that so much can possibly be done during the brief duration of the total phase of the eclipse. Even the trained observer knows that good results can only be obtained by the most carefully ordered plan and a systematic drill which leaves no opening to flurry, and no time for confusion. It is to this end, with the solar eclipse of next January in view, that Sir Norman Lockyer, than whom we have no hig' er authority on the subject, has pubblished the excellent volume now before us. In it he gives a full account, based upon letters that have already appeared in Nature, of the elaborate though unfortunately abortive preparations which were made by the expedition sent to Norway to study the eclipse of August 9, 1896, as well as many brief but instructive remarks upon the discoveries made in earlier eclipses. He notes, indeed, "how often it has happened that the chief scientific result secured at any eclipse was hardly dreamt of by the organizers of the expedition." But none the less it is essential to have the plan of campaign laboriously thought out beforehand in every detail, and Sir Norman Lockyer's description of his admirable arrangements at Kiö in 1896 ought to be studied by every astronomer, amateur or professional, who proposes to be in the track of the moon's shadow next January. Such students should especially note the hint that "time-saving devices are of the highest importance in eclipse work, and too much attention cannot be given to them." It would be idle here to attempt to summarize Sir Norman Lockyer's account of the chief points in solar physics on which, by increasing the dispersive power of his spectroscopes and prismatic cameras, he hopes to get fresh light in January. His own words must be read, as they will be read with close attention, by all who take an interest in one of the most fascinating branches of astronomy. The only fault one can find with the book is that the style lacks the polish and even at times the lucidity to which one is accustomed in the author's writing, but that may be excused in what is not so much a treatise as a collection of practical notes. Before taking leave of this book, one may call attention to the very interesting account of the remarkable aptitude which the officers and crew of H.M.S. Volage showed for astronomical work at the eclipse of 1896. Many astronomers have previously felt that in such expeditions as that to the Varanger Fiord "a warship at one's back makes everything easy," but it does not seem to have occurred to any one before Sir Norman Lockyer that its crew might provide a large staff of observers. An eclipse is an occasion on which much useful work can be done by intelligent amateurs. When Sir Norman asked for volunteers, he got as ready a response as if it had been a question of cutting out a hostile cruiser or boarding a slave-ship. More than 70 volunteers of all ranks were enlisted. Groups were formed to sketch the corona, to note the stars visible during totality, to record the colour-changes in the landscape, and to do much similar work that, whilst useful to science, was beyond the scope of the astronomers engaged in more intricate duties. The training which went on busily for some days before the eclipse proved both sailors and officers to be apt pupils, and at least one of the most delicate instruments was intrusted to their sole care. When the eclipse had come and gone behind a bank of cloud, Sir Norman Lockyer replied to the captain's condolences by assuring him that a most important discovery had actually been made. "He had demonstated that with the minimum of help, and that chiefly in the matter of instruments, such a skilled and enthusiastic ship's company as his could be formed in a week into one of the most tremendous engines of astronomical research that the world has ever seen; so that if the elements had been kind all previous records of work at one station would have been beaten." When we remember what highly-complicated pieces of machinery our modern warships are this testimony to the ease with which the crew of the Volage took to the manipulation of delicate and unfamiliar instruments helps to show that, in spite of the pessimists, we have got the right sort of men in our Navy. As the ships have become more complicated, the men have grown more ingenious. And one is encouraged still to say of the British sailor, as was said in Armada days, that he has t his equal anywhere for skill and general handiness. Are we to go on with Latin Verses? By the Rev. Hon. E. Lyttelton, M.A., Head Master of Haileybury College. Crown 8vo., 193 pp. London, 1897. Longmans. 3/6 This little book is a contio ad clerum, an appeal by a schoolmaster to his brethren of the craft to reconsider before it be too late the educational value of an exercise that is fast disappearing from the curriculum of our secondary schools. Latin verse composition is (at Oxford at any rate) no longer a sine quâ non for college scholarships or the highest classical honours. The increasing pressure of subjects for which room has to be found at public schools involves the gradual crowding out of those which are in least demand or are supposed to be merely ornamental. Such subjects become the luxury of a few. The verdict of the teaching profession and of the general public condemns them as a necessity for the many and once condemned, to restore them is difficult if not impossible. Mr. Lyttelton, as becomes an Etonian brought up upon a surfeit of Latin elegiacs, under a system which used to be irreverently described as giving the maximum of trouble to masters with the minimum of result to boys, makes a gallant attempt to stem the tide. He claims for Latin versewriting even in its most elementary stages the credit of an intellectual discipline, giving sureness of vocabulary, perception of rhythm, and the genuine satisfaction of overcoming a difficulty, of visible achievement after effort. The schoolboy who after many searchings of heart and of his "Gradus " has produced a line or lines that will scan and have no grammatical fault looks upon the result, we gather, much as Touchstone speaks of Audrey-" a poor virgin, Sir, an ill-favoured thing, but mine ; and this sense of proprietorship and successful effort, by enlisting the boy's interest in Latin verses, is supposed to enhance the intellectual profit of the exercise. own 66 With much that Mr. Lyttelton says of Latin verse-making as an aid to the imagination and to the correct use of language we agree; and it is true that, as he puts it, a boy who has to translate an English poem must read it," and make some effort to understand it. To many of us the most abiding aud fruitful result of our Latin verse composition is the familiarity with much good English poetry. But granted that one of the best tests of proficiency in a language, dead or living, is a facile and idiomatic employment of it in composition, is not such proficiency as well attained, and more accessibly to the average learner, by the employment of prose? Mr. Lyttelton says not; and repudiates Latin prose as an educational instrument in comparison with Latin elegiacs-to which, by the way, he seems to confine Latin versification, almost ignoring the much higher branch (as we should call it) of hexameter verse. But Mr. Lyttelton's view of the whole question is, we cannot help thinking, somewhat narrowed by his educational environment-by old Eton superstitions of constant Latin elegiacs as the best educational instrument, and by the Cambridge tendency to ignore, as compared with Oxford scholars, the great value of Latin prose composition-an exercise (to quote the words of a great teacher thereof)" so absolutely intolerant of imperfect knowledge, such a stern touchstone of obscure thought or superficial work." Mr. Lyttelton, we fear, will not roli up the stone of Sisyphus, or sweep back the sea. Things have gone too far for that. But if he helps to preserve for good scholars a graceful accomplishment, and (we would add) one of the purest of intellectual pleasures for those who are able to enjoy it, his book will have done service, though not exactly in the way he hoped. As a practical appendix, Mr. Lyttelton prints nineteen Latin elegiac versions of a smoothly flowing but rather vague poem of O. W. Holmes, full of loose metaphors, the grappling with which has been the chief difficulty of translation-Latin, as is well known, being much less tolerant of metaphor than English. Mr. Lyttelton pleads-and some of these translators agree with him for a more liberal use of metaphor in Latin. But of these versions the most successful, in our opinion, are those in which its use has been restricted. Take, for example, the metaphor "Time's grey urn in the opening lines: Yes, dear departed cherished days, = 66 Could Memory's hand restore Your morning light, your evening rays, From Time's grey urn once more. Such renderings as pallida Temporis urna, aetas tristis ut urna, vetus aetatis urna, livida urna (would this grey"), gravis urna, and the like, are unnatural and unmeaning, a translation of ignotum per ignotius. Professor Jebb, whose fine taste for scholarship serves him alike in Latin as in Greek, thus renders it, simply but effectively, in what strikes us as the best of these versions :Tempora praeteritae penitus delecta iuventae, O si Mnemosyne vos revocare mihi, Si iubar ex aevo posset reparare sepulto Quod nova lux olim, quod moritura dabat. What the average 15-year-old school-boy would make of such a passage we shudder to think. Mr. Lyttelton can hardly intend it as a specimen of what should be put before him as an educational instrument. Siam on the Meinam, from the Gulf to Ayuthia, together with Three Romances illustrative of Siamese Life and Customs. By Maxwell Sommerville, Professor of Glyptology, University of Pennsylvania. With 50 Illustrations. London, 1897. Sampson Low, Marston. A book entitled "Great Britain on the Thames from the Nore to Putney-bridge," compiled by an amiable and observant gentleman from China, unacquainted with the English language or with Western thought, would hardly be expected to give a very reliable account of the British Isles, or of the customs of their inhabitants, even though it should be charmingly illustrated with photographs from neighbouring countries, and embellished with a little pidjin English spelt phonetically. In the same way Mr. Maxwell Sommerville's book about Siam must not be expected to be otherwise than a collection of very rough impressions. Mr. Sommerville did a certain number of the sights of Bangkok, and went fifty miles up river in a passenger steamer to the "jungie" of the old capital, Ayuthia, where he spent at least a day. In the short time he was able to devote