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mony, makes such peculiarly touching music as I have never heard elsewhere."

In an appendix upon Negro Music the author brings together a considerable amount of data and presents a bibliography of the subject.

Thirty-eight Bahama stories are given. Many of them are very imperfect in sense and disjointed in structure. This may be the result of the fact that children, and not adults, are the usual narrators. There are two kinds of tales recognized, "old stories" and "fairy stories." The former are chiefly animal tales, analogous to the "Br'er Rabbit" stories of "Uncle Remus." The latter are chiefly of recent introduction from English sources. Rather curious is the variability of dialect; the same word may be quite differently pronounced in successive sentences. The stories usually begin and end with some set formula. The opening is generally:

"Once it vwas a time, a very good time,

De monkey chewed tobacco an' 'e spit white lime." To which may be added:

"Twa'nt my time, 't wa'nt you time; 't was old folks' time." The ending generally is:

"E bo ban, my story's en';

If you doan believe my story's true
Hax my captain an' my crew.

Vw'en I die, bury me in a pot o' candle grease." The three first lines are fixed; the fourth varies. Space does not permit a detailed study of the stories. The variant of the "Tar Baby" story is curious. So is Story XX., where we have "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" done into Bahama. "Big Claus and Little Claus " is terribly mangled, but has a quaint and original termination. Most of the fairy stories have peculiarly tragic terminations. As a sample of dialect and of the old stories, we cite "B'Helephant an' B'Vw'ale":

"Now dis day B'Rabby vwas walkin' 'long de shore. 'E see B'Vw'ale. 'E say, 'B'Vw'ale!' B'Vw'ale say, 'Hey!' B'Rabby say, 'B'Vw'ale, I bet I could pull you on de shore !' B'Vw'ale say, 'You cahnt!' B'Rabby say, 'I bet you t'ree t'ousan' dollar!' B'Vw'ale say, 'Hall right!' 'E gone."

Brother Rabbit goes to find Brother Elephant,

and makes a similar bet with him. Then, securing a strong rope, he succeeds in setting them against each other, both of them thinking that they are pulling against him. The rope breaks.

"B'Vw'ale went in de ocean and B'Helephant vwent vay over in de pine-yard. Das v'y you see B'Vw'ale in de ocean to-day, and das vy you see B'Helephant over in de pine bushes to-day."

FREDERICK STARR.

EURIPIDES THE RATIONALIST.*

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Naturally, a new book from Professor Verrall is suggestive, stimulating, compelling reluctant assent at times, as often, again, arousing eager opposition. He writes, as usual, to break with accepted beliefs, and upon a question well worthy of discussion. That the present essay, "Euripides the Rationalist," is particularly fragmentary, and anything but final, its author would probably be the first to declare. Still, every real student of Greek drama- indeed, every serious student of literature should turn its leaves.

ness.

It is universally conceded that Euripides' plots have nearly all a serious structural weakDoubtless every reader since Aristophanes has objected particularly to the long explanatory prologues, and to the spectacular finale wherein the "god from the machine" cuts the knot which the dramatist, or his characters, failed to untie through the natural inevitable progress of the action. It has been noted, often, that these divine apparitions are much less vigorous and realistic than the human characters. It was not left for Mr. Verrall first to point out, either, that all the men and women in, for instance, the "Hippolytos" are heroic, while all the divinities are ignoble. That such a drama seems a covert but deliberate attack upon the very existence of the popular gods, has also been often remarked.

Euripides was certainly not in personal nor artistic harmony with the popular theology of his time. He was forced into outward conformity with it by the whole environment, the traditions, the limited materials of his art. Compared with his greatest rivals, he was a realist, yet was obliged to accept the machinery of romance: or, as Mr. Verrall would say, an earnest atheist, he was compelled to respect the conventions of a pulpit! But Mr. Verrall advances far beyond these secure positions, and plants his standard boldly, declaring that Euripides used the drama chiefly, and persisall belief in myth and miracle, in the inspiratently, for this one purpose of breaking down tion of Delphi, in the very existence of Apollo and Athena.

