thirty-two volumes; but these will not exhaust the amazing amount of manuscript of which Ruskin was the author, for there remain many volumes of diaries and note-books, which will be published later, not to mention hosts of letters, which would fill volumes more.

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It is futile to lament that the late John Fiske's "New France and New England" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is not the book that it would have been if the author had lived to enlarge, rearrange and revise it, and with it to round out his important undertaking of a chain of histories extending from the discovery of America to the adoption of the Constitution. Fragmentary it necessarily is, but the fragments of so great a work by so skilled a hand are of more value than the completed work of a writer less endowed. Only the first two chapters, about one-fifth of the whole, had the benefit of the author's final revision. The third chapter he left nearly complete: the other seven are lectures, printed as Dr. Fiske delivered them. There is a break also in the continuity of the volume, chapters upon Salem witchcraft, and the "Great Awakening" being inserted between chapters upon "New France" and the story of Braddock's campaign. The book awakens conflicting emotions,-regret that the author did not live to complete it, and pleasure that so much of it was in a form to permit of publication.

In the four essays which make up the substantial volume called "Boston Days," "The City of Beautiful Ideals," "Concord and Its Famous Authors," "The Golden Age of Genius," and "The Dawn of the Twentieth Century,"-Lilian Whiting offers a collection of reminiscence, anecdote and description whose variety may be easily inferred from the simple statement that more than two hundred and fifty proper

names are indexed at its close. Miss Whiting's taste inclines her to appreciations rather than discriminations, and the relative space which she allots to the poets, artists, scholars, philanthropists and reformers, the lectureships, coteries, clubs and "movements" that have given the city its distinctive character, does not always correspond to the general estimate of their relative importance. But she has made an attractive and readable book, and her last chapter, in particular, presents to the stranger or new-comer a survey of the possibilities-musical, literary, educational and what-not-of life in present-day Boston, such as it would be hard to find in equal space elsewhere. Twenty full-page illustrations add to the interest of the book. Little, Brown & Co.

The old-fashioned reader who still clings to that out-of-date distinction between fact and fiction will be as much perplexed by "A Doffed Coronet" as he was by its predecessors, "The Martyrdom of an Empress" and "The Tribulations of a Princess." The lively writer still keeps up her incognito, and pours out page after page of highly seasoned and audacious gossip about courts and embassies, with initials and asterisks as guarantee of good faith. The present volume finds her married to her second husband, who is on a secret mission from the British government to the Khedive, and its first three hundred pages are occupied with reminiscences of Cairo during the period following Arabi Pasha's rebellion. Distance lends enchantment and suspicion is soothed. But when the scene shifts to America and the princely pair lose their princely fortunes and perforce earn their princely livings by clerking it in New York, the reader's incredulity is all up in arms again. But at least he cannot complain that he has been bored. Harper & Bros.

The future biographer of Viscount Kitchener will experience many difficulties when he endeavors to trace the re-conquest of the Sudan in the archives of the Egyptian War Office. None of our generals before Kitchener ever attempted, still less succeeded in attempting, to wage war without orders, without forms, without states or paperasserie of any sort or kind. A normal year's campaign in the Sudan began with the issue of the ordre de bataille to those concerned, and ended with the promulgation of the Queen's congratulations at the close of the war. The rest of the usually voluminous documents incidental to campaigning are wanting, for the best of all reasons -namely, that none ever existed.

When the average Aldershot general takes the field he has foisted on him a mass of phenomenally useless documents, which do more to cause general trouble and paralysis than any acts of the enemy: I could name a campaign not a thousand miles from Suakin that was entirely ruined by them. But Kitchener's office stationery consisted, of a sheaf of telegraph-forms which he carried in his helmet and a pencil which he carried in his pocket-and that sufficed. Moreover, he seldom read an official letter, and never wrote

one, and how much wear and tear was thereby saved let those say who have had the misfortune to serve under generals afflicted with the curse of penmanship. I do not offer it as a model for imitation, first, because Kitcheners do not grow on every tree, and next, because the conditions of one campaign are never exactly reproduced in another. Even as it was, had anything happened to K., it would have taken Pall Mall and Cairo a few years to discover where and what the army was, and they would have been forced to resort to advertisements in the ag ony columns of the dervish newspapers to obtain elementary ideas on the subject.

Each commander of the units scattered all over that enormous strategic chessboard, from Cairo to Kassala and from Suakin to Korti, only knew, only was allowed to know, what he saw at the extremity of his sun-blistered nose. He had, say, four companies, a few camel corps orderlies, and so many days' supplies: he had an idea that Dick This or Harry The Other occupied a post or a well some hundreds of miles away; but whether the army had marched or fought, or won or had disappeared bodily into the Great Beyond, he never knew, and had grown

tired of trying to discover. Why should he know or care? K. looked after that, K. looked after everything; and the very moment that the last pair of boots was worn out and the last mouthful of grain was being issued to the cattle, down dropped, like manna from heaven, a fresh supply in the nick of time, coming from goodness knows where, by road or rail or river: down it was dumped, and with a word and a blow away went the transport to serve some one else, who also thought that if he did not die of ennui he could make a tolerable certainty of starvation-and was always disappointed. And then one fine day when he least expected it, and had come to reckon himself as a dead man out of mind, a few curt words came clicking off on the wires-"March in half an hour." And he marched, and all the others marched, and everybody marched, until he woke on another fine morning at dawn to find he was with others, and that he and the others were the army. And how it was done he did not stop to inquire, was not indeed allowed time to ask, for all the news he got was to march again at dawn.