to the subject of his book he certainly used his considerable powers of observation with effect, and the scenes of native groupings, as they present themselves in the every-day life of the city and the river, are given not without some liveliness and evident appreciation. As a guide-book to the bazaars and Wats of Bangkok, Mr. Sommerville's work may rank with Carl Bock's and Frank Vincent's. More than this we cannot say. The book is hastily written, the information is inaccurate, the grammar is often faulty, and the style is poor. The native words and names are spelt with no regard to system, and there is nothing in the volume which may not be found far better considered in the works of Pallegoix, Crawfurd, Bowring, and many others. The illustrations are from photographs, most of which are familiar to Bangkok residents, and many of which are so charming that they go a long way towards redeeming the book A large proportion, however, are not Siamese at all, but are Malay, Shan, and Burmese, and many are given fancy titles by the author which rob them of much of their value. With regard to the "original romances at the end of the book, intended, as the author informs us, to illustrate "phases in Siamese life and customs, combined with the history of the river Meinam and of the people of the northern provinces " which they are intended to portray, we can only remark that they fail completely in their object. The idea would be an ambitious one even for a careful and experienced student of the East and of Indo-China; carried out as it has been it amounts almost to a practical joke. The hero, the viceroy of a large province, travels across country alone, with three servants, on mules, maintaining a pace of twenty-three miles a day for many hundred miles; the envoys of the King are made to travel thirty-six miles a day at least when they go abroad; Muang Pimai, a jungle village in the Korat plateau, is illustrated by photographs of Bangkok. It is not necessary to say more to show that the stories are valueless as illustrations of the life of the country; nor, unfortunately, are they very interesting. The character of the book is well illustrated by the map which forms the frontispiece. A large proportion of the names are wrongly spelt. A red line, designated the frontiers of Laos," separates the northern Lao States of Chiengmai and Nan, both of which are in reality inhabited by the same race of Lao, and also cuts the Korat plateau into two parts, although the Lao extend south of it for nearly three degrees of latitude. Inter alia, the Pichai river is called the Nam Pat; the important towns of Pichai and Nan are omitted altogether; and two high roads are marked as extending across the country in a N.N.W. direction to the Salwin from the neighbourhood of Paknam Po. These are apparently designed to illustrate the very "original romance at the end of the book; they have no existence in fact. Below is the inscription-"The most recent and comprehensive Map of the Interior of Siam." wonder if this joke will go down in America? No one in this country acquainted with the many surveys which have been made in the Meinam valley or with the maps of Pavie and McCarthy, or the publications based on these which have from time to time been published by the Royal Geographical Society, can be asked to treat it seriously. We The author appears to have approached his task with a levity and lack of industry and study which, in literature at all events, seem somewhat out of place. SOME MINOR POETS. The Earth Breath, and other Poems. By A. E. 6×5in., 94 pp. London, 1897. John Lane. 3/6 n. Lyrics. By John B. Tabb. 5×4in., 187 pp. 1897. Boston Copeland and Day. London: John Lane. 4/6 n. Minuscula. Lyrics of Nature, Art, and Love. By Francis William Bourdillon. 6×44in., 112 pp. London, 1897. Lawrence and Bullen, Ltd. 5/ Our younger poets, and those poets that are latest born into an unworthy world, seem to have made a compact by which they have bound themselves to be careful of their powers and risk no overstrain. They would go delicately, to small measures. The long poem-that "test of invention,' as Keats calls it-is not for them. Perhaps they have assured themselves that the public is not for the long poem. Certainly, none can accuse our minor poets of prodigality. Their volumes are of the slimmest; so much so, indeed, that the term "volume" applied to them savours of irony. Slight, too, are the lyrics wont to be, as though the poet sang in snatches, like the bird that "starts into song one moment, then is still.' But here the analogy stops. There is little that is birdlike in the laboured, over-elaborate composition, which, brief though it be, moves the fatigued reader with a painful apprehension of the toils of composition. "The Earth Breath," while not responding entirely to the characteristics we have indicated, is a fair example of the class of book the extreme tenuity of which is by no means a material attribute only. The author, modestly initialled as "A. E.," shows a certain accomplishment of verse, writing, indeed, as if it were his native tongue occasionally, and not the acquisition of study. But his style is exceedingly tropical, not to say flamboyant, and he too often tantalizes us by the imperfect expression of some possibly inspired or beautiful thought. He may be said to grope where he should