has to be taken where the driver pleases.

To-day there is no such picturesque gradation as mistress and maid. The well-known passage "As the eyes of a maiden are unto the hands of her mistress" will soon be "revised" into "As the eyes of a mistress are unto the hands of her maid"-meals, holidays, and hospitalities must be arranged to please the cook and housemaid.

To-day it is not true that "he who pays the piper calls the tune"; on the contrary, he who pays the piper must take whatever tune the piper likes, best to play and be thankful that the trombone is not thrown at his head. To-day there is no privacy. Gutter

The London Times.

journalism has made privacy impossible. What with telegrams, telephones, interviews, cables, and fertile imagination, private life has disappeared. The hearthstone has been exchanged for the housetop. Life is now in very deed a variety of "the open-air treatment."

And yet the quenchless world lives on, and in a rough way thrives and fattens. The world, happily, is not its own engineer. "There is a divinity that shapes our ends." Have faith in God. Generations come and go on leaden feet, but the God of generations dwells in the abiding tabernacle whence all the hidden wonders of ages pass slowly but vividly across the plane of time.

A committee of Danes is about erecting at Elsinore a monument to Shakespeare. It is to be placed in the open space between the town harbor and the railway station, facing the SOcalled "Hamlet Terrace" of Kronberg Castle. This is the spot where Hamlet met his father's ghost, and near the castle are exhibited what are called the grave of Hamlet and "Ophelia's brook."

The latest estimate of the yearly output of novels puts the total at more than eight thousand. Italy and Spain are credited with only 600 between them. France prints only 600 a year. The united Scandinavian countries are credited with the same number. Russia publishes 800 a year. The English-speaking peoples and the Germans issue the greatest number of novels. Anglo-Saxondom, with 2,000 new

titles, exclusive of double publications, leads all the rest.

Whether a truer loyalty to the marriage bond would result from the removal of its legal sanctions and penalties is the "problem" discussed in Helen Choate Prince's new novel, "The Strongest Master;" the central figure is a social-reformer who preaches the gospel of freedom with an imperiousness which over-rides the reluctance of his daughter and the scruples of her lover, and imposes upon them the trial of his theories; and the plot reaches its climax with the birth of their child. The opening chapters of the book, which find the hero just expelled from Harvard, are not in the same key with those that follow; the plot lacks continuity and concentrated effect; and the writer has not risen at any point to the possibilities

of her theme. But her story is readable. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In "A Little Captive Lad" Beulah Marie Dix proves that she can spin a story for boys and girls as delightfully as she can for older people-which is saying a good deal. Her "little lad" is the youngest son of an English Cavalier, taken from his hiding-place among his father's friends in Holland and brought home to the household of an elder brother who has cast in his lot with the Parliamentarians. The adventures into which his boyish loyalty leads him furnish the outline of a plot to which Miss Dix's exceptional gifts of insight and portrayal add human interest of a rare quality. would be hard to find a more satisfactory book. The Macmillan Co.

It

Mr. Aldrich's slender volumes are as welcome as they are infrequent, and the short stories which Houghton, Mifflin & Co. publish this season, under the title "A Sea Turn and Other Matters," though none of them-unless, possibly, "Thomas Phipps"-will linger in the memory as some of his earlier fiction has done, are marked by the ingenuity, the deft touch, and the easy blending of wit with sympathy which make all his work so charming. The scene of the initial story-a whimsical study in married life is laid at Marblehead; "Shaw's Folly" describes the experiences of a would-be philanthropist in New York; an episode of the Civil War is the subject of "The White Feather;" and Budapest is the background for "An Untold Story."

The Anthony Hope of "Quisanté" and the Anthony Hope of the "Dolly Dialogues" have collaborated with a new and shadowy Anthony Hope who models himself after the writers of

"Trilby" and "Sentimental Tommy," with a result that is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. There is ingenuity in "The Intrusions of Peggy," and persiflage, and satire on ambitions social and political, and character-probing very shrewd of its sort, and brilliant Bohemianism, and sentiment and irresponsibility galore. Trix Trevalla, the giddy young widow, is well drawn, and Lord Mervyn, her pompous fiancé, and Fricker, the promoter, and Mrs. Bonfil, who "likes to shape people's lives." But Peggy herself, the dea ex machina, with her wonderful hair and borrowed frocks and cigarettes and lobster suppers and easy, optimistic "intrusions" into her friends' affairs of heart and soulPeggy is not real. Worse than all, the reader is glad of it. Harper & Bros.

The "Captain Craig" who gives his name to the title-poem in Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson's volume of verse, and claims nearly half the volume for his own appears to be a bibulous and philosophic tramp into whose lips the author sees fit to put sundry reflections on life and conduct. With a wise prescience he foresees that his friend's remarks may be dull:

They may be dreariness Unspeakable to you that never saw The Captain: but to five or six of us Who knew him they are not so bad as that.

