of any size, provided it is deep enough and has a cover, with sheets of cork sewed over the bottom inside, will take excellent care of your specimens. The sheets of cork come in size 4 x 12, one-eighth or one-fourth of an inch thick, and in different grades, varying in price from thirtyfive cents to one dollar and twenty cents per dozen sheets. "Peat" is much used now for the same purposes, and costs the same as the cheapest grade of cork. You will need a pair of slender, "long-nosed" pliers, costing perhaps twenty cents. I consider these indispensable. Now your outfit is complete, and you can put it to use at the first opportunity. The next thing to learn is how to use it when the opportunity comes. Books and Authors Charlotte Brontë1 Mr. Shorter has made no effort to write a biography of Charlotte Brontë; she herself draws the picture of her life which he exhibits to us. His work is confined to the arrangement of her letters, which apparently required little editing, and to occasional brief comments and connecting links. These are too much abbreviated at times; there are points which should be more fully elucidated, more sharply presented. Yet in general the self-restraint which Mr. Shorter displays is fitting in the kind of biography that he wished to secure. The book does not take the place of Mrs. Gaskell's memoir; it forms, rather, a valuable supplement to it. Each is necessary to the other. The abundance of new material placed at the service of Mr. Shorter makes the present work necessary. Almost none of the many letters now printed have seen the light before, and the compiler is rather too much afraid of drawing upon Mrs. Gaskell's book. In preparing the work Mr. Shorter obtained the invaluable co-operation of the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who generously, and against his personal inclination, consented to the publication of several letters which touch his marriage with Charlotte Brontë very closely. But the most important additions to our knowledge of this brilliant woman are obtained through her correspondence with Ellen Hussey and with W. S. Williams. The former was the friend of her youth, who remained intimately attached to, her until her death; and Mr. Williams, the reader for Smith & Elder, was the confidant of her literary tastes and ambitions. The correspondence with Ellen Hussey covers the period of Charlotte Brontë's maturity; and that with Mr. Williams begins in 1848 and ends in 1853, a little more than a year before her death. Mr. Shorter's arrangement of the letters is not chronological. He devotes a chapter to each of the men and women who were most closely associated with Miss Brontë's life, and prints under each head those letters which deal most largely with the personality under discussion. 1 Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle. By Clement K. Shorter. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $2.50. In spite of certain disadvantages, this method is probably more satisfactory than any other would have been. The work has been done with skill and discretion, and it reveals the very soul of the shy, reserved little woman who suddenly burst from obscurity to delight the world with the shimmer of her butterfly wings. The character of Charlotte Brontë, as shown by these letters, has wonderful gentleness and delicacy. In her correspondence she was neither reserved nor self-assertive; she was absolutely simple and sincere. Her letters, therefore, endure triumphantly the test of this publicity. A nature more sweet and gentle, more modest and unspoiled, more loyal and unselfish, has never been combined with genius. She did her duty according to her lights; and the inevitable wish that she had given more time to the world and less to the care of the house," shirt-making," and the teaching of children, is fruitless. Her conscience was a stern master, and effectually prevented any work except that which it approved. The impression of the pathetic sadness of her life remains after reading these letters. Yet they themselves are not melancholy, and when she encounters the great tragedies of her experience she mentions them with touching simplicity and reserve. She was as stainless as a lily and as fragile, unfit for contact with the world. Her shyness gave her perpetual pain, and made her two experiences as private governess a prolonged torture. She had the defects of her qualities, and there was no social adaptability in this conscientious, rigid, stern little woman. from Mary Taylor, the more intellectual and strenuous of Charlotte's two most intimate friends, thanking Mrs. Gaskell for a copy of the "Life," says that the picture is "not so gloomy as the truth," and speaks of two reviewers, "neither of whom seems to think it a strange or wrong state of things that a woman of first-rate talents, industry, and integrity should live all her life in a walking nightmare of 'poverty and selfsuppression."" But it was not these deprivations and anxieties alone which made the tragedy of Charlotte Brontë's life, potent as they were for misery to her sensitive nature. Branwell's dissi A letter pation and death, and the slow decline and death of the two beloved sisters, made her newly acquired fame but dust and ashes. Tired and heartsick, she took up again the dull routine of small duties, attending