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suddenly arrested in a composition superb ly balanced, and yet natural and easy in the extreme. In "1807" we have the most triumphant and the most fiery of those battle-pieces, crowded with small figures, in which Napoleon, without any undue emphasis, is given the central and inevitable place of honor. This is the type of those ambitious works in which Meissonier, carried away by his own desire to reach perfection, attempted a completeness of plane upon plane, beyond the capacity of any eye but his own. To another class belong his isolated subjectfigures, reading, etching, painting, smoking, or merely sitting calmly in a rosecolored or a sky-blue coat. Throughout his life the muse of Meissonier, in the old

phrase, brought forth none but male children. Much as he loved drapery and custume, he very seldom consented to draw a woman; when he did, as in the hostess in "La Halte," or the servant-maid in "La Culotte des Cordeliers," he succeeded just well enough to send us back contented to his troopers and his philosophes. Meissonier's unique position in the art of our time is very curious. He sprang out of nothing, full-armed, without a master; and he dies at eighty, the most honored and the most popular of French painters, without ever having had, in any serious sense, a pupil. He has been, like Cowley's Phoenix, "a vast species alone.”— Saturday Review.

LITERARY NOTICES.

THE LAST OF THE BARONS.

WARWICK THE KINGMAKER, By C. W. C. Oman, (English Men of Action Series.) London and New York: Macmillan & Co.

In the history of European nations no period is more interesting than that which embodies the last throes of feudalism and the beginnings of the new age when cities began to be. come powers, with their concentration of mercantile and political growth, and the growing feeling of burgher independence. Such was the characteristic feature of the latter part of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries in France and England. Louis XI., one of the most astute of the French kings, made relentless war on the barons of France and the great feudatories who minimized the power and dignity of the Crown. To do this he cultivated in every way the alliance and support of the burgher classes, and encouraged trade and manufactures, no less for his own purposes than for his knowledge of their value to France. His English contemporary, Edward IV., respects his antipode, was, in craft at least, his equal. He pursued a similar course with cold-blooded and relentless tenacity. Though he had risen to the royal seat by the means of the great Earl of Warwick, whom Bulwer aptly calls the "Last of the Barons" in his great historical novel, he became hostile to him at an early period, and finally forced him into rebellion that he might destroy him. Ed.

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ward, who was as keen-sighted as he was pleasure-loving and ferocious, saw the irresistible drift of the new tendencies of the age, and sympathized with them. It was this fact, as well as that the proud king would endure no other great power near his throne, which doomed the house of Nevil, and the magnificent nobleman who was its head. Not only was the Earl of Warwick the man to whom the house of York owed its dynastic. success more than to any other man, but Warwick had, by his alliances, become so powerful that his shadow projected over the throne. He was the most powerful and haughty subject who ever bowed the knee to an English king He was the last of that race of obdurate and fierce nobles who under the feudal organization were likely at any time to terrorize the throne, who scorned the common people, and were resolute in defending the rights of their class against king and commons alike. Warwick, though the possessor of splendid personal traits, had all the virtues and prejudices of the order, which practically ended with himself. The pathos of the life of the great kingmaker was not merely that he was the victim of an ungrateful and heartless master, who felt the vast obligation which he owed to the house of Nevil irksome. It was rather that he was doomed by that rising popular tide of independence and self-assertion on the part of the middle classes, which feared the king less than it did the proud and imperious representative of the old conservative

order of things. Without this help, Edward would have been a straw in the hands of Warwick, great as was the king alike as military captain and politician. Mr. Oman, in sketching the life, character, and career of one of the most picturesque figures in English history, has used all the somewhat scanty material at his command in recreating this great personality for our imagination. If he has failed somewhat in giving us the thing which is the life blood and marrow of history or biography, he at all events succeeds in clearly showing the conditions in which the career of Warwick was set, out of which it grew, and by which the strength and grandeur of his character were dashed helplessly against an iron wall. The story of Warwick's life is one of the most illuminating episodes in the long and splendid drama of English history, and the telling of it has been so well done by the present author that it deserves to be widely read.

THE PROTAGONIST OF EUROPEAN LETTERS. PETRARCH. A Sketch of his Life and Works. By May Alden Ward, author of "Dante : A Sketch of his Life and Works." Boston: Roberts Brothers.

In using the title protagonist, as applied to Petrarch, it is not designed to express the supremacy of his genius, but the fact that he was the first of European authors to exalt literature into a profession. Dante, who was a contemporary of his early youth, and whose powers were far more sublime and lofty, and Boccaccio, who was the friend and rival of his riper years, developed the genius which has made their names immortal only as incidental to lives which were far more consciously busy in connection with other ambitions and aspirations. Petrarch was first, last, and always the literary artist and scholar, though his patriotic passion was not less than that of Dante, and though his occasional diversions into diplomacy and politics carried him sometimes far away from his chosen vocation. The influence which he exerted on the beginnings of that renaissance of thought which set Europe loose from its intellectual bonds was immense, and entitles him, perhaps, to a still loftier fame even than does that nightingale song which preceded the outburst of Chaucer in England.

Petrarch, born in 1304, was the son of a Florentine notary, and, like Boccaccio, was destined to the law; but the irresistible bent of both carried them to higher pursuits. The

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passion for Greek literature had already begun to penetrate Italy, though the fall of Constantinople, with the dispersion of Greek scholars and their precious manuscripts, did not occur till the next century. Petrarch threw himself into the study of the Greek and Latin classics with intense enthusiasm. When only 23 years old he met Laura de Sade, whose name is immortally linked with his own as having inspired his scnnets. Boccaccio, who could not understand a pure and Platonic passion, always denied the lady's existence out of his friend's imagination. But there is no doubt that Laura was a genuine person, a married lady, who was the mother of a large family, and for whom the poet chose to exercise an exquisite ideal attachment. He always pictures her as a lady of divine beauty and impeccable virtue, who cherished his homage without requiting his love. Petrarch, to divert his mind from the agitation of his somewhat fantastic passion, travelled extensively in France, Germany, Flanders, and Italy, and became acquainted with all the distinguished persons of his time. He had already become distinguished as the foremost Italian poet, for it was to be many a long year yet before Dante was to take his supreme pluce in the eyes of the world, when the Senate of Rome and the University of Paris made him poet-laureate in 1340, and on the following year he was crowned at Rome.

The revolution effected by Cola de Rienzi inspired his keenest sympathies, and the poet used all his skill both as a poet and a diplomat to forward the hopes awakened in patriotic Italians by this short-lived outburst of the spirit of political reform for which the age was not ripe. Petrarch's life, though devot. ed mainly to scholarship and letters, was henceforward spent in oscillating between Vaucluse, his own chosen home, Avignon, the seat of the Popes, Venice, Naples, and Milan. Though his Florentine citizenship and property, which had been taken from him, were restored, and the Florentine seigniory beseeched him to dignify his native city with his residence, he never did more than visit the home of his fathers. He died at Arqua, near Padua, in 1374. His great work, that by which Petrarch is remembered in literature, "Il Canzoniere, or Rime de Petrarca," con. sists of more than three hundred sonnets, about fifty odes after the model of the troubadour songs, and three short poems in terza rima. It is in these that he immortalized the beauty and virtue of Laura and his own

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genius, and created new forms of poetic art. His prose writings were in Latin, and as a philosopher he entered the first protest against the scholastic subtleties of theology, and revived the spirit of free inquiry and discussion, which was to swell finally into the Ref. ormation. He shone alike as the opponent of ecclesiastical corruption and tyranny, the apostle of unshackled thought, and the champion of Italian freedom. His influence in the revival of classical learning was prodigious, and his contribution to the intellectual growth of Europe in this way can hardly be overestimated. To him also, not less than to Dante, does the Italian language owe a debt in the perfecting of its forms which justly merits the homage which literary Italy has never ceased to pay to his memory. The author of this little book, in quoting Symonds, recalls that brilliant writer's admirable summary of Petrarch's place in modern judgment, and properly explains why the poet is best known by the work which did not embody his grand. est labor. 'To have foreseen," says the critic, a whole new phase of European culture, to have interpreted its spirit and determined by his own activity the course it should pursue, is in truth a higher title of fame than the composition of the most perfect sonnets. The artist, however, has this advantage over the pioneer of intellectual progress, that his delicate creations are indestructible, and that his work cannot be merged in that of a continuator. Therefore Petrarch lives and will live in the minds of millions as the poet of Laura, while only students know how much the world owes to his humanistic ardor." The lady author, Miss (or Mrs.) May Alden Ward, who is responsible for this book, does not contribute anything new to our knowledge of a career which has been a much-ploughed field of research and discussion for three centuries, but she has given us a convenient and compact summary of Petrarch as man, patriot, poet, and scholar, gracefully written, and embodying the best-digested conclusions of critics and essayists. As such it is a timely companion to her book on Dante, which was made on similar lines.