Mr. Verrall applies his tests, in detail, only to three plays altogether: The "Alcestis," the "Ion," the "Iphigenia in Tauris." In general, he attempts to divide each drama into a central

* EURIPIDES THE RATIONALIST. A Study in the History of Art and Religion. By A. W. Verrall. New York: Macmillan & Co.

plot, wherein purely human motives and actions leave no room for the marvellous, and a tableau before, or after, or both, which satisfied the popular conservatism, while at the same time impressing upon every thoughtful mind the helplessness, the dishonesty, the unreality, of the people's gods. As to the "Ion," Mr. Verrall in 1890 worked out this theory much more fully, in an annotated edition and translation. Here he seems to the present reader to have an unanswerable argument in the main. Apollo is indeed a shamefaced and baffled liar at the end of the play, a brutal libertine from the beginning. Here, certainly, Euripides hardly retains any pretense of belief at all. His spectacular Pallas, at the close, only silences for the instant, at best, the voice of common-sense and right impulse. Apollo himself fails to appear, and no serious attempt is made to excuse his absence or his previous behavior.

Yet even here Mr. Verrall seems over ingenious in his detailed reconstruction of what Euripides, as he thinks, meant to show us really took place. Still less can we promptly agree that Alcestis evidently fainted only, from hysterical excitement, under the delusion of a doom appointed her. Heracles, to Mr. Verrall, is but a drunken braggart, who, entering the tomb, found the lady awake, and escorted her quietly back to the palace. If this were all quite evident, it should have been evident long ago.

Milton, for instance, should have seen that "sad Electra's poet," he who brought back "Alcestis from the grave," was but a scoffer!

We are not quite willing, then, to have our poet's consistency, his single-minded devotion to a cause, defended at such a terrible cost. We do not believe the creative imagination, the artistic delight in his work, could coëxist so long in Euripides with pure scientific agnosticism. Disbelief, to be inculcated by "innuendo" (Mr. Verrall's favorite word), corrodes the soul itself, as examples like Lucian, Voltaire, and Swift remind us.

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But we think Mr. Verrall will be compelled - by compulsion from within at least apply his method to the whole list of extant plays, or at any rate to most of them. The study will be by no means barren, even if the final verdict on the main question be "Not proven," or even "Not probable." Especially interesting are his sketches of the many-minded keen-witted critical audience to which Euripides appealed, the reminders that the poet was not merely heard once, but read and dis

cussed all the year round, in general, the attempt to reconstruct the fifth century Athenian conditions. For all the imagination, the literary taste, the open-mindedness of Mr. Verrall, classical scholarship has abundant cause for gratitude.

Like his rival in iconoclasm, the German Wilamowitz, Mr. Verrall often sallies into the field before his forces are quite assembled and fully under control. Thus, a straggling argument on page 172 tells us "the Medea was one of a group which gained not only a prize, but the first." In our meagre and fragmentary knowledge on such matters, hardly any one fact is more interesting than that in the historic year 431 B.C. Eschylus' son, the heir of his art, was placed first, Sophocles second, while Euripides with the Medea took the third or "booby" prize!

Professor Verrall's style is not so clear, bright, and graceful as Mr. Jebb's; and the subtlety of his arguments makes this doubly apparent. "No one who is accustomed to literary composition will doubt that the Phoenisso did not originally conclude with the departure of Edipus," etc. (p. 242). Everyone accustomed to literary composition will see clearly that the third negative bewilders nearly every mind.

Lastly, hasty readers may be warned that the general thesis will be found in the preface, while the final summing-up is on pp. 259-60, attached, perhaps by accident, to a very ingenious brief essay which has little essential bearing on the rest of the book. At any rate, these last paragraphs should be marked off as Epilogue. WILLIAM C. LAWTON.

CHRIST AS DOCTRINE AND PERSON.*

A dogmatic rendering of the work of Christ more or less interferes with a vital rendering of his words. It is not easy to look upon the atonement as a dis

* JESUS AS A TEACHER, and the Making of the New Testament. By B. A. Hinsdale. St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co.

CHRIST'S IDEA OF THE SUPERNATURAL. By John H. Denison. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

STUDIES IN THEOLOGIC DEFINITION, Underlying the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. By Frederic Palmer. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS. Its Relation to Evolution. By J. S. Black. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE. The Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching. By David H. Greer, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

COLLEGE SERMONS. By the late Benjamin Jowett, M.A. Edited by the Very Rev. the Hon. W. H. Fremantle, M.A. New York: Macmillan & Co.

The

tinctly formal transaction, and, at the same time, on the life of Christ as giving vital relations. two conceptions mutually exclude each other. When he is to us the way, the truth, the life, the growing source of a spiritual experience, we cannot attach much importance to any alleged reconciliation under a violated law. Being reconciled with God, we have no feeling left for any formal conflict between us. Hence, it has happened, while the dogma of salvation in Christ has lost ground, the fact of salvation in Christ has correspondingly gained ground. The thoughts of men are more than ever turning to him, and are laying hold of his life and words with unusual insight.

"Jesus as a Teacher," by Prof. B. A. Hinsdale, is a sober, substantial, well-digested book. It embraces knowledge, perception, and feeling. While its perusal would be profitable to most readers, it would be especially profitable to the better class of Sunday-school teachers. It holds itself more aloof from the merely formal side of truth, and gives itself more freely to its vital aspects than one would expect it to do as arising in the interests of pedagogy. The volume carefully presents the circumstances which imparted character to the teachings of Christ, as well as a full consideration of his spirit and method. It embraces a second part,-"The Making of the New Testament."

It is not easy to give an adequate conception of the book entitled "Christ's Idea of the Supernatural." Each reader, as in testing a fruit of an unusual flavor, must pronounce upon it for himself. There is so much individuality in it that it will please and instruct different persons very differently. To many, it may easily become a manual of heavenly things. It is pervaded by a tone of very positive spirituality. The thought and the feeling are so closely interwoven that the reader must share them both, if he is to catch the impulse of the author. The line of presentation, like the path of a bird in flight, must be seen as it is evolved, as it escapes the eye almost at once. There is a great deal of beauty as well as of force in the volume. The author moves with alert and sympathetic steps along the lines of spiritual affinity.

In spite of much difference, the work is not unlike "Studies in Theologic Definition," a book also marked by insight and strong conviction. The purpose of both authors is to readjust our religious conceptions to the allotted conditions of knowledge. Both feel painfully the fact that religious conviction has lost ground in many minds by that which ought rather to have purified and strengthened it. The ruling idea by which Dr. Denison would reconcile the natural and supernatural, the earthly and the divine, is that of coordination - the coördination by which each living thing is put in vital relations to the very different things which surround it. As physical life links together in one experience the organic and inorganic, so does a higher spiritual life lay hold of the sensuous facts beneath it and the supersensuous ones above it. This conception

is handled in a wide facile way, and is made very fruitful. The idea which Mr. Palmer finds equally pregnant is that the finite and the infinite are not opposed to each other, but that the infinite fully contains the finite. So the two are, and have been, in perfect reconciliation. Our exaltations of God have often been a driving of him out of his own word and works,-the building up of an abstraction in place of an apprehension of concrete facts and a divine history. This conception the author develops with fulness and skill, and so will render a vital service to those who can readily accompany him. One feels, in reference to both these authors, that they thread the jungle with such swift and sturdy steps because they follow a path that wont and use have made familiar to them. In the light or out of the light, they escape, by the habit of their own minds, the entanglements and wanderings which others experience. This certainty of thought is a perfectly normal product in all higher, more complex, and spiritual themes. A bird gets the knack of the air by flying. We learn how thought and perception and feeling spring up and flow together by standing where the full streams of life lie at our feet. We can easily believe that both books, flowing as they do from a vital experience, will carry refreshment and vitality with them.

To

We cannot speak with as much confidence of the next volume, "The Christian Consciousness." give such a definition to Christian Consciousness as to make it a distinct and productive source of power in human life, and to trace its way onward fertilizing the thoughts and feelings of men, constitutes a most difficult task. We do not think that the author has attained that firmness in the original idea, or that clearness in the sequence of events under it which are necessary to render the discussion stimulating and fruitful. The things developed do not turn with sufficient definiteness on the theme proposed.

"The Preacher and His Place" is a volume of lectures delivered at the Yale Theological Seminary. These lectures, in common with most of the courses which have preceded them, cling pretty closely to the peculiar practical wants which lie before the preacher in our time. These courses have been delivered by those who are in actual service, and supplement rather than continue the seminary work in Homilities. This fact is indicated in the present course by the titles of the several lectures. The first four titles are: "The Preacher and the Past," "The Preacher and the Present," "The Preacher and his Message," "The Preacher and other Messages." The lectures of Dr. Greer are enjoyable. The style is pleasing and perspicuous; the subjectmatter is interesting, and the temper serene. They are penetrative without being profound, earnest rather than fervid, and progressive while marked by no radicalism. They carry the mind forward without jar, evoking general acquiescence, and render the vision more clear and pleasurable in many directions. They will be profitable to most ministers.