upon her father with remarkable devotion. When she finally married, her love was born of respect and pity, and gave her a quiet kind of happiness. But even this was bestowed upon her for only a few months before her premature death. The letters which tell the story of this simple life are quaint and precise-their exactness becomes almost rigidity at times-yet there are darting flames behind them. The gentleness hides masculine strength, the shyness covers more than masculine ability. And the character of the woman is revealed in this correspondence. In an early letter to Miss Hussey, she describes an occasion when she lost her temper, and adds, "I am glad you are not such a passionate fool as myself." An amusing phrase to apply to this tranquil little woman, who could say with absolute truth, "Under these circumstances [the separation of the sisters] should we repine ? I think not our mutual affection ought to comfort us under all difficulties. If the God upon whom we must all depend will but vouchsafe us health and the power to continue in the strict line of duty, so as never under any temptation to swerve from it an inch, we shall have ample reason to be grateful and contented." Her Protestant intolerance was another source of unhappiness to her, especially in Brussels, where she and Emily "hated the land and people." Mr. Shorter takes pains to refute the assertion that Charlotte was in love with M. Héger, the Paul Emanuel of "Villette." There are a few phrases in her letters which offer an excuse for this supposition, but though her admiration for the choleric little professor was touched with enthusiasm, there is no evidence that she suffered from an unrequited passion. The criticisms of this intolerant little Puritan upon those about her at the Pensionnat Héger are severe. "They have not intellect," she writes to Branwell, "or politeness, or good nature, or good feeling. They are nothing." Her friends were few, but they were close. People in general did not interest her, yet her imagination could take fire from a hint. In a letter to Emily on page 117 she relates a curious experience which she uses in "Villette "—an impulse which led her into a Catholic church and impelled her to enter the confessional. It s a delightful indication of the way she was sometimes carried outside of her rigidity. And here and there the letters have charming touches of playfulness. Branwell Brontë this biographer does not consider a genius, and he shows that the sisters were misled in several instances by this only brother. To our knowledge of Emily and Anne he can add but little, concluding that their papers were destroyed by Charlotte. He has discovered, how ever, a childish diary kept by them, which is not without interest. And he prints also two notes from Emily which deal gracefully with trivialities. Many of Charlotte's letters, however, contain interesting allusions to her sisters. This one refers to the last illness of the most isolated and heroic of the three: "Emily is a real stoic in illness; she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy. To put any questions, to offer any aid, is to annoy ; she will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not one of her ordinary avocations will she voluntarily renounce. You must look on and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word-a painful necessity to those to whom her health and existence are as precious as the life in their veins. When she is ill, there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me." But bitterly hard as it was for Charlotte to adjust herself to the new conditions, she is never morbid, she is much too sane to center the universe in herself. The story of Charlotte's four love-affairs is interesting, and adds even greater dignity to her character. The history of the impulsive Mr. Price and his love at first sight indicates that long acquaintance was not necessary to an appreciation of Charlotte's personal charm. The admiration of James Taylor, who was connected with Smith & Elder, gave her more serious thought. She describes him as "horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity." And though she ridicules some personal idiosyncrasies, there are indications that he might have been successful had he not been too easily discouraged. If she had married him, her opportunities for observation would have been greatly widened. Upon the nature of her affection for Mr. Nicholls, whom she ultimately married, these letters form an illuminating commentary. It was a case in which the strength and weakness of his terrible passion for her aroused her pity and gradually bore down her opposition. The injustice of her father's antagonism hastened the culmination. Two months before her marriage she writes, "What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender love to me. I believe him to be an affectionate, a conscientious, a high-principled man; and if, with all this, I should yield to regrets that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts, are not added, it seems to me I should be most presumptuous and thankless." Yet she does learn to love her husband with a quiet, sincere affection, and in later letters she speaks of him tenderly as "my dear boy." Perhaps she followed a theory expressed in a letter written in 1840: "No