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life; the hideous blasphemy and sin of the creature to the Creator-these are my endless sorrows; these keep me wretched and in chains, when I would fain be free. These create hell around me, and endless torture; these bind and crush me and pervert my being, till I become what I dare not name to myself or to others. And yet...as the eternal God is my witness...I do not think I am as bad as the worst man living. I may tempt, but I do not pursue; I take the lead in many lives, yet I make the way I go so plain that those who follow me do so by their own choice and free will more than by my persuasion." He paused,-then continued in a softer tone,

You look afraid of me, but be assured you never had less cause for terror. You have truth and purity-I honour both. You will have none of my advice or assistance in the making of your life's history; to-night, therefore, we part, to meet no more on earth. Never again, Mavis Clare, no, not through all your quiet days of sweet and contented existence, will I cross your path; before Heaven I swear it!

"One word,-if, when I am gone, you ever think of me, think that I am more to be pitied than the vericst paralysed and striving wretch that ever crawled on earth, for he, And when you pray perchance, has hope, and I have none. for me-for I hold you to this promise-pray for one who dares not pray for himself. You know the words, Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!' To-night you have been led into temptation, though you knew it not, but you have delivered yourself from evil as only a true soul can. And now farewell. In life I shall see you no more; in death —well, I have attended many death-beds in response to the invitations of the moribund, but I shall not be present at yours. Perhaps, when your parting spirit is on the verge between darkness and light, you may know who I was, and am; and you may thank God with your last breath that we parted to-night-as we do now-for ever."

MAKING LOVE TO THE DEVIL.

Mavis Clare moves away, appalled by the sombre shadow that clouded the Prince's brow and the strange expression that gleamed in the dark beauty of his face. Then Tempest came forward, and the Prince coolly remarked that he wanted to try Mavis Clare; she had rejected all his offers, and he could only make matters smooth by asking her to pray for him. A woman of that dreamy idealistic temperament always likes to imagine there is a man who is grateful for her prayers. The next night but one, Sybil leaves her husband's couch and goes down to meet the Prince, in a diaphanous garment of filmy white. The husband follows and witnesses the scene. She makes love to the Prince, as might be expected from a vulture of vice, a harpy, and all the rest of it. The husband listened to her accents vibrating with mad idolatrous passion, while she implored the terrible Prince to have pity on her. He, however, was in no such mood. "I know you love me," he said; "I have always known it. Your vampire soul leaped to mine at the first glance I ever gave you; you were a false foul thing from the first, and you recognise your master. I know it all. The kiss I gave you on your wedding-day put fire in your blood, and sealed you mine; but I hate you! Yes, I hate you, and all such women as you, for you corrupt the world. I hate you with the bitterness of immeasurable and unforgetting hatred, for you have done me a wrong; you have added another burden to the load of punishment I carry."

A VERY JOSEPH !

The woman, however, was in no mood to be repulsed even by such an uncompromising declaration of detestation. She followed him with outstretched arms, a very Bacchante of wild loveliness, but the Prince was as a very Joseph:

"Stand back!" he said. "Be afraid of me, as of an unknown

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"I will love you," she cried. "I shall love you until I die." "And after you die," said he-"will you love me then?" "After death," she stammered. "Yes, after death," he repeated sombrely. "There is an 'after,'. as your mother knows; death is never deceived, though life may be. And afterwards," he asked again—“ will you love me, do you think, when you know who I am?" "When I know who you are! she repeated. “Do I not know? You are Lucio, my love, whose voice is my music, whose beauty I adore, whose looks are my heaven." "And hell-and hell," he interposed with a short laugh. "Come here. Since you love me so well, kneel down and worship me." "With every pulse of my being I worship you," she murmured, kneeling with clasped hands, a smile of perfect rapture on her face. 'My king! my God! for one kiss from your lips I would die; for one embrace I would give my soul!" Unmoved, the Prince said, "Stay where you are, and let me look at you. Soa woman wearing a husband's name, newly risen from a husband's side, steals forth in the night, seeking to disgrace him and pollute herself by the vulgarest unchastity. I may do what I choose with you, you say-torture you, kill you. . . I shall not kill, drown you, curse you, or love you. I shall simply call your husband."