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his "Pepita Ximenes" proved to American readers how well justified his reputation is. The book before us, which is admirably translated by Mrs. Serrano, like its predecessor, deals for the most part with rural life and rural types, and the freshness and simplicity of the story are conjoined with a very perfect art. Indeed, the broad and primitive lines of conduct and sentiment which are involved in the delineation of rural society seem to us to require a finer delicacy of touch and a surer dramatic instinct than pictures of life in the hot-beds of civilization, where motive and passion are both more complex and highly seasoned. Doña Luz, the heroine of the present novel, is an interesting study of a perfectly healthy and normal woman, harmonious in mind and body, in whom innocence and truth are combined with delicate and ardent sensibilities. The passion which finally awakens in a nature so virginal and pure for a man who proves to be a wretched impostor and fortune-hunter, after marriage has made the discovery on the part of the bride useless, is depicted by Valera with the hand of a master. The character of Doña Luz is as perfectly done in its way as its lighter companion study of the preceding novel, "Pepita Ximenes," though of course it belongs to a nobler type of womanhood, and is far more austere. Among other characters in this Spanish idyl, that of the old money-lender, Don Acirclo, is almost as good and natural a piece of portraiture as that of the heroine, and several of the other minor people of the story are hardly less vivid and well wrought. But in such books as this it is not merely the story that pleases an intelligent reader. It is rather the insight it gives us into the atmosphere and personel of a kind of life perfectly new to us, a life full of quaint and piquant flavor and full of the freshest and sweetest realism in the best sense of that much-abused word. Vale. ra's Spanish novels remind one of George Sand's rural studies in their perfection of art and their insight into the broad motives which belong to universal humanity. Such books as this may be read more than once with pleasure.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.

AMONG the recent deaths in England is that of Rev. Dr. E. H. Plumptree, Dean of Wells, at the age of seventy. He did much good work in his day as a professor at King's College, a country clergyman, and a cathedral

dignitary. A man of refined and poetical temperament, he lacked the critical judgment and the accurate scholarship necessary to make his literary works of permanent importance. Besides two volumes of verses, of which Lazarus, and other Poems,' was the more successful, he published translations of Sophocles and Eschylus, and the "Divina

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Commedia" and Canzoniere" of Dante. He also wrote a life of Bishop Ken. He compiled a number of commentaries on various parts of the Bible, published several volumes of sermons, and was a contributor to Dr. Smith's Dictionaries of the Bible, of Christian Antiquities, and of Christian Biography.

MESSRS. WILLIAMS & NORGATE, of London, Eng, have issued the prospectus of a collection of Irish legends and tales, to be edited from the original MSS. and translated by Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady, who occupies an almost unique position as being equally conversant with the old vellums and the modern language. Materials for two volumes of about 400 pages each are now ready, which will be sent to press as soon as a sufficient number of subscriptions are received at 28s. for the entire work. The first volume will consist mainly of Lives of Saints, the Ossianic and Cuchullin cycles; the second will contain the Dialogue of the Seniors, in three recensions. The title chosen for the work is "Silva Gadel

ica."

Mr. Joseph Wright, Ph.D., of Heidelberg, has been elected to the deputy-professorship of comparative philosophy at Oxford, vacant by the resignation of Mr. Sayce. In addition to those formerly mentioned in the Academy, Mr. R. Seymour Conway, of Caius College, Cambridge, was also a candidate. Dr. Wright is best known as the translator of the first volume of Brugmann's "Grundriss der Vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft." He has been residing for some two years past at Oxford, working with Prof. Max Müller; and he has devoted special attention to English dialects, of which it is hoped that he may some day publish a dictionary.

THE statue of Barns which is in course of erection at Ayr is expected to be unveiled during the forthcoming summer, but about £300 is still required for the completion of the work. Some of the newspapers record the death of Mrs. John Thomson, the wife of a wine merchant in Glasgow, who was a granddaughter of Robert Burns. She was in the seventy-sixth year of her age.

THE death is announced of M. Elie Berthet, well known as a prolific novelist, a number of his stories having appeared in the feuilletons of various Parisian journals.

AT the last meeting of the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries, Mr. John Robinson ex. hibited a curiosity found among the Delaval Papers-a receipt for the Seaton Delaval tithe rent, due to the Earl of Northumberland, signed by Thomas Percy, one of the Gunpow. der Plot conspirators. The receipt is dated October 27th, 1605, a few days before the arrest of Guy Fawkes. Percy had hurried North, and collected upward of £3000 of

the earl's rents. He arrived in London on November 1st to find that the plot was known.

THE authorities of Trinity College, Dublin, with the University of which it is the mother (Mater Universitalis appears in its charter), have decided upon the date of the festival which is to mark the opening of a fourth cen. tury of successful labor. The first week in July, 1892, will, they hope, be in Dublin a gay time, with distinguished English, American, Australian, French, German, and Dutch visitors, when honorary degrees will be conferred, and hospitality extended to old graduates. The secretary appointed is Prof. Arthur Palmer, who will at once commence organizing the feast and filling in the details of the general scheme.

