the two just as genuine types as Cicero himself. His better-known contemporaries and friends, Cæsar, Octavius, Brutus, live too. This is only another way of saying that M. Boissier has imagination as well as erudition, and that he has both in a high degree. His subject matter is uncommonly attractive, and no one has given us a better picture of society in the time of Cæsar; but his manner is even more attractive. By it he has made Rome, the Rome of Cicero, a thing of the present, not of the past; by it, too, he has crystalized our vague impressions into something like proper shape. For instance, writing of Brutus, M. Boissier says: As he has never been spoken of with composure, and as political parties have been accustomed to screen their hatred or their hopes under his name, the true features of his character were early effaced. Amid the heated discussions that his mere name raises, while some, like Lucan, exalt him almost to heaven, and others, like Dante, resolutely place him in hell, it was not long before he became a sort of legendary personage. To read Cicero brings us back to the reality. Thanks to him, this striking but indistinct figure, that admiration or terror have immoderately enlarged, becomes more defined and takes human proportions. If it loses in grandeur by being viewed so closely, at least it gains something by becoming true and living. 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 July 30. This weekly report of current literature will be supplemented by fuller reviews of the more important works.] RELIGIOUS N th Ir A ar ta T: Fi H ta th vi th ke bl fo: ma tra CI alt Or are the lot Da Ge us cha un set Tw tha Co ge pa ma thi Yo Religion for To-Day, by Minot J. Savage, is a volume of sermons preached during the first halfyear of the author's ministry at the Church of the Messiah in this city. To those who have thought of Dr. Savage as a mere iconoclast this volume will prove an agreeable surprise. There are, indeed, passages where his wit gets the better of his reverence, and where he shows an indisposition to believe that there are more things in heaven and earth than have been known in his experience, but the sermons as a whole are full of constructive faith and strong poetic and religious feeling. The fact that he accepts only Ba what his experiences have led him to accept abl gives a freshness and force to his testimony. his Some of his sermons, such as those on "God In- hu side the Universe," "Is God Incarnate in One Man Only?" and "Immortality," are pervaded with a sense of the immanence of God worthy of a Quaker mystic proclaiming the doctrine of the Inward Light. (George H. Ellis, Boston, Mass.) open sea. President Jordan's instructive and impressive report to our Treasury Department on the results of his observations at our sealinggrounds last year has given us much food for thought, and, we hope, a decided spur to recent diplomatic action. "Matka and Kotik," though a charming popularizing of zoological knowledge, ought to confirm any good resolves which governments may have made on behalf of humanity. The book is lavishly supplied with illustrations, most of them from photographs taken for the various Behring Sea Commissions. These are supplemented by some clever drawings which illustrate the life of the beach-masters, made by Miss Lesley, a student in zoology at the Stanford University. There is also a well-detailed map of St. Paul Island in the Pribilof group, but the most interesting of all aids is a calendar of approximate dates, giving on a single page a year's events among the seals. HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY The Victorian Era, by P. Anderson Graham, is a succinct and readable review of the progress of England during the present reign. It is a well-planned and well-executed jubilee volume. (Longmans, Green & Co., New York.) An Outline of Method in History, by Professor Ellwood W. Kemp, of the Inciana State Normal School, is a scholarly and suggestive volume showing how to teach history so that the scholar shall have a broad view of the progress of humanity and shall, as much as may be, live in the different epochs whose events he studies. (The Inland Publishing Company, Terre Haute, Ind.) The tender, loving record of the home life of Charles Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him, by Mamie Dickens, is welcome to the lovers of Charles Dickens. The book merely touches the public or literary life of this great author. It is with the father, the man, in the home he loved, surrounded by his children, his pets, and his friends, that the book has to do. The larger part of this record is devoted to the life of the family at Gad's Hill, the best-loved home of Charles Dickens, the house that as a boy his father suggested might be his. Miss Mamie Dickens died before she revised the proofs of the book-a work done by her sister, the " Katie" of the household. The sadness and the tragedy, if one there was, in the life of Charles Dickens do not mar these pages. The daughter pictures only the father, and dwells longest on the festivities of birthdays and holidays, above all on the Christmas festivities of the household, where the father was the leading spirit in fun and frolic. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.) LITERATURE The Merry Devil of Edmonton has been added to the delightful series called "The Old Dram. atists," printed by J. M. Dent & Co., of London, with their widely recognized taste in book making, and to be obtained here from the Macmillan Company, New York. There is no evi. dence of value about the authorship of this ancient comedy. At one time critics were inclined to attribute it to Shakespeare, but only because of the resemblance between the rough and rather coarse fun to that found in Shakespeare's " Merry Wives of Windsor" and "Henry IV." Other internal evidence, however, very strongly weighs against the thecry of Shakespeare's authorship. The play is clumsily put together, and, as the editor of this edition points out, entirely lacks the quality of poetry and of idealism belonging to Shakespeare's genius.