patriot. At twenty, having finished with distinction his course at the Jesuit college in Manila, he completed his education at Madrid, Berlin and Vienna. The remaining fourteen years-he was shot in 1896 as a traitor, despite the protest of Gen. Blanco, governor-general of the Philip pines at the time of his arrest-crowded with travel and study in Europe and America, were devoted to constant but vain appeals to Spanish public opinion for justice for his country. Never an advocate of independence, he returned to Manila to assist in allaying disaffection and righting wrongs, only to be banished despite a promise of protection. Released after four years of confinement, he was seized while on his way to serve as an army surgeon in Cuba, brought back and shot, a romantic love affair ending in marriage the night before his death. An Eagle Flight written out of such experiences could not fail of vividness and intensity.

Another book of the far-away life is Mr. Lloyd Osbourne's first independent venture, "The Queen Versus Billy," a collection of South Sea stories. Of his equipment for picturing folk whose very existence is hardly thought of, one need but remember his long and close association with Stevenson and his own love of roving in the track of the sailor and the occasional trader. Coming out from under the shadow of a great name, Mr. Osbourne has made good his title to recognition as himself a story-teller who knows his art. In its genuineness no less than in its freshness his work closely recalls that of Mr. Charles F. Lummis, in his new Mexican and South American stories.

Any glance at current fiction, however hurried, that should overlook "Tommy

THE QUEEN VS. BILLY, AND OTHER STORIES. By Lloyd Osbourne. Charles Scribner's Sons, 12mo, $1.50.

TOMMY AND GRIZEL. By James M. Barrie. Charles Scribner's Sons, 12mo, $1.50.

and Grizel," might justly be charged with omitting the novel that is coming to find place as the first production of the year. Whether or not it is Mr. Barrie's own first production is quite another question, one that it is as yet not worth while to ask because it is futile. In the general discussion it is interesting to note that the book seems to appeal far more to men than to women. The subtlety of Tommy's relations to Grizel in his final effort by a loveless marriage to undo what had been done, and the more or less tragic failure of that effort through his final taking-off, create a situation which sex-wise finds masculine more than feminine appreciation. Is it because the marriage of self-sacrifice and disappointment is so much oftener the anticipated experience of woman?

Another book, written like Barrie's with the art that waits, is Mrs. Steel's "The Hosts of the Lord," her latest tale of India. The reader, familiar with results but not with processes, can hardly understand how a writer can by patient persistence of restraint have plot, character and scene so perfectly in mind that page will follow page without erasure or correction. "And if I do slip," Mrs. Steel once said, "I rewrite the whole page." To get close to the life of India she for three months lived by herself in the Mussulman quarter of a Punjab town, doing her own work and, nativelike, sleeping on the roof under the stars. Out of an experience thus perfected come the slowly evolved pictures of race contacts and contrasts that in fidelity to a mysterious and elusive type and environment have been pronounced unique by the most competent criticism.

To say that M. Bourget brings to the

THE HOSTS OF THE LORD. By Flora Annie Steel. The Macmillan Co., $1.50.

DOMESTIC DRAMAS. By Paul Bourget. Translated by William Merchant. Charles Scribner's Sons, 12mo, $1.50,

drama of domestic life sureness of touch and felicity of phrase ("the poet-aspirant, now an artisan of prose" meaning a journalist) to match keen psychology and searching philosophy is, of course, to describe Bourget. Yet whether one turns to the opening story, the emotional drama of the conversion of an agnostic physician, or follows the more commonplace career of a bourgeois Parisian family, or studies the phases of child life, grouped in a collection of short stories at the end, the reader is impressed by the impossibility of dropping out one of these qualities and preserving the unique charm. If these qualities could be in any degree dissociated, one from the others, it would be the last of Bourget.

A like French delicacy of art, perfection in mating thought with phrase, that characterizes the work of Mr. Henry B. Fuller, reveals a temperament so much more naturally in harmony with the finer environment abroad, that his Chicago belonging is realized only by an effort. It is hard, therefore, considering him by nationality an American, to place him at his best, whether in the rôle of patriotically fighting Philistinism-as when he arraigned the associated architecture of Chicago as growing more hideous and more preposterous" every year-or in the rôle in which he is most evidently himself, the teller of the story that most appeals to his sympathetic interest. Such a story is his latest, a Sicilian romance, "The Last Refugee," both in its bright coloring and its sombre shading.

THE LAST REFUGE. A Sicilian Romance. By Henry B. Fuller. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., $1.50.

The dashing tale of love and adventure, with the vice-regal court in Dublin for the scene during the vice-royalty of the duke of Rutland in the closing years of the eighteenth century, could find no happier artificer than Mr. Hinkson, so well known for his clever Irish stories. The gallants and beauties in "The King's Deputy" fairly march before the reader's eyes, so swift in action is the story.

Miss Seawell's latest romance, "The House of Egremont," finds suggestion of mention in Mr. Hinkson's tale as a sketch may suggest a picture. The plot centres in the St. Germains court life of James, the banished Stuart, at the end of the seventeenth century. It was a time of great dramatic possibility, crowded with thrill of incident and futility of daring, to which the story gives powerful expression. Of chapters of great intensity, the most intense is that which tells in simple phrase how a boyish Jesuit faced the hangman who draws and quarters, and the dreadful mob applauding the butchery, with as gallant Christian a bravery as ever marked the end of chivalrous cavalier. On the romantic and historical sides the story is thoroughly satisfying, for it is told with vividness, picturesqueness and charm. It is a story one might look for from a native of Virginia. Where else do Jacobin traditions, though transplanted, still seem to linger with a like sense of fitness?

THE KING'S DEPUTY. A Romance of the Last Century. By H. A. Hinkson. A. C. McClurg & Co., $1.25.

THE HOUSE OF EGREMONT. A novel. By Molly Elliott Seawell. Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. Charles Scribner's Sons, 12mo, $1.50.

N

TO lack, this year, of volumes whose beauty of illustration equals, yet does not outshine, the excellent value of the text.

If, in some instances, the pictures are showered upon the pages so profusely as quite to absorb the attention for a while, as in the case of Mr. Richard Whiteing's "Paris of To-day" (The Century Co.), the light touch, the informing narrative and the nimble wit of the writer are lost sight of only for a time; the book is charming as a whole, and except for the weight of the tall, handsome octavo, to browse among its pages is a continual delight. To explore Paris is usually counted good fun enough in the abstract; to have Mr. Whiteing for commissionaire is better luck than usually falls to the average traveler. He knows his

way about, but he does not require enthusiasm for his own favorite spots and is indulgent to your catholic curiosity without patronizing you. He begins with a chapter in which he describes "The Governmental Machine," and with a large and a large and tastefully gilded "philosophic pill," prepares his reader's intelligence to appreciate the panorama which he is presently to show. He declares that "the French are really the most serious and purposeful folk in the world— a great, sad race, too, with a pessimistic bitter for the subflavor of their national gayety, as it is the subflavor of their absinthe. . . . Our Gauls are a gloomy and a brooding swarm, ever haunted with the fear of being left behind in the race of life, their clear, keen intellect marred

Copyright, 1900, by The Century Co.

RICHARD WHITEING

[Author of "Paris of To-Day."]

6

and thwarted by wretched nerves. It is the artistic temperament with its penalty. . . . In point of fact, the men here are the women, and the women the men. The quiet, laborious, cool-headed housewife runs France. The secret of the malady is nature's; the secret of the cure. is the people's own. There is none other so ploddingly, so remorselessly industrious. After every outbreak France picks up the pieces; . . . the fatal war was an attack of nerves. The Jew-baiting is another. . . . and the awful affaire' [Dreyfus] is a third on the same lines. . They know perfectly well what is the matter with them, and for their straight-jacket they have invented the administrative machine. . . . It is the permanent civil service, the government-in a word, the great automatic contrivance that keeps them going in national housekeeping while they are on the rampage. Nowhere else, except perhaps in Germany, is there anything like it for efficiency of a kind. It is everything that they are not-stable, unchang

ing, the slave of tradition, a thing that moves from precedent to precedent, but with restraint instead of freedom for its aim. The first Napoleon was the inventor of it. . . . It is a Chinese bureaucracy in completeness, with the difference that it is in thorough repair. As a piece of clockwork it is one of the greatest of human inventions. . . . This, as I have said, was Napoleon's gift to France, and the wiser sort, who dread her moods and their own, esteem it above all his victories. Law and police form. an integral part of the machine, enduring, unchanging, in their hierarchal condition a solid bulwark against the vagaries of the popular spirit."

With such an understanding of France and its people, conveyed to his readers with simple directness and the charm of the philosopher who sees all sides of his subject, Mr. Whiteing proceeds to show the various aspects of his Paris, and the glory of them. Paris of the Faubourgs and of the Boulevards, fashionable Paris and the Paris of the artists, with a lingering glance at Parisian pastimes, are the general landmarks of his book. Skilful and polished in style, not too explanatory of what one may be supposed to know, the text, which has appeared serially in the Century, must at once command even a wider audience. In all details of manufacture, save for the heavy glazed paper (which is, of course, an unavoidable blemish in so copiously illustrated a volume) the book is beyond criticism. Mr. Castaigne's illustrations represent the best that can be done in this field.

Another imposing volume is "More Famous Homes of Great Britain, and Their Stories," which is, as its title indicates, a supplementary work to one issued last year by Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons, who send us the present book. The number of Americans who will be interested in such books as this one and its predecessor