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"Love me, I

66 LOVE ME OR I DIE!" Getting desperate, Sybil drew a dagger. say, or I shall stab myself here dead at your feet, and cry out to Geoffrey that you have murdered me!" He seized the dagger, wrested it from her clutch, snapped it, and flung it on the ground. She stood breathless and white with rage, in mingled passion and terror. Then she said deliberately, "You shall love me, or I shall die, one of the two. I will give you all to-morrow to decide; love me, give me yourself, be my lover; but refuse me again, and I will put an end to this life of mine! I cannot endure existence without your love."

Then, with a sudden swift movement, she flung herself upon his breast. The moonbeams showed her husband, her eyes alight with rapture, her lips trembling with passion, her bosom heaving. The blood surged up to his head, and a red mist swam before his sight. Would Lucio yield? Not he! Tearing her desperate hands from his neck, he forced her back, crying, "Woman! false and accursed! restrain your fevered desires; fair fiend, have patience, we shall meet ere long!"

66 THE MOONLIGHT GLISTENED BLOOD-RED.” At this point her husband, somewhat tardily, concluded that it was time for him to interfere. He dragged her away. We have the tableau filled in ad lib. with mad fury, black rages, chokings with wrath and pain, etc., etc., on his part. On hers, calm insistence that it is all the fault of the new fiction, while the Prince cynically brings the scene to a close. She, with a wild and wicked rapture in her face, kisses her hand to the Prince, and the two men are left alone.

Facing one another we stood, silently. I met his sombre eyes and thought I read an infinite compassion in them. Then, while I yet looked upon him, something seemed to clutch my throat and stop my breathing; his dark and beautiful countenance appeared to me to grow suddenly lurid as with fire; a coronal of flame seemed to tremble above his brows; the moon

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Let me write for others the awful Truth as I see it. There is no death-none, none! I cannot die! I am passing out of my body; I am being wrenched away from it inch by inch in inexplicable mystic torture; but I am not dying-I am being carried forward into a new life, vague and vast . . . I new world full of dark forms, half shaped yet shapeless; they float towards me, beckoning me on. I am actively consciousI hear, I think, I know. Death is a mere human dream-a comforting fancy; it has no real existence; there is nothing in the universe but life. O hideous misery-I cannot die! In my mortal body I can scarcely breathe; the pen I try to hold writes of itself rather than through my shaking hand; but these pangs are the throes of birth, not death.

Still I hold back,--nude and trembling I stare into a dark void; and now there are wings about me,-wings of fiery scarlet; they fill the space,-they enfold me,-they propel me, they rush past and whirl around me, stinging ine as with flying arrows and showers of hail.

To my despair and terror,-to my remorse and agony,-I live. Oh, the unspeakable misery of this new life! And worst of all, God, whom I doubted, God, whom I was taught to deny, this wronged, blasphemed and outraged God exists.

Serve me, dead hand, once more ere I depart. . . my tortured spirit must seize and compel you to write down this thing unnameable, that earthly eyes may read, and earthly souls take timely warning I know at last whom I have loved,-whom I have chosen, whom I have worshipped. Oh, God, have mercy. . . . I know who claims my worship now, and drags me into yonder rolling world of flame. . ., His name is

This is the end of her.

She is buried, and Mavis Clare is at much trouble to explain to the widower that the Prince is a worker of evil, a fiend in a beautiful human shape, a destroyer and corruptor. Tempest replies that, on the contrary, the Prince is his best friend, and leaving Mavis he joins his friend on his yacht and starts for Egypt. The Prince's fascination continued as great as ever, but sometimes his every look seemed fraught with meaning, his every gesture suggestive of an almost terrific authority. The men on board the yacht seemed like fiends.

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"Sorrows!" I echoed. "He is supposed to rejoice in the working of evil."

