tinctly formal transaction, and, at the same time, on the life of Christ as giving vital relations. The 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 coördination 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. 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 mediæval 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 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 Com 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 Comedy of Sentiment" (F. Tennyson Neely) without mons, 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 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 shows how 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 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. 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. Re-writing the history of Mr. Berenson's book on "Lorenzo Lotto" (Putnam) will hardly prove Italian Painting. interesting reading to the average person. It is not, strictly speaking, a biography, but "an Essay in Constructive Art-Criticism," as the secondary title tells us. The matter of it has been of more moment to the author than the style of it. The author has had something to say, and has not cared too much about how he has said it. So, beginning with a catalogue of facts, as though he were a German instead of an American, he ends with a conclusion, logical enough, if it does not meet with entire acceptance. He has reconstructed the masters and influences of Lorenzo Lotto, and incidentally overhauled the history of early Venetian art to prove (what is undoubtedly true) that the Bellini were not the only teachers in Venice in Lotto's early days, and that there was a large following of the now-neglected Vivarini from whom Lotto descended, rather than, as formerly supposed, from the Bellini. What this book proves about Lotto and the early Venetian school is perhaps not so important as the method taken to prove it. We are here brought face to face with the working of the Higher Criticism in art—the scientific method of arriving at the authorship of pictures. Mr. Berenson, since the death of Morelli, has become its high priest; and while people may smile as they please about the art-criticism which consists in measuring ears and finger-nails and studying draperies and backgrounds, it is yet the only accurate basis upon which the study of ancient painting can rest. Moreover, Mr. Berenson has modified the method of Morelli, and is not flinging aside all the views of the past as "antiquated rubbish." Where he establishes a new view, he does it with a reason and with a mastery of facts that few will venture to dispute. Indeed, Mr. Berenson is to be treated seriously and with respect, not sneered at, as was the unjust fate of his learned forerunner, Giovanni Morelli. It is understood to be his ambition to rewrite the his tory of Italian painting; and, if we take his "Lorenzo Lotto" aright, the book is merely to show us the method whereby he proposes to execute his larger task. A new and critical history of Italian art is much needed; and if every important Italian painter is treated with the thorough study that characterizes the present volume, we shall have an epoch-making work. A volume of essays from "The Nation." The sight of Mr. E. L. Godkin's shapely volume of "Reflections and Comments" (Scribner) calls to mind Matthew Arnold's curt comment in his recently published Letters: "Far the best paper here is the 'Evening Post,' written by Godkin." Few cultivated Americans, we fancy, will gainsay Mr. Arnold here—at least very flatly. Mr. Godkin's writing has long been a potent social and political force in this country; and in so far as it lies in the way of the journalist qua journalist to do good in the society he lives in, he has done it. The volume is made up of thirty-three articles selected from the author's contributions to "The Nation" during the past thirty years. Those have been chosen, of course, which seemed to him of most permanent value; and while their prevailing tone is social and literary, political themes have not been avoided. Among the titles we note: "The Short-Hairs" and "The Swallow-Tails," " Organs," "Panics," " John Stuart Mill," "Rôle of the Universities in Politics," "Physical Force in Politics," "The Evolution of the Summer Resort," "Tyndall and the Theologians," etc. Ranging in tone, as in theme, from grave to gay, the volume shows Mr. Godkin at his best-and Mr. Godkin is, as we all know, an engaging as well as a sound and scholarly writer. Some of the papers, it may be fairly said, are literature, not journalism. Norwegian Immigration to the U. S. The census of 1890 indicated that there were at that time in the United States 1,535,597 persons who were born in Scandinavian countries or were children of Scandinavian parents. An enumeration to-day, taking into account grand-children and great-grandchildren, would show upwards of two million of representatives of this blood among us, these being scattered through every state and territory of the Union. Professor Rasmus B. Anderson, the wellknown champion of the Northmen, has recently published a volume of nearly five hundred pages, well-arranged and well-indexed, which he calls a "first chapter" in the history of Norwegian Immigration, from 1821-1840. There were very few Scandinavians in the United States before 1821. In the years between that time and 1840, six main settlements were made: one in Orleans county, New York; one in LaSalle county, Illinois; one in Chicago; three in Wisconsin; besides a number of smaller colonies elsewhere. Himself the son of immigrants of 1836, Mr. Anderson has gathered a vast fund of information about the Norwegians, showing in some measure the contribution which they have made to the history of the world, and especially to that of the United States of America. The privations of the pioneers are well set forth, and a large number of biographical sketches are given, which, interspersed with pictures of individuals, of homes, and of public buildings, will be of great service to the thoughtful historian of later years, who, looking at the cosmopolitan population of this country, attempts to show what each raceelement has contributed to its upbuilding. Others have presented the claims of the Scotch, the Irish, the Scotch-Irish, the French, the Huguenots as a special