young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool." Her opinions are so individual and so interesting that it is a temptation to quote many of them. She criticises Emerson's essays: "Deep and invigorating truth, dreary and depressing fallacy, seem to me combined therein." In Jane Austen she finds "a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound." Of Macready's acting she says that "anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive, than his whole style I could scarcely have imagined;" and her shyness did not prevent her from astonishing a dinner-party by expressing this heretical opinion. "London people," she writes in the same letter, "strike a provincial as being very much taken up with little matters about which no one out of particular town-circles cares much;" and she adds that should she ever live there she would especially "eschew the literary coteries." Modest as she was, Charlotte Brontë never lost her independence of judgment and of action. "I should like you to explain to me more fully the ground of your objections," she writes to Mr. Williams of his criticism of the curate chapter in "Shirley." "Is it because you think this chapter will render the work liable to Is it because, severe handling by the press ? knowing as you now do the identity of Currer Bell,' this scene strikes you as unfeminine? Is it because it is intrinsically defective and inferior? I am afraid the first two reasons would And in not weigh with me-the last would." another letter on the same subject she says: "I anticipate general blame and no praise. And were my motive principle in writing a thirst for popularity, or were the chief check on my pen a dread of censure, I should withdraw these scenesor, rather, I should never have written them. I will not say whether the considerations that really govern me are sound, or whether my convictions are just; but such as they are, to their influence I must yield submission. They forbid me to sacrifice truth to the fear of blame. I accept their prohibition." Such phrases as these, scattered through the letters, give us an insight into the independence, determination, and force of character which enabled this shy, unassuming little woman to give "Jane Eyre" and "Villette to the world. --The London "Figaro" adds this new item to Whistleriana: "Ah! by the way," said Mr. Frank Harris, "I was talking to that great genius Degas about you, Mr. Whistler. He remarked to me, 'Hein! Whistlaire! He has talent.' Talent!' I exclaimed, 'how can you talk of the greatest artist of the day in that way? You should remember that not only is he an incom parable etcher, a marvelous draughtsman, and a prince among painters, but he is at the same time the wittiest conversationalist, the most brilliant epigrammatist, and the best company alive.' 'Well, if he is all that,' replied Degas with a shrug, what a pity it is that he does not paint with his tongue!" Christian Instincts and Modern Readers of the Rev. A. H. Craufurd's capital solution of " Enigmas of the Spiritual Life" will welcome his new book, "Christian Instincts and Modern Doubt," a book addressed to those who acknowledge the necessity of religion, and as well the impossibility of accepting its conventional presentation. The author is admirably caustic. Throughout the book the word "religion" is never used as a synonym for ecclesiasticism, and in particular cases we find biting comment on those peculiar and persistent forms of ecclesiasticism which have been inimical to the spread of Christianity. This is especially true in the last essay, which occupies the greater part of the volume. The essay will repay any one's careful reading. Mr. Craufurd does not hesitate to pay his respects to those High Churchmen who belong to what he calls the high-and-dry party. No matter if the leaders of the old High Church party delivered Anglicans from a dreary slovenliness, no matter if they lessened the loneliness of spiritual life and made religion in some ways a less dismal thing, their path lay between Rome and reason. They sought to vindicate for themselves the rights and privileges of apostolic succession. They regarded as quite essential to Christianity belief in their ludicrous fiction of baptismal regeneration, a fiction than which it would be much The difficult to find anything more palpably absurd in all the various superstitions of Paganism." Nor do the Broad Church people entirely escape: "We have now no Thirlwall among the Bishops, and no Stanley among the Deans. ... Broad Church party appears to have become tamer and more torpid. It has few effective preachers, even in London, since the secession of Mr. Stopford Brooke, though Mr. Haweis and Canon Page Roberts still minister well to many of those who need a rational religion; and we may hope that Dr. Momerie will now again preach regularly." Justice is done to the Nonconformist conscience, but we have also this clever touch: "It is being rapidly educated, trained, rationalized, and mellowed. It is emancipating itself from Phariseeism. It is discovering that Puritanism is not Christianity, and that geniality of nature is not a mere weakness." There is a great deal of this radical sort of thing in the book, but a great deal more which 1 Christian Instincts and Modern Doubt. By the Rev. Alexander H. Craufurd, M.A. Thomas