grasp, and even when disposed to deviate into clearness it is not for long, as the opening of the little poem "Divine Visitation " may suffice to show :The heavens lay hold on us; the starry rays Fondle with flickering fingers brow and eyes; A new enchantment lights the ancient skies. What is it looks between us gaze on gaze; Does the wild spirit of the endless days Chase through my heart some lure that ever flies ? Mr. John Tabb is a poet of graceful fancy and some individuality. His little book of " Lyrics appears to have reached a second edition. Mr. Tabb's prevailing mood is grave, sententious, almost aphoristic. Within the limits of two or three stanzas he enshrines some pensée, or flower of fancy, pretty or piquant it may be, or of a purely ethical character. The quatrain," which is so commonly epigrammatic, elegiac, or encomiastic, becomes in Mr. Tabb's hands an extremely graceful poem. "The Mid-Day Moon" is a charming example : 66 Again, in conceit : Behold, whatever wind prevail, Their noonday never knows we have a pretty Not all of these quatrains, each of which adorns a page of the book, are so neatly turned as these. Mr. Bourdillon's Minuscula comprise certain reprints from previous volumes-" siftings." the author calls them-with the addition of some new poems. It is a pity the poet has allowed his sieve to retain the five "Love Sonnets," which have almost every defect that metrical form may know. The third especially Now hath the ageing year forgot thee, June, And doteth on the mænad month, October,is a monument of ungainly artifice and sad infelicity. Can it be that Mr. Bourdillon imagines the stanzas "To a Lark," though classed among his "new poems," to be either new or original? A clearer Shelley an echo than this infinitely little poem there could not be. Oddly enough, the poem that precedes it"Joy's Way "is the freshest, brightest, daintiest lyric of all that is new in the book. For the rest, some of the additional songs are extremely pretty, and will increase Mr. Bourdillon's reputation as a song-writer, both with musicians and lovers of song. Among my Books. A COLLOQUY ON CRITICISM. There is, about this we are pretty well certain, nothing more uncomfortable and disquieting to the ordinary good fellow-and unless you adopt a standard of excellence so high as must damn the whole British Empire most of the sons of Adam are good fellows-than to find himself at loggerheads with his neighbour about anything. The people who love to differ are the minority-they may be found, no doubt, if not in every hamlet, certainly in every township, but for all that they are the minority and only distantly resemble the kindly hosts who love best those songs which have a chorus in which all can join. As a proof of this I would instance the unhappiness of finding yourself positively disliking and despising some book written, it may be, by an acquaintance, which is enjoying great popularity. To take it up only to find its "pathos" repulsive, its "humour " disheartening, its "merriment" offensive, and then laying it down with a groan to read, or, worse still, to be told by some honest fellow, of its strange power, its dramatic grip, its enormous sale. All this is sheer agony. The ordinary sorrows of life, however crushing, are shared with humanity. Tombs and monuments remind you of other men's bereavements; -the list of bankrupts gives you a feeling of kinship with half the town; but this inability to enjoy what apparently all the world is enjoying is intolerable. It is no use saying de gustibus, &c. In the first place it is not true. Burke long ago pointed out in his Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful that mankind are more generally agreed about Virgil than they are about Aristotle. These things cut very deep into life. Were you to be condemned to spend three months at sea in small cabin with a stranger with what easy composure would you hear him, the first night, declare himself a Hobbist, but how would your heart sink within you were he to aver that he never could see anything funny in "Pickwick"! It is a very serious thing to differ radically on a question of taste. And so it comes about that the life of a Critic in these times is well nigh intolerable, and, indeed, it is not without emotion-genuine emotion-that to-day I see launched a new critical adventure. It makes a brave appearance as it pushes off, friends wave their handkerchiefs, the captain is on the upper-deck, the crew (well-tanned veterans some of them) wave their new quills-it is indeed a gallant sight! Yes-but look ahead to the sea where the ship must go, to the far off ocean, whose vast tides pant dumbly passionate with dreams of all the books, as yet unwritten, which Literature must review, and of the authors, passionate but not dumb, whom we shall, if we do our duty, most grievously offend. Duty! the word instantly arrests one, just as did the word "delicacy" the great Journalist in Friendship's Garland. "Delicacy," he murmured, surely I have heard the word, in the old days before I learnt to call Hepworth Dixon's style lithe and sinewy and before ever I wrote for this cursed paper." So at the word "Duty," I stand at attention. What are the duties of a Critic? No sooner is the question asked than temperament steps in and makes everything difficult. One man's temperament leads him to magnify his