Some day you sit down with a favorite book, the solacer of many a past hour which grief or care sought to make its own, but the book has, most unaccountably, lost its talismanic virtue, and is void alike of consolation and stimulus. You are about to vote the bright wit oxidized, the heavenly muse wingclipped and flagging, the sage emptily sententious, when the genius of the book interferes, -"Not so rash! vote me a long holiday, give me leave to gather dust on the high shelf; then come to me some fine morning by and by, and see what I'll do for you!”

It is to be suspected that much good material is lying in limbo, discarded for good and for all, when it only craved a little time for rest. When this desideratum is better understood, may we hope to hear less about the Total Depravity of Inanimate Things?

Fiction. Mr. Oldmixon, by William A. Hammond. (Appleton.) The industrious Dr. Hammond's third novel is an improvement on his previous ones. There are fewer characters. To be sure, they are just as crazy as the others, but they are more amusing. The incidents are also more to the point, and the author has discovered what a first-rate use can be made of second-sight. A more convenient contrivance for putting a character in possession of the facts about another character was never invented. It makes detectives superfluous, and to be rid at once of detectives

in novels is to owe a heavy debt to this author, which we shall never stop trying to pay. There is one character, by the way, whom Dr. Hammond never seems able to keep out of his story. It is the unsuccessful novelist. He is like Charles I. in Mr. Dick's petition. At the Red Glove (Harpers) is a somewhat clumsy copy of a French novel. It is for virginibus puerisque so far as naughtiness is concerned, but it reads as if the author had suppressed the wickedness, and with it whatever life the story might have had. At Love's Extremes, by Maurice Thompson (Cas

sell), is a disappointment. Mr. Thompson strikes so genuine a note in his poetry that this piece of artificiality and melodrama was not to be looked for. The commonplaces of fiction transferred to the South do not gain in richness or beauty because of the tropical soil in which they are set. After London, or, Wild England, by Richard Jefferies. (Cassell.) What has got into Mr. Jefferies? He used to write delightful books; of late he has taken to constructing puzzles. He uses his knowledge of wood-craft but for the most whimsical and willful purposes. He supposes London, and indeed all civilization, blotted out of existence, and then busies himself with constructing a newer life close to nature fumbling its way into the light. However consistent the book may be with itself, it is a tiresome and, so far as we can see, useless piece of ingenuity. After climbing to the bottom of the well after Truth, pretty much all one can discover is a damp frog. - Upon a Cast, by Charlotte Dunning (Harpers): a conventional novel, of mild interest and indifferent value. By Shore and Sedge, by Bret Harte (Houghton), contains three stories, in which this clever author turns and turns again, and guileless innocence winks in the fashion customary in Mr. Harte's stories. - A Superior Woman (Roberts) is one of the No Name Series; it really belongs to the no value series. It is a young lady's story, and is dreadfully weak in the spinal column. A Second Life, by Mrs. Alexander, has been produced in the Leisure Hour Series (Holt.) - Recent numbers of Harper's Handy Series are Louisa, by Katharine S. Macquoid, and Mr. Butler's Ward, by F. Mabel Robinson. The latest numbers of Harper's Franklin Square Library are Ishmael, by M. E. Braddon; Betwixt my Love and Me; Charlotte Brontë's The Professor, and Heart's Delight, by Charles Gibbon.

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Literature and Criticism. How should I Pronounce? is the title of a manual for schools, colleges, and private use, by W. H. P. Phyfe. (Putnams.) The stranger to the English language would wish to begin with practice on the author's name, but having mastered that, he would find himself face to face with a very elaborate and somewhat formidable analysis of the subject, which seems to us of slight practical or even theoretical value. The writer appears to have wished to make his work thorough, but after all the most valuable part is his list of a thousand words commonly mispro nounced, which he has marked with their proper pronunciation. - Goose-Quill Papers, by Louise Imogen Guiney (Roberts): a score of little essays which may have done service before in newspapers. They are the cheerful, accidental work of a young writer who has caught affectations of style rather than of thought, but does not yet carefully distinguish between what is gracefully idle and trivial. The little paper A Child in Camp has, to our thinking, the most agreeable touch, and indeed one does not feel otherwise than kind toward an author who shows so much genuine sympathy with honest moods. It is the personality behind the book, rather than the thought in the book, which attracts. One may fairly look to see the assumed quaintness rub off without loss to the sincerity of the nature.-) - Mr. Beers has prepared a

convenient companion to his Willis in the Men of Letters Series, in Prose Writings of Nathaniel Parker Willis, a selection from the otherwise discouraging complete works. (Scribners.) - Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Andrew P. Peabody (Little, Brown & Co.), places the reader deeply in debt to one of our ripest scholars and critics. Landscape, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton (Roberts), is an inexpensive edition, without the plates, of a book which will be more than a book of the season. Mr. Hamerton writes so agreeably, and brings a trained artistic power so cleverly to the task of interpretation for the untechnical mind, that he receives at once the respect of the artist and the admiration of the general reader. He is discursive, and we wish he were not so fluent, but since we must talk about our subjective enjoyment of objective nature, why, let us get Mr. Hamerton to put our ideas into easy English. The Ingoldsby Legends (Crowell). It is a little odd to find at this day an apparently library edition of this book without a line of explanation as to origin or authorship. Can it be that the book is known to everybody? The Appletons have added to their valuable little Parchment Series a volume of selections from the Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, with a preface and notes by Stanley LanePoole. Those who are interested in securing first editions of Longfellow's works will thank Mr. W. E. Benjamin for his neat little handbook, in which the collector will find full and accurate descriptions of the earliest issues of Longfellow's various prose and poetical writings.

Poetry and the Drama. Glenaveril, or the Metamorphoses, by the Earl of Lytton, is appearing in monthly parts like a serial novel, as it is. (Appleton.) Selected Poems from Michelangelo Buonarotti, with translations from various sources, edited by Ednah D. Cheney. (Lee & Shepard.) Mrs. Cheney has done a real service in bringing these poems together, in giving the original side by side with the translation, and in adding her own brief but pertinent notes. Songs of the Heights and Deeps, by the Hon. Roden Noel (Elliot Stock, London): a volume of respectable poetry by a versatile author. - A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson (Scribner's Sons), is a collection of charming lyrics which, in spite of the author's design, address themselves to adult readers rather than to children. The subtle fancy which underlies many of these verses is a thing likely to escape the juvenile reader. There are, however, several poems in the volume that will go directly to the heart and imagination of childhood. Camp-Fire, Memorial Day, and other Poems, by Kate Brownlee Sherwood. (Jansen, McClurg & Co.) A large number of the poems in the volume are drum and fife poems, written apparently in war times, or under close recollection of the war. It is singular how little variety there is in war poetry, but the fact is somewhat encouraging, for when war is over the inspiration for poetry will not cease. Songs and Sonnets by Maurice Francis Egan, and Carmina, by Condé Benoist Pallen (Kegan Paul, London). Two authors in one book, and the book only thirty-eight

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pages long! In this case art is short, very short. The verse is smooth, decorous, thoughtful. Unity Songs Resung; compiled by C. H. K. (Colegrove Book Co. Chicago.) A collection of short poems by various authors, which have already appeared in the Unity Newspaper. They are mainly religious and sub-religious in character. Random Shots, by Nelson Goodrich Humphrey. (Pantagraph Establishment, Bloomington, Ill.) Mr. Humphrey begins his preface with these words: "There is only one way to make ideas invariably interesting, - simply to tell the truth," but our ideas about Mr. Humphrey's poetry, if this rule were applied, would interest Mr. Humphrey's friends more than they would him. Vladimir; a Poem of the Snow. Malczewski. (Howard Lockwood, New York.) The author makes haste to explain that he is not Malczewski, but only wears the outside garment of the Pole. The poem is a blind, groping set of verses, which go staggering on to nothing in particular.Poems of the Old Days and the New, by Jean Ingelow (Roberts), will be welcomed for its healthfulness, its hearty sympathy with the substantial in English nature and human nature. There are occasional lines which have a beauty on which one rests, but there is no such compactness of art as makes one know that the cup of beauty is just full. - Lyrical Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Selected and Arranged by Francis T. Palgrave (Macmillan & Co.), is a tasteful collection of the laureate's minor poems, with judicious extracts from the more lyrical passages in his longer poems. A delightful pocket-volume for the seaside.