"College Sermons" is made up of discourses delivered by Professor Jowett to the students of Balliol College, during his long term of service. They are admirably fitted to do college men good. They express the wise, sober convictions of a well-trained mind, earnest and devout in its temper, and regarding religious belief and action chiefly on their practical side. Supported by the personal confidence and reverence which Professor Jowett commanded, they must have been a very direct and irresistible means of good. The temper of the discourses, as became a scholar, is eminently liberal and charitable. Their purpose, pursued in a simple, unimpassioned way, is to sober, widen, stimulate, and strengthen the thoughts of young men. They are especially suited for this work. They are in sympathy with a large and purified life. The editorial work of this volume has not been very thoroughly done.

These six books, taken collectively, like many others that have come before us, show no decay in the Christian spirit. They all involve an effort a vital and prosperous effort to restate religious truth, and readjust it to the new and better conditions which have come to it. This is not weakness, but strength; not decay, but growth. The large adaptability of our faith and the emboldened and higher spirit which it so readily assumes are conspicuous in such discourses as these of Professor Jowett — a man of ripe scholarship, sober thought, and wide life. JOHN BASCOM.

Prime Minister.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS.

Mr. Stuart J. Reid's life of Lord An English reform John Russell is one of the best of the interesting series of political biographies ("Queen's Prime Ministers Harper) of which the author is general editor. A finer subject could, of course, hardly be desired. From the days when Napoleon was changing the map of Europe almost at his will until the time of our own Civil War, Lord John Russell was in the House of Commons, and prominent from the first; and this splendid service was crowned with five years more of distinguished service as Earl Russell in the Foreign Office and as Prime Minister. During this whole career Lord John was the champion of the Whig principles of religious toleration and equality, and of the participation of the people in the government through widened suffrage and reformed representation in Parliament. Himself a member of one of the proudest families of England, he outran even the bulk of the Whig party in his zeal for reform. In these days it is difficult to realize the exclusiveness of the aristocratic spirit that prevailed among the ruling class at the beginning of this century. Men of broad culture, open minds, and patriotic impulses feared the overthrow of all the barriers against revolution if any slightest change were made

in the institutions of the land. Lord John Russell identified himself with reform movements at the outset; the cause of parliamentary reform was so peculiarly his own that he was chosen to introduce the great measure of 1832, although not yet of cabinet rank. The beginnings of popular education were made or fostered by him against the strenuous opposition of his own class. So, though his vision was not always clear, and he sometimes was found opposing what he ought by his own principles to have favored, his influence in bringing England out from the aristocratic and medieval conditions prevailing before 1832 into the democratic equality of to-day was very great. The fault of Mr. Reid's book is one that is almost inseparable from the biographical method of writing history, especially when the writer is a thorough admirer of his subject. While the statements of the book are in the main correct and the point of view is the right one, yet the concentration of attention upon one actor necessarily magnifies his part in events. Although the author points out the mistaken judgments and acts of his hero, there is not enough allowance made for the work of others. Especially defective is the treatment of the relations of England and America in our Civil War. Mr. Reid sees in the Alabama question only a petty quarrel in which we were over-sensitive and England was in no way at fault; but that she preferred to humble herself rather than be on hostile terms with us. Lord John Russell, who was Foreign Secretary at that time, was not wont to tamely yield the rights and prestige of England without compelling reason, nor was this consistent with England's past.

Nordau's works of imagination.

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It is often rather unjustly supposed that a critic ought not to make his appearance in imaginative literature unless he can show how the thing should be done by example as well as by precept. But there is no real reason to suppose that Herr Nordau, for instance, could write better plays, even from his own standpoint, than Dr. Ibsen, or better novels than M. Zola. If one read "The Right to Love" and "The Comedy of Sentiment (F. Tennyson Neely) without knowing that they were by the great scourge of contemporary literature, one would not trouble much to consider one's impressions. They are both of that kind of literature which used to be mildly condemned as aping French wickedness, but which is now a favorite form with several popular moralists of our time. The first is a drama which showshow an unfaithful wife finds the path of unfaithfulness not so smooth as she had imagined; the second is a novel which presents a German professor in love with a bold-faced but charming adventuress. Both allure to virtue (in a measure) by showing the thorns on the rose-bush of vice. Neither, on the whole, does much more: the drama gets along without real characters or situations, the novel has no real atmosphere. Both have certain good points, the idea of finally giving the unrepent

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ant wife the position of housekeeper to her husband is quaint, to say the least; and one rushes through the tale of the professor's intrigue, with a great desire to know how he is going to get out of it. Speculating upon these works as being written by the same hand which turned out "Degeneration,' we are led to wonder whether Herr Nordau be not really an ornament, albeit a modest one, of the literature of imagination rather than of the literature of knowledge. But, to tell the truth, this is a matter upon which many people have made up their minds some time since.

Hans Breitmann once more.

Even those who have never read the "Breitmann Ballads" by Mr. Charles G. Leland - and there must be some such can hardly fail to catch from "Hans Breitmann in Germany" (Lippincott) a flavor at once distinct and genial. The hearty self-confidence, impossible in one who is not sure of himself and his readers, the strange fact that the dialect is never tiresome, the clear refreshment of the relapses into good German, these make a sort of quaint toning in which one perceives pleasurably the humorist at work, gravely subduing and bringing under control the great mountainous jokes and scattering the smaller ones with a winning artlessness. But the book has its other vein also, so that one goes comfortably along, enjoying the conversation in prose, enjoying the ingenuously extempore verse, sometimes warmed by a glow of genuine warm-heartedness, sometimes surprised by the sudden appearance of a quaint moral coming so seldom and so unexpectedly that one is rather pleased than vexed. Even the tarry-at-home would enjoy the book; but to another the all-penetrating influence of the Vaterland brings a sudden revival of connection with the high-pitched roofs and the winding streets, with the beautiful gardens and the well-remembered bierlokals, of the hundreds of characteristic things that remain with everyone, the mention of one of which is enough to bring back on a sudden the old-time feeling of inverted homesickness. A curiously attractive book, doubtless much of its charm lies in the constant temper of the scholar and the man of culture beneath the cheerful features, displayed in the frontispiece, of the sympathetic humorist. It is to be hoped that it will be favorably reviewed and widely read, for upon such circumstances, we are given to understand, hangs the appearance of more volumes of the same kind.

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all-dominating Papacy marshalled its armies to crush out by force the alien and dangerous spirit of a people that chance had brought under the dominion of one of its sons; division and religious strife entered to weaken and paralyze the effective energies of the Bohemians themselves; and thus the land of John Hus became the Bohemia of today. Before the Thirty Years' War, nine-tenths Protestant, all opposition to the Church was ruthlessly suppressed and Protestantism disappeared. Two histories of Bohemia have lately been written, with the double purpose of giving to the Englishspeaking descendants of Bohemia in America a knowledge of their motherland, and of opening to others the stirring story of Bohemia's struggles and achievements. The first is an elaborate work of seven hundred and fifty pages by Robert H. Vickers, published by C. H. Sergel & Co., Chicago. It is furnished with maps, illustrations, and index, and can be commended as a thorough treatment of the subject. The other work is less pretentious, being a compilation under the title of "The Story of Bohemia," by Frances Gregor (published by Cranston & Curts, Cincinnati). This volume also has illustrations, but lacks an index. It gives a full outline of the history in about half the compass of the larger work.

Biographical stories by Susan Coolidge.

Romantic and entertaining as fiction are the five biographical papers, by Miss Susan Coolidge, gathered into a volume called "An Old Convent School in Paris, and Other Papers" (Roberts). The characters who figure in these sketches are real personages, and the author seems to have had access to sources, in the shape of diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies, not commonly accessible. These being used with much literary art, a remarkably picturesque series of narratives is the result. The subject in each case is some person of high social or political distinction. The first two papers have to do with a Polish princess of the eighteenth century; the third with that terrible woman-emperor, Catherine II. of Russia. At her death, a sealed manuscript was found among her papers an autobiography of the early years of her married life, written in her own hand, and addressed to her son, the Grand Duke Paul, great-grandfather of the present Czar. At first kept in the imperial archives and guarded with scrupulous care, this manuscript finally, in some unexplained manner, was copied, found its way to Paris, and into print. One of the copies, rare and hard to come by, has served Miss Coolidge as basis for "The Girlhood of an Autocrat." A story of English official life in India bears the title "Miss Eden," the authority being three volumes of delightful letters written by the sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India; the concluding paper takes us into the French court of Louis XIV. through the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon. The book is one to instruct as well as delight, and is suited to readers old or young.

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