office, another's to minimize it. Pomposity is the besetting sin of the one, cynicism of the other. Of the two Mr. Cynic is the more agreeable while Mr. Pomposity does the least harm. It is desirable to avoid "glasses" and to see things with the naked eye. Can it be said that to review new books as they appear is a public duty? The fact that it is discharged privately proves nothing. Until 1870, in England the duty of educating the young was discharged by the British and Foreign School Society and the National Society, whilst for many a long day the duties of nursing the poor and visiting prisons were left to individual charity. The maintenance of the Fine Arts is, after a beggarly fashion, recognized by the State, and there are those who seriously advocate a National Theatre. Ought Criticism to be established and endowed? Should the Gazette appear with a Literary supplement? On the whole, we think not. But if Criticism is a matter of private enterprise it should be undertaken in a suitable spirit. The famous motto of the Edinburgh Review assumes too much. A Judge is not self-elected, neither does he choose his calendar and condemn whom he wills. The country prosecutes, the jury convicts, the Judge sentences. Lord Brougham, if it was Lord Brougham, owed no duty to the public to ridicule John Keats in the Edinburgh Review. Lady Eastlake had no better right to slander Charlotte Brontë in the Quarterly Review than has any evil-tongued woman to revile her neighbour in the market-place. The duties of a Critic are those of a handicraftsman who takes money in exchange for an article of his manufacture. He must do his best to learn his business, and, having learnt it, to go about it diligently and honourably, and in a spirit of humanity. He must avoid the error of imagining his opinion to be a great matter, but he is not entitled, if his criticism be printed and circulated, to treat it as if it were of no moment whatever. Critics are sometimes accused of forgetting the publicity, the almost awful publicity, of the printing Press, and of scattering abroad in the lightness of their hearts all kinds of winged words and poisoned arrows. But do they? You have only to compare the trenchant and often most. valuable criticism you hear at a dinner table with the tame, emasculated utterances of the Press to realize how paralyzing is publicity and how impossible it is to say in print what you may utter with perfect propriety in private. Nobody can truthfully assert that harshness or brutality is a characteristic of presentday criticism. Whether it be wise or foolish, important or insignificant, it is at least good-natured. Books are liberally besmattered with praise, and the rarest gifts of the gods are affected to be bestowed upon writers of the most humble endowments. Enthusiasm seems easily kindled. Nobody, as I have already said, wishes to differ with his neighbour, least of all to make his differences public. "Whistle and let the world go by" is a maxim of prudence, and one very generally observed by wise men. But how is the poor critic to observe it? A popular novel, a popular volume of theology, and a popular poet are sent him for review. He reads, and as he reads his gorge rises. They are, so, at least, the unhappy writer conceives, everything fiction, religion, poetry ought not to be; what should be natural is forced, what should be devout is vulgar, what should be felicitous is ill-expressed; grace, dignity, delicacy, charm-of no one of these qualities is there so much as a trace. Of course, the reviewer may be mistaken. But, if he is, his whole outlook upon this world is mistaken; all that is about him is mistaken; his library is all wrong; every estimate he has formed, every lesson he has learnt is all wrong-everything is upside down, if these books be anything but the poor trash his judgment tells him they are. But is he to say so? The novelist is a great friend of his wife's sister, the divine and the poet are club acquaintances of his own. He cannot say what he really thinks of their productions -their "work," as they love to call their lucubrations. Unable to say what he thinks, he proceeds to say as little as he can about the books before him, and to fill up his space with general reflections, which are deprived of all value because the writer does not apply them fearlessly to the matter in hand. The result is deplorable. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. FICTION. St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Chapters xxxi.xxxvi. by Mr. Quiller Couch. 7×5žin. 312 pp. London, 1897. Heinemann. 