"Neither angel nor devil can do that," he said slowly. "To rejoice in the working of evil is a temporary mania which affects man only. For actual joy to come out of evil, Chaos must come again, and God must extinguish Himself." He stared across the dark sea, the sun had sunk, and one faint star twinkled through the clouds. "And so I again say-the sorrows of Satan; sorrows immeasurable as eternity itself— imagine them: to be shut out of Heaven; to hear all through the unending æons the far-off voices of angels whom once he knew and loved; to be a wanderer among deserts of darkness, and to pine for the light celestial that was formerly as air and food to his being; and to know that man's folly, man's utter selfishness, man's cruelty, keep him thus exiled, an outcast from pardon and peace. Man's nobleness may lift the lost spirit almost within reach of his lost joys, but man's vileness drags him down again-easy was the torture of Sisyphus compared with the torture of Satan. No wonder that he loathes mankind; small blame to him if he seeks to destroy the puny tribe eternally; little marvel that he grudges them their share of immortality; think of it as a legend merely". and he turned upon me with a movement that was almost fierce "Christ redeemed man, and by His teaching showed how it was possible for man to redeem the devil.”

A VISION OF THE DAMNED.

Now the story is hurrying to its close. After spending some time in Egypt and seeing visions there, they rejoin the yacht and set out for the Riviera. Tempest determined to marry Mavis Clare-if he could. Full of this pleasant dream he went off to sleep:

About midnight I awoke, vaguely terrified, to see the cabin full of a strong red light and fierce glare. My first dazed impression was that the yacht was on fire, the next instant I became paralysed and dumb with horror. Sybil stood before me

Sybil, a wild, strange, tortured writhing figure, half nude, waving beckoning arms, and making desperate gestures. Her face was as I had seen it last in death, livid and hideous... her eyes blazed mingled menace, despair, and warning upon me. Round her a living wreath of flame coiled upwards like a twisted snake . . . her lips moved as though she strove to speak, but no sound came from them, and while I yet looked up at her she vanished. I must have lost consciousness then, for when I awoke it was broad day. But this ghastly visitation was only the first of many such, and at last every night I saw her thus, sheeted in flame, till I grew well-nigh mad with fear and misery. My torment was indescribable, yet I said nothing to Lucio, who watched me, as I imagined, narrowly. I took sleeping draughts in the hope to procure unbroken rest, but in vain, always I woke at one particular moment, and always I had to face this fiery phantom of my dead wife, with despair in her eyes and an unuttered warning on her lips.

BLOOD FREEZING AD LIB.

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He thinks of committing suicide, but is disturbed by the Prince, who sees what he is about to do, and says, “I will go away, I would not disturb you for the world." "You say that!" said Tempest. "I thought you were my friend." The Prince looked full at him, his eyes grew large and luminous with the splendour of scorn, passion, and sorrow intermingled. Did you?"-and again a terrific smile lit up his features. "You are mistaken: I am your enemy." His dark and frowning figure seemed to increase in stature, towering above him like a gigantic shadow of a thunder cloud. "My blood froze with an unimaginable sickening terror, and then thick darkness filled my sight and I dropped down senseless." The rest of the story gets almost too wild and whirling for words. The fortieth chapter begins:-" Thunder and wild tumult -the glare of lightning, the shattering roar of great waves leaping mountains high and hissing asunder in mid-air, this fierce riot of savage elements let loose in a whirling boisterous dance of death. I awoke at last with a

convulsive shock. Staggering to my feet, I stood in the black obscurity of my cabin, trying to rally my scattered forces; the electric lamps were extinguished, and the lightning alone illumined the sepulchral darkness.

AVE, SATHANAS! AVE!

Frantic shoutings echoed above me on deck-fiend-like yells that sounded now like triumph, now like despair, and again like menace. The yacht leaped to and fro like a hunted stag amid the furious billows, and every frightful crash of thunder threatened, as it seemed, to split her in twain. The wind howled like a devil in torment; it screamed and moaned and sobbed as though endowed with a sentient body that suffered acutest agony; anon it rushed downwards with an angry swoop as of wide, flapping wings, and so forth. It is a kind of overture, which after a time becomes articulate; fierce cries mingle with jarring thunder, and the waves roar, the wind shrieks, and I leapt erect as I caught the words of the clangorous shout, Ave Sathanas! Ave!'" Lest he should not hear it plainly, the lightning writes it in a snaky line of fire in the darkness. It is no wonder then his brain swims round and grows full to bursting. He feels he is going mad, raving mad, when suddenly the prince-like black phantom in the pale, strange light surrounding him stills the storm with a word, and then tells him he has chosen him out of millions to learn in this life the lesson that all must learn hereafter.

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THE DEVIL'S SERMON.

He went on, a lambent radiance encircling his brow, and a burning glow steadily deepening and flashing from his eyes, and preached the following sermon :

"They behold in you a shameless egoist, persistently engaged in defacing their divine image of immortality, and for that sin there is no excuse and no escape but punishment. Whosoever prefers self to God, and in the arrogance of that self, presumes to doubt and deny God, invites another power to compass his destinies-the power of evil, made evil and kept evil by the disobedience and wickedness of man alone, that power whom mortals call Satan, Prince of Darkness, but whom once the angels knew as Lucifer, Prince of Light." He broke off, paused, and his flaming regard fell full upon me. "Do you know me now?"

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Men make their own choice and form their own futures, and never let them dare to say they are not free to choose. From the uttermost reaches of high Heaven the spirit of God descended to them as man; from the uttermost depths of lowest hell, I, the spirit of rebellion, come, equally as man. But the God-in-man was rejected and slain; I, the devil-in-man live on, for ever accepted and adored. Man's choice this isnot God's or mine.

"I have chosen you because you are a type of the apparently respected and unblamable man. You are not what the world calls a criminal; you have murdered no one-yon have stolen no neighbour's goods-your unchastities and adulteries are those of every fashionable' vice-monger-and your blasphemies against the Divine are no worse than those of the most approved modern magazine-contributors.

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For the Egotist there is no chance of wholesome penitence, since to himself he is perfect, and counts his Creator as somewhat inferior. This present time of the world breathes Egotism -the taint of self, the hideous worship of money, corrodes all life, all thought, all feeling.

"The End is near; I take my part in that end-for the souls of mankind are not done with when they leave their fleshly tenements. When this planet is destroyed, as a bubble broken in the air, the souls of men and women live on-as the soul of the woman you loved lives on-as the soul of the mother who bore her lives on-aye, as all my worshippers live on through a myriad worlds, a myriad phases, till they learn to shape their destinies for Heaven. And I, with them, live on in many shapes, in many ways. When they return to God, cleansed and perfect, so shall I return-but not till then."

His accents sunk to an infinitely mournful cadence. "What have your teachers done with me and my eternal sorrows?" he went on. "Have not they, and the unthinking churches, proclaimed a lie against me, saying that I rejoice in evil? O man, to whom, by God's will, and because the world's end draws nigh, I unveil a portion of the mystery of my doom, learn now, once and for all, that there is no possible joy in evil it is the despair and the discord of the universe; it is man's creation, my torment, God's sorrow. Every sin of every human being adds weight to my torture, and length to my doom, yet my oath against the world must be kept. I have sworn to tempt, to do my uttermost to destroy mankind, but man has not sworn to yield to my tempting. He is freelet him resist, and I depart; let him accept me, I remain. Eternal justice has spoken; humanity, through the teaching of God made human, must work out its own redemption-and mine."

THE DEVIL AN ANGEL.

He ceased. Telling him, “You shall understand with whom you have dwelt so long, in whose company you have sailed perilous seas, one who, proud and rebellious like you, errs less in that he owns God and his Master." hellish tortures, scintillant glories, etc., and crowned with Then the orchestra chimes in again, with thunder crashes, a mystic radiance as of trembling stars of fire, he beheld, not the Prince, but an angel; a sublime figure, towering between him and the moonlit sky, the face austerely grand and beautiful, shone forth luminously pale; the eyes were full of unquenchable pain, unspeakable remorse, unimaginable despair. All around was a dense crowd of faces, wild and wonderful, whose imploring eyes were turned upon him in piteous agony, the air darkened and lightened with the shadow and brightness of wings. Vast pinions of crimson flame began to unfurl and spread upwards, shafted pinions of burning rose, streamed upward, flaming from his dark form, and sprung aloft in a blaze of scintillant glory, and a voice, infinitely sad, yet infinitely sweet, struck solemn music from the frozen silence.

The ship, which had been frozen up in icebergs, crashes through the ice with a noise of thunder, and face to face with immortal despair, Tempest and the angel, steered by Amiel, rush onwards to the world's end. On the way they pass a pale creature, a white woman's shape clothed in her long hair, wearing the anguished face of Sybil. She casts herself down upon the deck and weeps. He realises what an angel a little guiding love and patience might have made her. "At last I pitied her; I had not pitied her before."