- From the same publishers, and printed in very similar form, comes the second volume of the neat edition of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution. POETRY Mr. Lloyd Mifflin has published, through Messrs. Estes & Lauriat, in beautiful form, a book of sonnets entitled At the Gates of Song. The sonnets are mostly Miltonic in their make-up. They are one and all permeated with an earnest. ness of purpose. As good an example of Mr. Mifflin's manner in the use of the sonnet as any is the following: They who create rob death of half its stings; They, from the dim inane and vague opaque Of nothingness, build with their thought, and make To shapes narmorean; or they overtake His scepter reaches o'er remotest zones; Roll on for ages and reverberate When kings are dust beside forgotten thrones. The book is charmingly illustrated with reproductions from original drawings by Mr. Thomas Moran. MISCELLANEOUS That every woman, beautiful or plain, shrinks from the ravages of age is doubtless true, and this is not wholly vanity. Every thoughtful woman realizes the power of beauty; she knows that youth alone is a power that appeals to the world, and she may have a thousand reasons wholly unselfish for wishing to influence people about her. Because of her love of the power of attraction that lies in youth and beauty, every reader wholly alive will give more than a passing glance at a book bearing the title The Way to Keep Young. She may never be seen by even her own family scanning its pages, but it will be a book that she will more than scan. In this book Dorothy Quigley does not deal with cosmetics. Her magic for holding youth is exercise, bathing, food, intellectual interest. She advises study that will train the intellectual powers as being the greatest enemy of age and the closest friend of youth. There is much wisdom, perhaps not wholly new, and very little nonsense in Dorothy Quigley's directions for keeping young. (E. P. Next to beauty, perhaps, women value that quality which we call charm-that subtile quality which, like the gift of poetry, seems to be a gift at birth, and beyond the power of the mind to acquire. Dorothy Quigley has entitled her second book, most confidently, Success is for You. (E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.) She believes that the power of success lies easily within the grasp of every woman, and proceeds to prove it, by essays in chapters on "The Upbuilding Process," "Trust Thyself," "To Attract Success," "Whom and What to Avoid," etc. The book is an earnest effort to train women to objective instead of subjective thinking. Literary Notes -Madame Sarah Grand, the author of "The Heavenly Twins," has been at work upon a new novel. It is described as an extraordinary study of a woman's psychological evolution, and is supposed to be largely autobiographical. -The New York "Tribune" informs us that during the youthful days of Zola and the late Henri Meilhac, when they were both assistants to Messrs. Hachette & Co., the work of Meilhac was to reach down the volumes from the shelves for Zola to make into parcels. -It is said that Mr. Hall Caine spent months in studying what may be termed subterranean London in order to obtain material for a portion of his new romance, "The Christian." The titles of the four parts into which the story is divided are "The Outer World," "The Religious Life, "The Devil's Acre," and "Sanctuary." -The London "Literary World" says that Mr. W. D. Howells, presenting a set of his works to a friend, wrote various comments on the flyleaves, which have a personal as well as a literary interest. In "A Chance Acquaintance " he wrote, "The book that made me most friends;" in "Venetian Life," "The book that made friends with fortune for me;" in "Indian Summer," "The one I like best;" and in "Their Wedding Journey," " My first attempt to mingle fiction and travel-fiction got the best of it." -Mr. Stanley Addleshaw, writing in the "Gentleman's Magazine" of the extraordinary influ ence of the late Walter Pater, speaks of the remarkable change which came over Pater himself: His ideas, from being purely pagan in the "Renaissance," became in the greatest and most thoughtful of his books," Marius the Epicurean," actually Christian. He has not given up art; far from it, but only art for art's sake. The beautiful, the pleasure-giving, are no longer ends in themselves, but only means in which the ideal may be reached. The greatest art has always been that which tries to elevate men: in painting, Fra Angelico; in poetry, Dante; in fiction, Thackeray. So far is art from curtailing or maiming itself when it has a purpose, that it may be said with truth that no great art The Religious World Christian Co-operation The New York Federation of Churches By the Rev. Walter Laidlaw, Ph.D. The Federation of Churches and Christian The Federation's aggressive work is carried on by three committees. Its Committee on Investigation induces churches and charities in Assembly districts of the city to make a house-to-house canvass of their territory, with a view to acquainting them, and the city at large, with the local social conditions. The Federation office superintends this canvass and tabulates the result-a work of detail which is beyond the leisure of any pastor. In all quarters of New York City where population is dense, conditions are such that a wider public must become acquainted with the discovered needs, in order to the reinforcement of resident forces for good; and the tabulation of the material gathered is, therefore, arranged in the Federation's office with this dynamic purpose. The Committee on Investigation, for this reason, prepares with exceeding care the form of canvass which is employed. To the end that the maximum of directive information may be secured, the committee embraces the heads of the city's largest charitable organizations and its prominent sociological students and workers. Wherever the Federation's attempts are imitated this same policy should be pursued. The Committee on Co-operation takes up the work in an investigated district after the issue of an investigation report. The needs of all districts