I remember well meeting Kitchener in 1897 and asking him when The Event was due to happen. "Thirteen months hence," was the answer. "Thirteen months!" I said; "that is a long time to wait." "Yes, it is," said K.; "but remember that some of us have been waiting for it for thirteen years."

A good slice out of the best years of a man's life! and what uphill work in all those years, all the forming and fashioning of the weapon by Wood and Grenfell, all the selection of the tools, the amassing of information by Wingate, the endless endeavor to get a quart of men pressed into the pint-pot of the Budget, the schemings and plottings by Staveley Gordon and poor Rogers to get the best weapons, the best supplies, the best artillery and

most up-to-date equipment-to make, in short, a field army out of what the general public looked on as a most indifferent police, and looked on askance at that.

Oh those Budgets! what good stories could be told of them if some of the dead could speak and the living were not greatly tongue-tied! Half a million, not a penny more,-and do what you can with it: that was about the gist of the pro-consular ultimatum each year; and the problem was how to organize as a mobile army, equip, train, and feed 20,000 men or more on a credit only capable of supporting the armed forces of the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein.

But the pennies were saved here and cut there, and everybody did the work of three men until something was saved, and with this something there was purchased, very much under the rose and quite without the knowledge or concurrence of Pall Mall, quick-firing batteries, the latest plant, labor-saving machinery, and every sort and kind of new invention, until at last Kitchener, who had been the deus ex machinâ from first to last, set his steam-roller in motion and rolled the enemy flat.

The Cabinet Council that decided the advance on Dongola made a fortunate hit for their party, for Egypt, and for England. It was all so simple. There was a big map, fortunately not a largescale map, on the table, and some one chanced to see Dongola written in big letters. What more natural than that Mr. Chamberlain should remark, "Let's go to Dongola"? It sounded quite reasonable, and nobody made any objection. Off went a wire, and before Lord Cromer had time to turn round, the army had taken wing. That was, literally and without exaggeration, the beginning of the reconquest of the Sudan,

Kitchener is one of the hardest and most accurate thinkers I can name: he

is always thinking; not meandering aimlessly through a wilderness of casual imaginings, but thinking up and down and round and through his subject; planning every move, foreseeing every counter-move, registering every want, forestalling every demand, so that when he conducts a campaign with that unerring certainty that seems to recall the onward march of destiny, luck has had very little to do with the affair, for K. has arranged that everything shall happen as it does happen, and that particular way and no other.

In

Somewhere in the oubliette of Pall Mall there is a paper with the record of a meeting that took place at the Egyptian War Office before the final campaign. Only Kitchener, Wingate, and another officer were present. less than two hours K. laid bare the entire plan of subsequent operations, met every inquiry, formulated every want, satisfied every objection. He had worked right through the campaign in his mind, and saw daylight on the farther side of it. Everything was ready: there were so many boats to take so many men and guns and animals at a certain fixed date, depending on the Nile flood, which could be calculated with precision; there were so many weeks' supplies to be at this place and that, and the British contingent-calculated economically to the fraction of a guardsman by the order to leave band-boys behind-was requested to arrive at a certain given date, to steam and march to a certain point, to fight its usual battle 1600 miles from the chair in which K. was sitting, and to leave for London the very next day with its work accomplished. And all these things happened precisely as ordained at that meeting, so that one momentarily believed that even the unexpected had been banished from the art of war.

The gift of overcoming apparently insuperable difficulties which the Sir

dar's officers possessed in such a marked degree was very largely due to the unbending severity with which he treated all failures, whether high or low were responsible for them. A thing was ordered: it had to be done, and consequently it was done; no excuses prevailed for an instant. So when an officer lost a Nile steamer through the stupidity of a subordinate he was a ruined man; when the wires failed to connect K. with his base at a critical moment, the young officer in charge lost all the fruits of his long and meritorious labors. If no chief ever acknowledged more fully and generously good work well done, no one also was ever more unforgiving of failure, to no matter what cause the failure might be due. Once in the hottest moment of a blazing Sudan summer I incautiously reported that D. had got sunstroke, and therefore could not execute some order. "Sunstroke!" K. replied; "what the devil does he mean by having sunstroke: send him down to Cairo at once." However, D. being a friend of mine, I wired to warn him that he was under a delusion and was quite well, and the order was carried out, and nothing more heard of the matter, while poor D. lived to get himself handsomely killed before Mafeking.

On another occasion I took part in a river reconnaissance under Colin Keppel: we were aground for seventeen hours on a falling Nile in the middle of the Dervish army, and 100 miles from our outposts; and if Keppel had not been a handy man of the best type, we might have been there now. We had no small boats,-the Budget did not run to such luxuries,-but a raft was made out of odds and ends of timber, and the anchor, weighing about a ton, was ferried out on it to a sandbank by forty stalwart Gippies, working up to their necks in the water, and we got a bearing on the anchor, and