THE LAST CHOICE.

Then a solemn sound of music surged upon the air, and once more the penetrating voice of the fallen archangel addressed him, giving him his last choice :

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Fate strikes thine hour, and in this hour it is given thee to choose thy Master. Now, by the will of God, thou seest me as Angel; but take heed thou forget not that among men I am as Man. In human form I move with all humanity through endless ages; to kings and counsellors, to priests and scientists, to thinkers and teachers, to old and young, I come in the shape their pride or vice demands, and am as one with all. Self finds in me another Ego; but from the pure in heart, the high in faith, the perfect in intention, I do retreat with joy, offering naught save reverence, demanding naught save prayer. So am I, so must I ever be, till Man of his own will releases and redeems me. Mistake me not, but know me; and choose thy future for truth's sake and not out of fear. Choose and change not in any time hereafter; this hour, this moment, is thy last probation. Choose, I say! Wilt thou serve Self and Me, or God only?"

As the question was thundered in his ears Tempest looked round and saw a gathering crowd of faces, white,

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'Arise, Lucifer, Son of the Morning! One soul rejects thee, one hour of joy is granted thee. Hence and arise!"

Earth, air and the sea blazed suddenly into fiery gold. Blinded and stunned, I was seized by compelling hands, and held firmly down by a force invisible, ... the yacht was slowly sinking under me. Overwhelmed with unearthly terrors, my lips yet murmured,

"God! God only." The heavens changed from gold to crimson-anon to shining blue, . . . and against this mass of waving colour, that seemed to make a jewelled archway of the sky, I saw the form of him whom I had known as man swiftly ascend, god-like, with flaming pinions and upturned glorious visage, like a vision of light in darkness. Around him clustered a million winged shapes; but He, supreme, majestic, wonderful, towered high above them all, a very king of splendour, the glory round his brows resembling meteor-fires in an Arctic midnight-his eyes, twin stars, ablaze with such great rapture as seemed half agony. Breathless and giddy, I strained my sight to follow him as he fled; . . . and heard the

musical calling of strange sweet voices everywhere, from east to west, from north to south

"Lucifer! Beloved and unforgotten. Lucifer, Son of the Morning, arise. . . arise. . ."

I was falling,-falling,-into unimaginable depths, when another voice, till then unheard, solemn, yet sweet, spoke aloud

"Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outermost darkness of the world. There let him find my light."

I heard, yet felt no fear.

"God only," I said, as I sank into the vast profound. Once more... yet once. . . the Angel-visage bent its warning looks on me,... I saw the anguished smile, the great burning eyes with immortal sorrows. WELL-?

The last chapter is an anti-climax and need not be quoted here. This is a rapid and faithful summary of a book which has already sold by the score of thousands, and which we are given to understand is being eagerly devoured by princes and sovereigns at home and abroad. What are we to think of it as a literary phenomenon? The conception, I have said, is novel and even sublime.. It is worked out with an audacity that does not shrink from blasphemy. The execution is vigorous-after thevigour of a tambour major. Its conspicuous quality is lack of restraint of any kind. To use, a vulgar phrase, Marie Corelli lets herself go with a vengeance all over the shop. It is as if the book were printed in capitals, and illuminated from cover to cover with the most glaring colours of the pyrotechnic artist. She paints indeed, but it is with a brush as huge as a bill-sticker's. But let no one despise it. It is the supreme example of a popular style; the zenith attained by the Penny Dreadfulesque in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

OUR MONTHLY PARCEL OF BOOKS.

DEAR MR. SMURTHWAYT, The three books that

have been selling best this past month are all of them novels-a bad sign, perhaps, were it not for the fact that the other three that go to make up the halfdozen "most in demand" represent theology, biography, and history of an unusually excellent description. Here is the list:

The Sorrows of Satan; or, the Strange Experience of
Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: Romance.
Corelli. 68.

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The Chronicles of Count Antonio. By Anthony Hope. 6s.
The Men of the Moss-Hags. By S. R. Crockett. 68.
The Teaching of Jesus. By R. F. Horton. 3s. 6d.
John Stuart Blackie: a Biography. By Anna M. Stod-

dart. 21s.

Westminster. By Sir Walter Besant. 18s.

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henchmen he counts just such another couple as Little John and Will Scarlet. And these " Chronicles" have just about as much connection as had Robin Hood's adventures. On the whole, I cannot help saying that Mr. Hope has done far better work, and trusting that he will do better. "The Prisoner of Zenda" has still to find a worthy successor from his pen, and so, for the matter of that, after its kind, has "Mr. Witt's Widow." "The Men of the Moss-Hags By Marie (Isbister, 6s.) has the Stevensonian sub-title, "A History of Adventure taken from the Papers of William Gordon of Earlstoun in Galloway, and told over again by S. R. Crockett," and it has a very Stevensonian flavour. But, well written though it is, it has little of the sense of inevitable rightness which was one of the distinguishing charms of "Kidnapped" and its fellows. In his dedication to Mr. Andrew Lang, "Poet, Romancer, Scholar, and Friend," Mr. Crockett calls his book an "attempt at a true history of some who fought bravely beneath the Banner of Blue." Certainly its pages do not lack brave fighting, and bloody. If you cared at all for "The Raiders," you will like "The Men of the Moss-Hags." It deserves a similar success. Mr. Horton's "The Teaching of Jesus" (Isbister, (3s. 6d.) is a volume of theology of a kind one is delighted to see selling so well. It deals with essentials, and deals with them well. It will help vastly to clear away what is effete and cobweb-clogged in the religious conceptions of the man in the street. "There is a new breath in modern theology, as if the air were stealing from the

At least Miss Marie Corelli sells; she may well claim to be independent of the reviewers! And Mr. Anthony Hope is another writer whom the public rushes at once to buy-especially when, as in his new book, "The Chronicles of Count Antonio" (Methuen, 6s.), he deals with a Zenda kind of milieu, with plots and counterplots, intrigues, gallantries, and clash of steel. His new hero is an Italian Robin Hood, who, baulked of his love, and outlawed from his native State, the pocketDuchy of Firmola, withdraws himself with some threescore sturdy followers to the fastnesses of the hills. Antonio's adventures are all of the kind that fell to the lot of the hero of Sherwood Forest, and among his

stiff lips of winter, and the Christian faith were about to become again the animating spirit of men and nations. It is due to a remarkable revival of interest in the teaching of Jesus"-so run the first two sentences of Mr. Horton's work, and they strike the right note-a note sustained by the succeeding pages. Miss Stoddart's "John Stuart Blackie: a Biography" (Blackwood, 21s.) is in two volumes, and is an adequate and exceedingly readable life of a man who had stamped the impress of his personality upon the Scottish people in a manner little short of miraculous. Miss Stoddart has made the best of her subject, excellent one as it is, and every page of the work is interesting. For frontispiece there is a good etching of the Professor, after a portrait by Sir George Reid, P.R.S.A. Then you will find Sir Walter Besant's "Westminster" (Chatto, 18s.), a bulky volume, the inevitable but none the less welcome complement to his "London." Like that book, "Westminster makes no pretence at being a history. Written for a magazine in a series of articles, it is discursive rather than scientific in plan, but its scope is large, and it succeeds admirably in revivifying for us the dry bones of the past, in peopling again the Westminster of earliest time, of the Middle Ages, and of more recent days. Its object, chiefly and in brief, is "to present the place as a town and borough, with its streets and its people," and naturally its interest is as much topographical as historical. The numerous illustrations, including an etched frontispiece of the Abbey, deserve your special attention.

You can turn now to the ordinary contents of your box, to the books which, while they have been talked about to a certain extent and are worth your reading, have still not reached the extreme popularity of the halfdozen I have just mentioned. Let me take history first. Mr. Basil Worsfold's "South Africa: a Study in Colonial Administration and Development" (Methuen, 6s.), is likely to be the most useful; but more immediately interesting is "The Relief of Chitral" (Macmillan, 8s. 6d. net), by Captains G. J. and Frank E. Younghusband, two brothers who served through the campaign as Times correspondents. It contains maps and numerous reproductions of photographs, and, with Mr. Thomson's "The Chitral Campaign," that I sent you last month, gives an unusually clear idea of the operations and difficulties of our troops. A volume, larger but not unsimilar, and very readable, is "The Land of the Nile Springs: being Chiefly an Account of How we Fought Kabarega" (Arnold, 16s.), by Colonel Sir Henry Colvile.

Perhaps Mr. Charles Lowe's "The German Emperor William II." (Bliss, 3s. 6d.), the new volume of the Public Men of To-day series, will interest you most of the volumes of biography I send. Certainly it is the most actual. Mr. Hume Brown's "John Knox: a Biography" (Black, 24s.), is a very serious study of the life, the work and the times of a man whom Mr. Brown considers to be, with his countryman and contemporary, George Buchanan, one of the most representative men of his century. "The history of their life and work 'belongs not merely to their own country, but to the -general development of Europe." Mr. Brown's object has been to present Knox in a two-fold aspect-at once as a great Scotsman and as a figure of European importance; and the better to do justice to his theme he has virtually written the religious and political history of the whole 'period of Knox's activity in Scotland. Then you will welcome Dr. George Smith's " Bishop Heber: Poet and Chief Missionary to the East, 1783-1826" (Murray, 10s. 6d.), which has an unexpected value as containing a number

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of letters and verses that have not appeared elsewhere. Dr. John Todhunter's "Life of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, with a Short Narrative of the Principal Events of the Jacobite War in Ireland" (Unwin, 1s.) is a volume of the New Irish Library; while the Hon. Lionel A. Tollemache's Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol" (Arnold, 3s. 6d.) is a very much expanded reprint of an essay, partly critical, partly compact of reminiscences, which attracted no little attention on its first appearance in the Journal of Education. Of similar interest is Mr. Augustus J.C. Hare's "Biographical Sketches" (George Allen, 8s. 6d.), containing "memorials" of Dean Stanley, Dean Alford, and Mrs. Duncan Stewart, and, for a reason not easy to discern, a paper on the French provincial town Paray le Monial. Each of his subjects Mr. Hare seems to have known intimately, and his book has plenty of new and valuable information. Dr. John Skelton's Table-Talk of Shirley" (Blackwood, 7s. 6d) is perhaps the most. thoroughly readable volume of reminiscences that has appeared this year. "Shirley" has known every one of importance for decades past, and his stories of and letters from men as diverse as Froude, Thackeray, Disraeli, Browning, Rossetti, Kingsley, Huxley and Tyndall give the volume a fascination and a value such as few books of the kind have. But-there is no index! last volume of biography, "Great Astronomers (Isbister, 7s. 6d.), partakes of the nature of a history of Astronomy, for Sir Robert Ball tells the tale of the life and work of eighteen astronomers, commencing with Ptolemy and Copernicus, and dealing in turn with Galileo, Isaac Newton, the Herschels, Laplace, the Earl of Rosse, and others. The papers are well illustrated.

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The

In "In a Walled Garden" (Ward and Downey, 6s.) Madame Belloc has collected many of the bright and fragrant flowers which from time to time this veteran worker and pioneer in all good causes has contributed to contemporary literature. Madame Belloc, the first woman to edit a woman's journal, is a descendant of Dr. Priestley. Her place by heredity in the front rank of the vanguard of humanity has been maintained by the services of a long and active life. The friend of George Eliot, Mary Howitt, Miss Procter, and a host of other distinguished women of this country, she was by her marriage brought into close relations with French literary society. In "In a Walled Garden " will find a good deal of new matter hitherto unpublished, correspondence with many eminent men and women, reminiscences of Cardinal Manning, Mrs. Jameson, Lady Georgina Fullerton, and glimpses of many notables of the recent past. One paper, "A Chapter of War," contains a vivid picture of the desolation which the German invasion wrought in the domesticities of residents at the seat of war.

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As I have nothing of legal or political interest that is new to send you this month, you cannot do better than read again Mr. R. H. Hutton's edition of Walter Bagehot's "Economical Studies" (Longmans, 3s. 6d.), which, with others of Bagehot's works, has just made its appearance in the Silver Library. I say "read again," for I suppose you are already acquainted with the two papers on the Transferability of Labour and of Capital, which make up his essay on "The Postulates of English Political Economy," with his "Preliminaries of Political Economy" and his studies of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, the Growth of Capital, and the Cost of Production.

The second, long-expected volume of the late Dr. Romanes's "Darwin, and After Darwin: an Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a Discussion of PostDarwinian Questions" (Longmans, 10s. 6d.), most of

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