hitherto investigated in New York have been shown to be so great that the resident workers have clearly seen that only by a permanent co-operative policy can the social evolution of their districts be effectively advanced. In the Fifteenth Assembly District, for instance, canvassed last year, the churches and charities plainly saw that, unless a co-operative policy be pursued, all of its workers, two years hence, will be as unaware as they were last year of the district's actual condition. They have, therefore, adopted a policy which will keep them measurably informed, permanently, of the condition of the locality, and which will at the same time change discouraging conditions into more hopeful ones. They have partitioned the whole terrisystem, dividing the territory geographically, and tory among themselves on a co-operative parish giving to each church one or more blocks as a special responsibility. It is the duty of the church taking charge of such a special parish to enter, in the course of the year, every home. This visit is primarily made, of course, in the interest of connecting with the church-which is believed to be the highest agency for social evolution-all families that have no church connection; but this is not the sole object of a church visitor's call. A family having a church home may be unaware of the existence in the neighborhood of a circulating library; the church's visitor may thus become a dynamic force in the interest ily may be helped by acquainting it with the exof the New York Circulating Library. The famistence in the locality of Penny Provident Fund banks, of baths, of cooking-classes, of a labor bureau. The Federation's Committee on Coing into this co-operative parish system, minutely, operation is to acquaint all of the churches enterwith the existence and ideals of the neighborhood agencies of social evolution; and it will be the business of the church visitors to extend the ipal and voluntary agencies of social uplift. For clientèle, and deepen the impression of all muricthe use of the visitors in the Fifteenth Assembly District a handsome calendar, with minute information concerning churches, schools, libraries, industrial classes, etc., is now going through the press. Sufficient copies are to be issued to place one in every home of the district. The churches' visitors, moreover, are to advance sanitary interests in their parishes. As it is now, into a tenement-house containing twenty families, representatives of four different churches may pass on spiritual errands. Church" A's" pastor climbs to the top floor of the tenement. and thinks it a marvel of salubrity, but this may be due to the favor of the upper air, and the inherent enmity to dirt of the parishioner visited. Pastor" B's" visit is on the third floor, and he thinks the whole house in need of disinfectants, parishioner. So both pastors depart with a faulty but this may be due to the squalid habits of his induction touching the character of the tenement. In the co-operative parish system it will be the duty of a church's visitor to enter every one of the twenty homes, and when they have all been visited an equation of the sanitary condition of the whole dwelling can be inductively formed. If the house be unhealthy, it will be listed, and compliance with law will be demanded, not through the individual church visiting, but by the local sub-federation, which will have a committee to deal with the tenement question. The parish plan of the Committee on Co-operation, therefore, promises to be an instrument to assist church, school, Health Board, library, and every other agency for good; to rebuild in New York the old sense of neighborhood; and the co-operative parish system cannot but secure for the united churches the confidence and affection of the entire community. It is the ambition of the Federation, as stated in my article of the third of October last, to "parish the city among a co-operant Christianity;" and already the whole region west of Eighth Avenue, from Forty-second to Fifty-ninth Streets, embracing a population of nearly 100,000, has been parished on this plan. The Committee on Extension concerns itself with the creation of new agencies in investigated districts. The recommendations of new agencies for districts investigated are all inductively framed. If they concern denominations, they are directed toward the specific denominations whose duty to the districts investigated seems to be the greatest. The work of the Committee on Extension, therefore, is of a most important and delicate nature, namely, to induce the denominations concerned to concur with the Federation's recommendations and to act upon them. If the recommendations concern charitable or educational work, it must not be thought that their adoption will be entirely devoid of difficulty, for church people and charity workers are almost identical, and the same human nature is shown in questions concerning kindergarten work as in questions concerning church doctrine or polity. The Committee on Extension is the diplomatic service of the Federation. Happily, however, it is made up of representatives of the forward movements of the prominent denominations in the city, and is, therefore, likely itself to be a miniature federation, with the co-operation of denominations rather than of churches for its object. The three branches of the Federation's work, therefore, are directive investigation, economic co-operation, and dynamic extension; and the history of the Federation hitherto has shown its directive, economic, and dynamic value. It has been so dynamic that every agency recommended in the report upon the Fifteenth Assembly District, issued in October last, was in existence in March. Our report pointed out the need of a Protestant Episcopal church, and St. Cornelius Church-an independent parish-is the answer. The Federation pointed out the need of more kindergartens, Penny Provident Fund stations, schools of domestic economy, and baths; and all of these features of work obtain in Hartley House, the industrial settlement of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. The |