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MR. HALL CAINE's last novel, The Bond. man," has reached a sale of close upon 15,000 copies in less than a twelvemonth, which includes three editions in the expensive library form. It has also appeared in the Tauchnitz collection of "British Authors," and in Petherick's colonial collection of European Authors." It is published in New York, in an authorized edition, by Mr. Lovell, besides in various pirated reprints. We now learn that a German translation is in preparation, which will be published by Mr. Schorer, of Berlin.

THE autograph letter of Mr. Charles Dickens to a friend in Scotland, giving an account of the death of "Grip" the raven, has realized £15 10s. at Messrs. Sotheby's rooms.

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN's new poem, "The Outcast; a Rhyme for the Time," is now definitely announced for publication by Messrs. Chatto & Windus. The text, which will be illustrated with about a dozen fullpage engravings, in addition to vignettes, is divided into four portions, named respectively

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PROF. A. CAMPBELL FRASER, the editor of Berkeley, who has filled the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh for nearly thirtyfive years, has announced his intention to retire as professor emeritus" at the end of the current session. At the same time he expresses a 'hope to devote some remaining strength to the service of the university by further research and literary work in the department entrusted to me, and in this way still to discharge an important part of the duties of a professor."

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THE death is announced of "Poet Close," to whom Lord Palmerston gave a pension, subsequently withdrawn after a speech in the House of Commons by the late Sir W. StirlingMaxwell, which was enriched by copious quotations from the poet's verses. Lord Palmerston, though a shrewd and sharp-witted statesman, knew but little about literature, and cared less. His placing an obscure provincial rhymester, whose doggerel was the laughing-stock of even the rustic audience for which it was intended, on the pension list, was one of the most absurd blunders ever made by an English Minister of State.

THE Theosophical Society, under the auspices of Mme. Blavatsky, is evidently very angry with Prof. Max Müller. A statement appears in the January issue of the society's monthly magazine that the next numbers will consist of papers by Swami Bhaskare Nand Saraswati, F.T.S., showing over 600 important mistakes made by Prof. Max Müller in his translation of Vedic hymns and other Sanscrit works. The correct translations will be given. There may be safety in numbers.

To most minds the name of Marat, one of the three dreadful despots of the French Revolution, who made the Reign of Terror will only be suggestive of all that is gruesome and repellent. Yet Jean Marat, in his early life, was a medical practitioner, and a writer of some note on medical subjects. M. Georges Pilotelle-who dates from 62 York Terrace, Regent's Park-proposes to issue a reprint of a rare medical tractate of Marat, of which the only known copy is that in the library of the College of Surgeons. Like other early works of Marat, it is written in English; but, comme tout le monde n'est pas obligé de savoir celle langue," M. Pilotelle has resolved to retranslate it into French. It will

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FROGS AND WASPS.-The common green tree frog, so often kept in ferneries, has been recently discovered to possess an insatiable greed for wasps. This extraordinary appetite does not seem to be in the least checked by an occasional sting. The protecting color of the frog, which sits motionless upon leaves, no doubt deludes the most wary insects into a sense of security. The wasp, however, trusting to its formidable reputation, which is duly published and advertised to the insect-eating world at large by bright and conspicuous colors, does not need to be wary. This may perhaps account for the fact that a large Australian tree frog at the Zoological Gardens has the genial effect of its protecting green color interfered with by numerous white patches and marks. Possibly it started life as a species by preying upon timid insects which were as green mentally as the frog was phys. ically, and were duped into approaching what appeared to be merely a leaf; later on it took to more stimulating food in the way of wasps and bees; and, owing to the boldness of its prey, no longer needed to be concealed. -English Mechanic.

WANTED: A MIDDLE CLASS IN RUSSIA. -It is impossible proximately to predict the future of the gigantic Russian Empire, occupied as it is by two distinct bodies which exist side by side, but between which there is no organic tie. Russia consists of two unequal and incongruous halves, which do not and cannot make one whole. The head and the feet be. long in no sense to each other; the one runs after every new fashion, the other as yet does not perceptibly move. The one is that ephemeral creation called la Société, the other is the nation; the one belongs to 1890, the other to 1490; and for the present the slender rudiments of a middle class are utterly inad. equate to fill the void between them. that such rudiments do exist is obvious to those who have had opportunities for ob. servation. Scientific men are forming the nucleus of this slowly coming class. We know

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