6 This posthumous romance of Mr. Stevenson will hardly take rank with his strongest work; but it has all that charm of the intensely characteristic, which, in the case of any writer of deeply-marked and attractive individuality, renders the reader almost unconscious of defects. With the author of "St. Ives,' indeed, they are so essentially the defects inseparable from "qualities " that it is hardly possible even to wish them away. Throughout these "Adventures of a French Prisoner in England," in the midst of one's admiration for the unflagging spirit with which the Vicomte Anne de St. Yves relates them, one 18 continually being reminded of the singularly loose thread of plot on which the Vicomte's creator has strung them together. And the picturesque vigour with which the French prisoner himself is delineated only serves to render more conspicuous the sketchy, not to say shadowy, draftsmanship which is all that Stevenson has cared to bestow on Flora Gilchrist, one of many heroines so treated by him, or rather, one might say, the subject of a treatment which perhaps only the fascinating Catriona can be Isaid to have wholly escaped at his hands. There are indeed times when the pursuit and courtship of this very vaguely adumbrated young woman by her vividly real, sharply outlined, essentially flesh-and-blood admirer, makes us almost feel as if we were assisting at the interview between Æneas and the shade of his wife. Until the Vicomte succeeds in actually embracing Flora through the open cottage window in that very pretty love scene in the rain, we can hardly believe that she will not elude her lover's clasp, as the ghostly Creusa eluded her husband's, par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno. To these contrasts, however, between heroes of "three dimensions" and heroines who represent merely a plane superficies, all good Stevensonians are by this time well accustomed, having, indeed, been mostly disciplined into submission to them, if the truth may be whispered salvâ reverentiâ, by no less a master than Sir Walter himself. Inured, too, they are to the loosejointed narrative, and to that slow evolution of plot which is only emphasized by the briskness in the succession of incidents. All these things, as has been said, have the charm of the characteristic. They are "Stevenson all over." In this last novel of his they are more than usually in evidence, though as easy to forgive as ever. For instance, there is really very little reason, on the face of matters, why the whole story should not come to a premature close with the escape of St. Ives from Edinburgh Castle. There is, at any rate, no reason, except a Stevensonian one, for his prolonged and harebrained tramp over a large portion of Great Britain with a hostile kinsman at his heels and a price on his head. Every well-wisher whom he meets with, from the girl whom he loves down to the family solicitor, deplores his obstinacy and rashness, and plies him with arguments for an immediate flight to France which a candid reader recognizes as unanswerable while he rejoices that they were disregarded. For the consequence of this disregard is that we accompany the escaped prisoner through a succession of the most stirring adventures, as ingeniously invented and as brilliantly narrated as anything we have had from their lamented inventor and narrator since he carried us breathless, with David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart, through the stirring pages of "Kidnapped." Apart, moreover, from the excellence of the story-telling, the fortune of the romance would be made by the masterly portraiture of its hero, who ranks high in our opinion among Stevenson's most successful studies of character. Never, perhaps, have the fascination and the foibles of the typical Frenchman been studied with such humorous insight, or hit off with such easy felicity of touch. To compare it with the "Brigadier Gerard" of Mr. Conan Doyle would of itself be no light praise, as all who are familiar with that brilliant little piece of portrait painting will admit. But the later of the two heroes has in more than one respect the advantage of the earlier. There is the same feather-headed courage, the same invincible cheerfulness, the same gallantry, gaiety, vanity, naïveté, in the one as in the but Stevenson's other, hero is the finer by certain superiorities which he would naturally and of right possess and also by certain qualities which were the gift to him of his literary creator, and which have no doubt intentionally been left out of Mr. Doyle's creation. The Vicomte is a polished gentleman, which can hardly be said of the worthy Brigadier, and he indulges in a delightful candour of self-criticism, of which that other equally high-spirited but still slightly wooden-headed soldier of the Empire would have been wholly incapable. Mr. Stevenson's hero in fact is, through and through, an adventurer after Dumas' own heart, as dashing as D'Artagnan, as chivalrous as Athos, as amorous as Aramis, as genial and jovial, if, of course, not quite so muscular, Porthos; and we follow him through the whole series of his enterprises by flood and field, and even by air, for he finally gives his enemies the slip in a balloon, with unflagging interest. The dialogue is of Stevenson's best, for in a certain sententiousness of humour indeed it often recalls some of the quaintest colloquies in the "New Arabian Nights," and particularly in that most fantastically droll among the stories in that volume, "The Rajah's Diamond." Excellent too is the picture of Old Edinburgh, and of the works and ways of the French prisoners on its Castle rock; while foremost among passages of the latter kind is the description of the fatal duel with scissors between the hero and the ruffianly but staunchly loyal Goguelat. "You have given me the key of the fields, comrade. Sans rancune," said the fellow when he had got his mortal wound. And Victor Hugo himself, at his best in "Les Miserables," would not have disdained to sign this passage, in which the dying man, who has firmly refused to give up the name of his slayer, bids him final as |