sweet-natured, sweet-tempered men who ever lived.... His hand never took a liberty with a human face, or a horse's head; and whenever it went a little astray, you could always read between the lines, and know exactly what it meant." We are not so fond of, because we are not so familiar with, Charles Keene in this country as we should be; but every word du Maurier has written of him is true.

A number of du Maurier's works have appeared since his death. Perhaps these "Reminiscences and Appreciations of English Illustrators of the Past Generation," will prove to be the last. They certainly are not the worst. In the volume he has carried out his purpose to speak of the craft to which he devoted the best years of his life, the craft of portraying by means of little pen-and-ink strokes, by lines and scratches, a small portion of the world in which we live; and he has given us a better understanding of the humorous and satirical treatment of the illustrated criticism of life in the last half of the century, as it is to be found in the work of Leech, Keene, and du Maurier, than we have ever had before.

If Mark Lemon had accomplished nothing else, he would have done the world in which we live good service in advising the young artist on “Punch" to "do the graceful side of life." Since du Maurier took up the pen as well as the brush and the pencil, these pages have contained many words concerning him in his double career, as author and artist; written by one who, in his unimportant way, has had the great good fortune to know, in the flesh, no matter how slightly, not only du Maurier but Thackeray and Charles Keene; and he wonders if some day-where there are no days -he will see them in the spirit, with the added spirit of John Leech!

MR. GEORGE GISSING, in one of the later chapters of a volume called Charles Dickens, A Critical Study,' says that-"twenty years ago a familiar topic for debating societies was a comparison of the literary characteristics of Dickens and Thackeray. Not impossibly, the theme is still being discussed in country towns, or London suburbs." And then he goes on to show how absurd this all is, how manifest are the points of difference between the two authors, how easy of dismissal their mutual relations in literature; and he adds that debate, in the proper sense, as to which is the greater novelist there could, and can, be none. We do not know how the country towns of England or the London suburbs discuss the matter now; but it is curious that no reader in America to-day, who has the courage to say that he cannot read Dickens, does not fail to put on record, as a half-apology and almost immediately, the fact that he does like Thackeray, or rice versa!

• Charles Dickens. A Critical Study. BY GEORGE GISSING. 12mo, Cloth, $2. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co.

ness.

From his sub-title it will be inferred, naturally and truly, that Mr. Gissing is treating of Dickens the novelist, not of Dickens the individual; of whom he seems to have known but little, if anything; for he says 66 we are told that the eyes of Dickens were very bright; impressing all who met him with a sense of their keenness." No man who ever caught the eyes of Dickens, even from a platform in New York, or from a hansom in London, ever failed to be impressed, directly, by their keenBut, as a critical study, thorough, unprejudiced and exhaustive, the book cannot be too highly commended. It touches upon, and in most instances, it dwells upon, each one of the great community of characters who have formed, for so many years, a little world in themselves. Mr. Gissing evidently knows them all intimately, he has certainly studied them all carefully and analytically; and, generally, he does them full justice, as human beings; although he dwells upon what he calls their "far-fetched eccentricity" and their frequent fantastic exaggeration; which seem to have impressed all the critical students of Dickens, since Mr. Winkle and the Wellers were first created. Impossible as many of these persons appear, in cold type; is there not in the mind's eye of every reader of these lines, at least some one particular individual of either sex, in real life, acquaintance, relative or friend, who, if put into a book would not seem quite as exaggerated, as impossible, as eccentric, as typical as is Miss Betsy Trotwood, Mr. Wopsle, John Jarndyce, or as Sally Brass herself?

We look upon Mr. Gissing in this country as a story-teller, rather than as an essayist, or as the reviewer of the stories of other persons. His name appears upon the title pages of a dozen works, which are what one of our contemporaries calls " solid, honest, patient, and full of ideas." He treats of the seamy side of life, of the lower middle classes of whom Dickens was so fond; his scenes, generally, are laid in the East End of London, or in what is called "across the River"; and his people are the small shop-keepers and toilers of Kennington, not of the Kensington of Thackeray; -the slight changing of the spelling marking, most emphatically, the distance intervening between the two quarters of the Metropolis. They are four miles apart, as the 'bus creeps, they are four hundred miles apart, in the social scale. As a realist himself, Mr. Gissing may be pardoned for seeing in the Dick Swivellers and the Tom Linkwaters of Dickens, certain qualities which he thinks are not real; but we can hardly forgive him for saying "that a novel more shapeless, a story less coherent than Martin Chuzzlewitt' will not easily be found in any literature!" Nevertheless, in the present book, he has certainly succeeded in considering, faithfully and honestly, the career of Dickens, in reviewing his literary work, in regarding him from the

stand-point of posterity, and in estimating his relation to an age which is passing away; but which in the pages of Dickens is likely to live for some ages to come.

5

THE author of "English Words, An Elementary Study of Derivations," Mr. Charles F. Johnson, Professor of English Literature, at Trinity College, Hartford, has lately published an admirable little book called the Elements of Literary Criticism, well worth the serious attention, not only of the "Learners," for whom it was prepared, but of those who think they have learned, by study and by experience, something of the proper expression of thoughts and ideas. He has divided his discourse into a number of chapters, devoted to "Unity," to "The Power of Drawing Character," to "The Writer's Philosophy," to "The Musical Word Power," to "The Phrasal Power," to "The Descriptive Power," and to "The Emotional Power"; and while their admirers may not always accept some of his conclusions concerning the works of Byron, Thackeray, Whitman, Dickens, George Eliot and others, they must admire the word power and the phrasal power in which these conclusions are couched. He "relegates Byron, magnificent artist as he is, to the second or third rank." He speaks of " the formless waste of words that lies on the pages of Whitman." He says that in the novels of Dickens "the course of events is unnatural. Everything is theoretical, and all the characters are posing.... He was successful too early, and too easily, to compass the meaning of life. His work can never take a strong hold of future generations, and he lacked the philosophical insight which understands without experience, and interprets by the imagination." Of George Eliot he writes:-"In clearness and individuality of her characters she is hardly inferior to Shakspere. Her personages are well rounded-out human figures, though lacking in the full rich human nature of Shakspere's. But they are confined to the genus Englishman of the early Nineteenth Century, with the exception of the Fifteenth Century Italians in Romola,' and do not embrace types of the man universal. They are insular and contemporaneous.... In affluence George Eliot is not remarkable. Middlemarch' is a broad canvas, but it is not very closely crowded." And in contrasting "Vanity Fair" with "The Newcomes," he declares that "in real life so able a woman as Becky Sharp would never have failed as Becky Sharp did."

It must not be inferred from these extracts that Professor Johnson is nothing if not critical. He does due justice in all cases where justice is due. He is broad and liberal and unprejudiced in his views; and he is the master of a style of English diction, by the careful study

5 Elements of Literary Criticism. By CHARLES F. JOHNSON. 16mo, Cloth, 80 cents. New York and London: Harper and Brothers.

of which all "Learners," in all the schools of criticism, may well profit.

In regard to the power of expressing thought in musical words, he says, "This, though but a small matter in itself, contributes more than any other element to giving a production lasting popularity. It is a complex matter of vowel sequence, consonant sequence, phrase cadence, and sentence wave, subtly related to the thought, and a result of the complex personality of the writer. It colors the thought, somewhat in the same way that the tone of the voice, modulation, gesture, and expression of the face, color vocal utterance, making it infinitely richer and fuller, and sometimes giving words a meaning quite different from their bare significance." Elsewhere the author writes:-"Literary form gives language a scope and a reach which it does not possess as a language. Furthermore, although the primary motive of the writer does not affect the literary value of the product--he may wish, for instance, merely to entertain-there is in our race a bond between the love of beauty and the love of reality or truth, so that what is put in the literary form is almost invariably instructive in the highest sense, and moral in the highest sense."

Professor Johnson does not write to entertain. What he writes is moral and instructive in the highest sense, and it is invariably put in the literary form.

To the copy of HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, which bears the date, July 1886, the present writer contributed his first "Literary Note"; and, at the end of twelve years, voluntarily, but with no little natural regret, he discontinues his connections with this particular Department of the periodical; feeling that he, and his readers, need a rest and a change; and asking for his successor all the kindly sympathy and attention which he himself has received.

He has enjoyed the work; and he hopes that he has done, or has said, nothing to harm those of whom he has written, or to whom he has written. Although, generally, he has dealt with but one line of publications, he has always been left free to express his personal estimation of the works in question; and he has looked, in books and in authors, for what was good rather than for what was bad. While it is very much easier to blame than to praise, he has tried to show his appreciation of the best efforts of the older writers, and to encourage, not to dishearten, the younger.

When the volume submitted to him showed, what he felt were, signs of indefensible carelessness, incompetency or indelicacy, he has preferred to remain silent altogether, rather than to condemn.

This may not be the Element of true Literary Criticism; but it seems to him to be the spirit of The Golden Rule!

VOL. XCVII

No. DLXXVIII

spun

OU are going to have the great sennaval lieutenant who had made the trip upon which Ethel Barrowe was starting, and she remembered the prophecy day after day as the "great sensation" itself out. It was a sight-seeing sensation that he meant to predict, for Miss Barrowe was going through southern Russia as far as Batoum, and then across the Caucasus, and so back again. Eccentric old Mrs. Barrowe, her rich aunt, had invited her to leave home in Cincin nati and visit her in Athens, where the old lady employed her wealth and leisure in the pursuit of such pious and humane projects as the succor of the Cretans and the relief of the Armenians projects which the scoffers among her friends characterized as "dreams," and other persons, of less importance to her the leading statesmen of continental Europeregarded as mischievous nightmares. Now that she had her pretty niece to entertain, she was starting upon a journey she never would have made alone, to show the young woman what the Russians call their Riviera and their Switzerland, and to meet those Armenians through whom she had been generously contributing for the cause of their oppressed brethren in Turkey.

"Dreams," did I call her amusements? Then both women were dreamers, because Miss Ethel was a poor girl floated above the trials of her position by her fond hopes, for she knew that her aunt liked her better than any relative she had, and she aspired to become her heir. And now she was about to cross Europe and penetrate Asia-she who until a month before had never been twenty miles from Cincinnati, and in that city learned no more of the world than one gets from member

Copyright, 1898, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved.

ship of a Baptist sewing circle, a progrestalked-about novels of each year.

On the way to Moscow and southward to the Black Sea the lieutenant's prediction lost weight. The Czar's wheat and cabbage farm, called Russia, is mainly a great flat dish of earth, with a dull sky bent down all around to meet the rim-a tiresome monotone of grass and grain, flecked with villages of wretched cabins with thatched roofs, brown as so many rats in a granary. If there is variety, its effect on the mind more than offsets the little pleasure it brings to the eyes, for it must consist of an over-costly church and of the squalid people who have built it. But by nine o'clock on the third day from Moscow the earth began to rumple into broken limestone hills, guttered with canyons and crevices. Orchards appeared, and the shade trees became willows and locusts, instead of the incessant pines and birches of older Russia. The houses changed into the modern Greek typeone-storied stucco or stone, painted white or yellow, roofed with heavy red tiles, always walled around, and usually showing the soft round tops of small trees staring over the walls.

Suddenly the train crawled out of a tunnel to the edge of a cliff overlooking the blue, yellow, and white port of Sebastopol. Beyond the blue of the harbor, dotted with stately men-of-war, lay a bigger reach of liquid indigo--the Black Sea. It was October, and only the day before all Russia, apparently, had been whitened by hoar-frost. But now the car windows, all opened, let in air as warm as the breathings of cattle. Arrived at the station, the travellers found themselves in a Levantine city, with the usual white