Politics and Economy. The Fall of the Great Republic (Roberts) is an anonymous skit, professing to be an historic sketch in 1895 of events which took place in 1886-1888. The author announces himself as Sir Henry Standish Coverdale, Intendant for the Board of European Administration in the Province of New York, and writes of the socialistic destruction of the United States, and the provisional government set up by the European powers. The satire is apparently written by some one very much in earnest, and its severity may set some people to thinking; but the author most of all needs to think. He should settle for himself first the question, How came Europe to be impregnable when the United States fell so easily? Then he should begin to estimate the powers of resistance. So far he has studied only the power of projectiles. He is like a person who sees a gun discharged. Only a trigger pulled, and all that mischief done! What is to prevent the world from being blown up, if heavy enough guns are made?. Democratic Government, a study of politics, by Albert Stickney (Harpers), is a clear, vigorous discussion of practical politics. Mr. Stickney wants a national convention, as do many, and he shows himself possessed of excellent qualifications for membership in that convention. His book may not hasten the calling of the convention directly, but it is one of many signs that people are thinking to the point, as well as a help to students to

of the Surplus Revenue of 1837, being an account of its origin, its distribution among the States, and the uses to which it was applied, by Edward G. Bourne (Putnams): a well-considered little book which is a boon to those who have heretofore been obliged to put up with the most meagre and unsatisfactory account of this episode in our financial history. The Mercantile, Manufacturing, and Mining Interests of Pittsburgh, issued by the Chamber of Commerce (W. G. Johnston & Co., Pittsburgh): a sort of business card of the city, with heliotype or similar illustrations of buildings and the like. Ever so much about the people who run the city, but nothing about the workmen who do the bulk of the work. - Collected Essays in Political and Social Science, by William Graham Sumner (Holt): a volume of vigorous and uncompromising thinking on the subjects of bimetallism, wages, sociology, collegiate education, and kindred topics. If the author is dogmatic and insolently narrow, he explains in his paper on colleges why he is.

Education and Text-Books.

School Bulletin

Year Book of the State of New York for 1885, giving sketches of the city superintendents and the county commissioners, and a list of the principals of village schools and academies, by C. W. Bardeen. (The author, Syracuse, N. Y.) The biographies are apparently written by the same genial man who writes epitaphs. The Bureau of Education in Washington issues a pamphlet devoted to Planting Trees in School Grounds, a good subject, and treated both from the practical and from the sentimental side. It is a pity that with less continental ardor there might not be more attention paid to simple gardening in connection with school grounds. The yards of most schoolhouses are forlorn places. The same Bureau issues among its Circulars of Information one on City School Systems in the United States, by John D. Philbrick. It has nearly as many views as it has facts. Lectures on the Science and Art of Education, with other lectures and essays, by the late Joseph Payne, edited by C. W. Bardeen. (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y.) There is good sense in this book mixed with a great deal of rather pompous travesty of sense in philosophic terms. There is much also that is inexpressibly dull. It is singular how soon books about teaching can stop being interesting. - The Meisterschaft System has been applied to the Italian language by Dr. Richard S. Rosenthal, and the first of the fifteen parts to be published has been sent us. This system, as is well known, aims to communicate a short and practical method of acquiring complete fluency of speech. (Meisterschaft Publishing Company, Boston.) - Assyriology its Use and Abuse in Old Testament Study, by Francis Brown (Scribners) is an address given at the Union Theological Seminary. It is an admirable piece of work, showing the author to have that judicial mind which keeps the scholar always in the saddle.