branch of French, the Dutch, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Germans, and the Welsh, and this new volume will be welcomed as a valuable addition to the growing literature of American population. A creditable list of the names of prominent persons of this Norwegian descent might be made; but far more satisfactory is the feeling, which many share with Mr. Anderson, that the stock has been uniformly excellent, and welcomed everywhere during the busy three-score years and ten since the first stragglers came to cast their lot in the Western land. Occasionally in the volume there are indications of what might be written in a "second chapter," but the pioneer historian is the one who is especially to be commended, for the collection of material from the older citizens, who are fast dying out, is far more difficult than the compilation of facts about the life of the period since 1840. The book is published by the author, at Madison, Wis. The story of Marcus Whitman. Mr. O. W. Nixon's narration of "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon" (Star Publishing Co., Chicago) is the work of an enthusiast rather than an historian, and is a collection of newspaper sketches rather than a book. The story of Marcus Whitman, with reference both to his ride to save Oregon and to the tragedy at Waiilatpui, has already been adequately told, and in much better English, by Mr. Barrows, in his volume on Oregon for the "Commonwealths Series." The present work, although based upon tradition mainly, is substantially correct in its statements; yet there is an atmosphere of rhapsody for the hero and of disparagement for those whom he overcame which is not historical. Mr. Barrows has given the true setting of the story with regard to Daniel Webster, and it is not necessary to belittle him in order to magnify Whitman's great service. The proof-reading of this work is very careless, and the author's English is most slovenly, while his dates are occasionally incorrect for standard events. The "Introduction," by another hand, illustrates one of the abuses of bookmaking. If the book is worth anything, it should go on its own merits; and this introduction by the Rev. Frank W. Gunsaulus does not help it. It would be difficult to put into four scant pages more bad English, mixed figure, and distortion of historical proportion. One knows not what to say of such a statement as this concerning Whitman: "He was more to the ulterior Northwest than John Harvard has ever been to the Northeast of our common country." Stories of the Wagner operas. Few works of equal length have called forth so large an amount of comment and criticism as the eleven operas of Richard Wagner. The author has been discussed as poet, as musical composer, as dramatist; his theories have been recklessly assailed and as recklessly praised; his character and career as a Iman have been in turn lauded and decried. A catalogue of a Wagner library, compiled by an enthusiastic bibliographer and published some years ago, had already reached three large octavo volumes, and many additions have since accumulated. A new book on Wagner, covering new ground, would seem to be almost impossible; yet such an one has just come to hand in Mr. H. A. Guerber's "Stories of the Wagner Operas" (Dodd, Mead & Co.). The charm of the book is in its adherence to the simple aim expressed by its title. No attempt is made to discuss the "music of the future," to discourse of aria parlante or leit-motif, nor even to deal with the author's biography except so far as it concerns the choice of his subjects and the sources of his inspiration. The stories of the Wagner music dramas are here retold in straightforward and attractive prose, according to the same principle that has made Mr. Guerber's other books so popular. The illustrations, one for each story, are of uncommon beauty, some being copies of familiar designs by the best masters, and others being apparently drawn specially for this work. A volume from The appointment of Lord Acton as Froude's successor Regius Professor of History at Camat Cambridge. bridge, to succeed Froude, aroused much interest last winter, and not a little curiosity to know more of his life and work than had previously been made public. For many years it has been noticeable that when English scholars have spoken of Lord Acton, it has been in terms of the greatest respect, although he has published hardly anything. On June 11, he delivered his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, and this is now printed in a small volume called "A Lecture on the Study of History" (Macmillan). A single lecture, of course, cannot provide sufficient material to justify so great a reputation as that which Lord Acton has so long enjoyed, but as far as it goes it shows that in him Freeman and Froude have found no unworthy successor. It reveals wide reading and philosophic breadth of manner, although there are indications that the writer has not fully digested his vast stores of information. The notes, which are about twice as voluminous as the text of the lecture proper, admit us perhaps too freely into the secrets of his workshop. It would be interesting to know who is responsible for the bad proof-reading of this volume, which has necessitated a list of no less than forty-three errata; even in the list itself we have detected two errors and one unintelligible correction. Students of the Elizabethan period Italian influence on of our letters are, of course, conscious Elizabethan plays. of the immense debt of Shakespeare and his fellow-writers to Italian sources, and of the very strong influence of Italian literature upon our own. In this connection, an exceedingly important study has been undertaken by Dr. Mary Augusta Scott, who has aimed to bring together, with suitable annotation, the titles of the many Elizabethan translations from Italian into English. She has already collected, she informs us, "more than one hundred and sixty translations from the Italian, made by ninety or more translators, including nearly every well-known Elizabethan author, except Shakespeare and Bacon." In a pamphlet entitled "Elizabethan Translations from the Italian," now published by the Modern Language Association of America, Dr. Scott presents a first instalment of the fruits of her research, in the shape of a cata |