Whittaker, New York, $1.50, Books of the Week [The books mentioned under this head and under that of Books Received include all received by The Outlook during the week ending April 23. This weekly report of current literature will be supplemented by fuller reviews of the more important works.] RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL The Lectures on Ecclesiastical History delivered recently in Norwich Cathedral, England, have been collected by Dean Lefroy and published in a compact volume. (Thomas Whittaker, New York.) We regret that these admirable lectures were not printed in the chronological order indicated by their subjects. Nevertheless, the book will be valuable to students of early church history, since it includes essays on the Fathers from Ignatius to Augustine, by such authorities as Professor Gwatkin, Robinson, and Ince, Bishop Barry, Archdeacon Sinclair, and others. Dr. Albert Henry Newman, Professor of Church History in McMaster University, Toronto, has published a book of peculiar significance to Baptists, and of not inconsiderable value to all theological students-A History of Anti-Pedobaptism. (American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia.) The work is appropriately dedicated to the Chancellor of McMaster University, and to the Presidents of Rochester, Newton, and Crozer Theological Universities, since much of the material was delivered before the students of these institutions in the form of lectures. Dr. Newman's account of the opposition to child-baptism from Gnostic and Ebionitic times to those of Gainsborough and Scrooby contains much which will interest and instruct the average reader, be he Baptist or non-Baptist.The Dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Mass., Dr. George Hodges, tells us in the preface to his new volume of sermons that the first discourse has been preached forty times. It is a pleasure to feel that so notable a discourse has already had such influence. Its title is "The Ground of Christian Certainty," and it might take fit place alongside Row's "Bampton Lectures" and other books which have served good purpose in the department of Christian Evidences. The book's title is In This Present World (Thomas Whittaker, New York), and it contains twenty sermons. Each is worth reading more than once, and all are characterized by the Dean's well-known breezy style and practical point. In paper, print, and binding Reconsiderations and Reinforcements, by the Rev. James Morris Whiton, Ph.D., is a model of book-making. We reserve the volume for later notice. (Same publishers.) HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY A Key to the Orient is an ambitious title for Mrs. Clapham Pennington's book of sketches and essays on Eastern matters, which treat of Oriental women, religions, slavery, and the missionary question from the "heathen's" view-point. The most instructive of these talks are those relating to the domestic life of the East, which the author had some special facilities for studying. Indeed, one wishes that the book gave more of its space to personal observation and less to the repetition of primary historical facts and unoriginal arguments. (J. Selwin Tait & Sons, New York.) The valuable historic series "Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times," published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, has been enlarged by the publication of Martha Washington, by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton. The preceding books of this series are "Margaret Winthrop," by Alice Morse Earle; "Dolly Madison," by Maud Wilder Goodwin; "Eliza Pinckney," by Harriott Harry Ravenel; "Mercy Warren," by Alice Brown. These volumes form a valuable contribution to the literature of the history of this Nation. Each writer has been painstaking in her investigations of private and state papers for information and has carefully edited it. This latest volume, though dealing with a character and a period familiar to the general reader, contains much that has never been published, and places incidents in their right relation, bringing out in clear relief a noble womanhood which must always hold a place in the affections of Americans. This book, as might be expected, presents the husband and wife in their home, social, and official relations. The destruction of Martha Washington's letters deprived her biographer of a source of information which has contributed greatly to the interest of the other biographies of this series. To atone for this lack the writer has given the historic background and the environment of the woman to whose character and charm the American people owe much of the grace and dignity of those first days of the Nation, when, without precedents to guide her, Martha Washington filled the position of "first lady of the land," and won by her dignity respect from friend and foe. establishing social standards that guided the little republican court through its days of infancy. POEMS Echoes, by Josephine Curtis Woodbury, is a handsome volume, elaborately illustrated by Mr. Eric Pape with full-page drawings and perhaps overmuch ornament. Two or three of the poems have enough of simplicity and true feeling to make them worthy of print; most are crude and immature. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.) A dainty little volume which Messrs. Copeland & Day (Boston) have just put out, Lyrics by John B. Tabb, contains verse which has very little in common with the average verse-writing. Father Tabb has not only a very delicate touch, but he has also a very original fancy. He gives us the unobvious aspect of things; he makes us feel their hidden charm. His talent does not strike one as robust, virile, and creative on a great scale, but as gentle, penetrating, and searching. In a multitude of poems so short that they are, for the most part, made up of single verses, Father Tabb flashes the light of the imagination here and there into the depths of nature and of life. He has a fine subtlety of imagination which charms, illumines, and sometimes perplexes. This quality must be felt in order to be understood or appreciated, and the best service a reviewer can render to the reader of The Outlook who has not fallen upon work from Father Tabb's hand is to bring before him two or three selections made almost at random from this little book: TRANSFIGURED Throughout the livelong summer day ILLUSION As yonder circling heavens define And Death on Time's horizon-line Shuts out Eternity; So, while in banishment apart Our widowed lives appear, Still holds each love-encompassed heart The center of the sphere. SELECTION Among the trees, O God, That with unrivaled love Hath not thy Love The homing dove? Or, 'mid the flame of flowers So says my soul, O God, NOVELS AND TALES It is quite a long time since Mr. Stockton has given us a volume of short stories, and A Storyteller's Pack is, for that reason among others, more than welcome. It contains ten short stories, with a little introduction, and these stories are, for the most part, in Mr. Stockton's characteristic vein. To say that they are of uneven excellence is hardly a criticism, because it is quite impossible for a man whose gift is so characteristic and so peculiar as is Mr. Stockton's to attain perfect success with every stroke of the pen. Mr. Stockton sometimes fails and fails lamentably, but so does every other humorous writer; on the other hand, Mr. Stockton often succeeds, and his successes are quite inimitable. His gift is one of the most characteristic which has yet appeared in our literature. The fact that it is humorous and light must not make us oblivious of its original quality. This volume is very handsomely made, with numerous illustrations from well-known hands, and a very taking cover. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.) Pine Valley, by Lewis B. France (Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., New York), is a collection of mining stories. A little child is the central figure of the first story, and the closing of the last brings the child again into prominence. Courage and cowardice, vice and morality, generosity and selfishness, are given surnames, and are the characters in the books playing appropriate parts in the mining camp civilization.A story that makes poverty attractive performs a mission. Doctor Luttrell's First Patient, by Rosa Nouchette Carey (J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia), describes a young physician and his brave, loving wife. The first patient comes just at the time when poverty becomes unbearable. The story does not equal" Not Like Other Girls." A Singer's Heart, by Anna Farquhar, is dedi cated to the art of singing. The heroine wavers between love and that art, and after bitter experience returns to the operatic stage with her voice purified by sorrow. The style is excessive, and the substance of the story commonplace. (Roberts Brothers, Boston.) ESSAYS, ETC. Elizabeth R. Chapman, in Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction and Other Essays on Kindred Subjects, writes soberly, moderately, and often acutely. One need not in every point agree with her to find much in these friendly and quiet talks to admire, and more to set one thinking. Almost avowedly these essays are sent out as an antidote to "The Woman Who Did" style of literature, and the analysis of the typical women of Grant Allen, Frankfort Moore, Mrs. Mona Caird, and other "hill-top" novelists is both clever and fair. The author's own general position is thus expressed in the preface: I believe in the Woman-movement. Not in the exaggerations and aberrations of a small minority of impa tient and ill-balanced minds, but in the reasonable claims and aspirations of the mass of thinking women, I believe that these have been obscured to a rather serious extent of late by the interminable flood of gaseous chatter to which the invention of a journalistic myth known as the "New Woman" has given rise, and that it has become necessary sharply to emphasize the distinction between this phantom and the real reformer and friend of her sex and of humanity whom I would call the "Best Woman." ity of Marriage" present in a strong way the The chapters on Divorce and "The Indissolubil argument against looseness in divorce laws. The author goes so far as to say, "Separation should, I think, be made easier, whereas divorce with liberty of remarriage, so far from being made easier, should, as soon as opinion is ripe for it, be abolished." (John Lane, New York.) EDUCATIONAL Numerical Problems in Plane Geometry, by Mr. J. G. Estill, of the Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, |