Perhaps not: but the chance reader, who is not one of the five or six, will find them dreary, and pretty nearly as deficient in sanity as they are in that divine quality of imagination which, rather than any count of syllables or use of capitals, distinguishes poetry from prose. The second half of the book contains little to redeem the first, and the net impression is of crudity and cynicism in about equal parts. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

It has been the vogue for a considerable time to speak of contemporary Italian literature as a negligible quantity; as at best a beautiful garden, now untended and unkempt, where the few flowers are all but undiscoverable among the wilderness of weedy growths a garden illumined, it may be, by the sunset radiance of Carducci, or by the summer-lightning of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Generalizations of the kind are notoriously misleading. Guy de Maupassant trenchantly alluded to them as the boomerangs of the would-be clever, that on occasion might hit their object, but were more likely to return upon the thrower. The other day we read in a foreign summary that, since Walter Scott, no novelists of note had appeared in our country, and that since Byron British muse had been silent. statement is not further from mark than that alluded to as common among us, nor than the rash assertion

the This

the

1. "Poesie." By Giosue Carducci (complete poetical works in one volume). Bologna: Zanichelli, 1900.

By

2. "Poesie Scelte"; "Valsolda"; etc. Antonio Fogazzaro. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1900.

3. "Dopo il Tramonto"; "Li Danaidi"; "Morgana"; etc. By Arturo Graf. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1890-1901. "Medusa." By the same. (New edition.) Turin: Loescher, 1890.

4. "Fatalita"; "Tempeste"; etc. By Ada Negri. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1895; 1896. 5. "Myricae." By Giovanni Pascoli. Livor

made a short time ago by one who ought to have known better, that there was not a latter-day poet, painter, or musician in Italy who stood above mediocrity-and this in the Italy of Carducci, of Segantini, of Verdi!

A juster note was struck a few years ago by one of the foremost French critics, the Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé, in whose now famous essay on the Latin Renaissance occur these significant words:

L'Italie est à cette heure le foyer d'une véritable renaissance de la poésie et du roman. L'esprit, qui souffle où il veut, rallume là des clartés évanouies sous d'autres cieux.

In the same year an Italian critic of repute, Alberto Manzi, thus hopefully concludes "a summary and outlook":

Young, strong, feverishly studious and laborious, Italy is passing through a fertile period of preparation which will before long lead to a great and

no: Giusti, 1890. "Poemetti." By the same.

Milan: Sandron, 1900.

splendid display of her artistic, literary, and scientific vitality.

The truth must be sought somewhere between these optimistic declarations and the deep despondency of the late Ruggero Bonghi, who (writing, it must be remembered, some five or six years earlier, and at a time of exceptional national depression) expressed himself thus:

In the literary life of the nation there are signs of the same languor that paralyzes its economical life. I see no sign of improvement. I should be very glad if there were a way out of so great a lethargy; but I do not find it. I think that the chief cause is the lack of any strong moral movement; there is nothing that agitates the public mind.

The gracious phrase of Monsieur de Vogüé not only aroused European attention, but was welcomed in Italy, and sank deep into the finer national consciousness.

The distinguished French critic was accepted as a prophet. For Italy he foresees a worthy destiny. It is not, perhaps, the destiny dreamed of by those who carved the inchoate "geographical expression" into the solidarity of a united realm; or of those who to-day would strain the national resources for the fata morgana of a militant worldpower; but it is a destiny at once high and possible. It is not, says M. de Vogüé truly, to be achieved by war, or with great ships. It is not a destiny to be won by the sword, but by the pen ("avec quelques condottieri de la plume").

But what is of more immediate concern is that the Vicomte de Vogüé discerns clearly what the student of contemporary Italian literature must realize if he is to form a just estimate, that there is in the Italian genius a conflict of two opposing influences, the one mystical, idealistic, austere, at times ascetic, the other sensual and

pagan. Into this conflict of "les deux génies opposés, qui se disputèrent de tout temps l'âme italienne," has entered another element, the brooding spirit of the North. To the sadness and pessimism inherent in the Latin nature, along with the more obvious pagan delight in and absorbing preoccupation with life for life's sake, have come another sadness and another preoccupation. The "Melancolia" that Dürer limned in symbol, and De Quincey adumbrated in words, and the musicians of the North breathed in strange airs and harmonies; that Schopenhauer has disclosed, and Ibsen served, and Nietszche interpreted; that has inspired the Slavonic mind from Tolstoi and Turgéniev to Dostoievski and Maxim Gorki-this new melancholy (coming to Italy ever with a Teutonic aspect and accent) has taken its place in the Italian soul, to work for good or evil. We hear much of the pagan tendency of the Latin genius; to-day the thought of Italy is more colored with longing and bewilderment than with that hedonistic vision of life which is supposed to be the peculiar attribute of the peoples of the South. It is not D'Annunzio (as is so commonly assumed abroad) who is the true representative of the Italian mind, not even Carducci, the greatest of Italian poets since Leopardi; the true representatives are writers such as the northerners Antonio Fogazzaro, Arturo Graf, Ada Negri; as the southerners Mario Rapisardi, Giovanni Verga, Matilde Serao. In these the cry of revolt is against the conditions of life as produced by human wrong and folly. In Carducci it is a vain cry of revolt against the inevitable change of ideals and circumstances, a cry of

longing for the life that was, the beauty that has decayed; the cry that finds utterance in verses like these

L'ora presente è in vano, non fa che percuotere e fugge: