editors deeming it wise to annotate the important ones thoroughly rather than the whole series scantily. These seventy Lives they have studied very closely, and the footnotes that mark the pages not only give historical changes and corrections, but contain critical characterizations of the painters that are of no small value. Vasari, in spite of his occasional hearsay evidence and his apparent antipathy to certain painters, is the fountain-head from which the histories of Italian art derive, and this new edition of his Lives is both timely and welcome. Some forty-eight photogravures of the masterpieces of Italian painting and sculpture help out the narratives by showing us the original works commented upon by Vasari. The edition is limited to five hundred copies-more's the pity, for the work should be popular and accessible to all.

So much for the books with illustrations that illustrate. Aside from the help the pictures afford the text, there is, naturally enough, a publisher's method in illustration. It brightens a volume, gives it an interesting look, and, when accompanied by good pa

per, wide margins, and "open-faced" type, results in artistic book-making. The present rivalry among publishers in the matter of handsomely made books is very strong, and we have no end of types and papers, ornamented covers with gold stampings, and variegated cloths. Sometimes it happens that pictures are thrust between the book-covers more to stimulate the curiosity and smarten the appearance than for anything like illustration. Yet it does not follow of necessity that every picture in a book should have something to do with the text. There are pictures that have value for their illustrative meaning, and there are pictures that should have. value for their decorative meaning. The distinction marks a fundamental difference. It is a hard one for us to grasp. We are so matter-of-fact, and so insistent upon it that everything should mean something, that we often pass by that which is graceful and good simply because it tells no story. Just at present people are having

lowed the manuscripts, and in Japan the book-maker followed the kakemono. To-day we are still following precedent to some extent. Some follow the Japanese, some the Italians, some the Germans. For instance, Mr. Hadaway's decorations for Mr. T. B. Aldrich's Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston) are of German inspiration, and remind us of the old Nuremberg calendars. The pages are long and thin, with ornamental borders, the type is black, underscored with red lines, and the initials are rubricated. The title-pages are figures of ecclesiastics in pattern, and the frontispiece is an illustration in red ink of Friar Jerome in his cell. The whole book makes up prettily, and has something of antique quaintness about it. Quaint and reminiscent, too, are Mr. H. G. Fell's ornamental designs for The Book of Job (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York). It would seem almost impossible for any one to make designs for this book without thinking of William Blake's "Job," and Mr. Fell has at least taken a peep at it.

The flying figures of the borders, the long cowled people, the swirling circles, point to Blake; but Mr. Fell has been himself on more than one page, and has produced some effective work both as illustration and decoration. A companion volume, The Book of Ruth (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York), pictured and designed by Mr. W. B. McDougall, is more modern in spirit and has less of the old woodcut effect than Mr. Fell's vol ume. In fact, Mr. McDougall rather suggests the modern poster in his designs, but with much. delicacy of line and originality in patterns. Some of the backgrounds and borders are charming in their adaptation of flowers, leaves, and other natural forms, and the illustrations themselves are effective Both of these volumes are good specimens of modern printing and book-making. There is no reason why the statement should not be extended to A Book of Christmas Verse, selected by H. C. Beeching (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York), with ten designs by Walter Crane. It is just as handsomely printed, and the "fat-faced" type, the full margin, the strong paper, are most attractive. But Mr. Crane's designs are not soulstirring either as illustration or decoration.

much merriment over the work of a young Englishman, Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. He is all sorts of an impressionist, symbolist, egoist, or decadent, as people choose to name him. Why? Simply because he decorates rather than illustrates fills a page with pretty patterns instead of pretty :stories. There is always enough of the Saxon in us to ask, What does it mean? and not enough of the Latin to ask, How does it look? If we could regard his work as ornament put in to make a book beautiful, we should applaud it to the echo. Perhaps we shall do so yet. Time changes many contemporary opinions, and a few years. hence we may be found guilty of acclaiming Beardsley as a genius. Whether we do or not, he is no less an artist of pronounced ability and originality.

But the decorated book did not originate with Mr. Beardsley. It is of very ancient lineage. The papyrus books of the Egyptians were illustrated and decorated, and the illumination of manuscripts was practiced in the earliest times. When printing was invented, the page-patterns fol

The new two-volumed edition of Irving's Bracebridge Hall (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York), in its white and gold binding, is not only ornamented by Miss Armstrong with pale-green page-patterns, but is furnished with some twenty-eight illustrations by American artists. The book is filled with good picturesque material, but some of the illustrators have thought their own conceptions more fetching than those of Washington Irving, and have treated us to "effects" that might as appropriately be inserted in the Koran as in "Bracebridge Hall." They are well enough done artistically, and the printing of them upon heavy plate-paper is excellent, but they do not illustrate. The dainty little border-pieces in color by Amelia M. Watson that adorn the pages of Thoreau's Cape Cod (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston) serve their purpose much better. They really enlighten the text, for the sketches

were made along Cape Cod; and with their color they give us quite an idea of the country about which Thoreau wrote. The printing of the colors is exceedingly good, and the use of the page margins for small sketches is quite a novelty. The result is decorative illustration, and that is what all picture-making for books should be.

One of the most important of the season's illustrated books is M. Gréard's Meissonier: His Life and His Art

(A. C. Armstrong & Son, New York). The life is not an exhaustive study of Meissonier. It is rather a series of sketches taken from the artist's own talk and letters, but what there is of it is authentic-something that cannot be said for some other published accounts of the painter. It was not necessary to say much about the man, for the public is interested only in the artist. Meissonier, like every other artist, wrote his autobiography in his art, and here it is, reproduced in two hundred illustrations, with forty full-page plates, partly in photogravure, partly in color. His best pictures are thus shown, and, of course, they help the text, because they are the very man himself. Meissonier had all the gifts of the illustrator, and had he devoted himself entirely to black-and-white work he would perhaps have achieved quite as much fame as he did in painting. His genre pictures-cavaliers, smokers, riders-admirably done though they be, are little more than colored illustrations. The Napoleonic cycle rises to pictorial creation, but is not the less illustrative. His whole work was a record of observation, and Meissonier himself was more of an eye than a poetic. mind. He left nothing to the imagina- . tion, and was ever intent upon giving facts. There is an édition de luxe of the book, the type on Japanese vellum, the plates on India paper, that should give one a still better conception of this man's great skill. He was a master in craftsmanship beyond any doubt.

Daniel Vierge is a master, too, but his work lies entirely within the realm of black-and-white. Here he certainly has no superior among living men. The story of his losing the use of his right hand, and the facility with which he

in the swing of lines, in the filling of page-space! Here at: last is the true decorative illustration-the kind that gives. light to the book as well as to the text, and makes both beautiful to look upon. Vierge is a Spaniard born, and has known the land of Don Quixote from boyhood. Mr. Jaccaci knows that country too, and is besides an artist who knows. what to omit as well as what to put in his narrative.

Poems by Paul Verlaine

Translated by Emerson G. Taylor

I.

O River in the street,

How quaint is thy retreat

Between high walls immured! Thy waters dark and clear Through byways thou dost steer With ripple faintly heard.

O River pale like death,
Hopeless thou flow'st beneath
A pall spun from decay;
E'en though above thy shores
On tower and cottage pours
The splendor of the day.

II.

Borne on the Autumn's wings
I hear, as from vibrant strings,
Harmonies.

Telling of Summer fled,

They wake in my heart-long deadMemories.

Breathless and pale of soul,

I hear the deep bell toll,

Full of fears;

trained his left hand to take its place, has been recounted more than once. The difference between the two hands is scarcely apparent in his work. Certainly the illustrations which he has recently made for Mr. A. F. Jaccaci's On the Trail of Don Quixote (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York) show the old spirit and energy with no perceptible diminution in accuracy. Each one of these 130 illustrations is worthy of study simply for the art it displays. No one has ever shown life, motion, character, force, better than Vierge. And how decorative he is in the massing of lights and shades,

As the dark hours flit by, Old days I dim descry Through my tears.

And then I'm whirled away, The bitter wind's poor prey, Here and there

I and the withered sheaves Of helpless blasted leaves. Tossed in air.

HEN one looks through the list of new editions of standard works of literature, he begins to doubt the accuracy of observation of those critics of contemporary conditions who tell us, from time to time, that serious books are no longer read, and that the reading public has ceased to care for sound literary workmanship. That there is a great laxity in the matter of discriminating between the good and the bad in literary form and substance is beyond question; that too many of those who read show no evidence of intelligence of taste or aim is also beyond question; but there are also many evidences of the existence of a body of readers who care only for the best, and who discriminate between literature and the great mass of writing which is issued in book form, but which bears no more relation to literature than a block of unhewn stone bears to the Parthenon. There are, fortunately, a very considerable number of publishers who deal with book-making in a generous and honorable spirit, who care for books as literature as well as merchandise, and who are glad of an opportunity of forwarding the interests of an unknown man of promise. But the publishing of books is, of course, a business, and must be conducted on business principles; and while intelligent publishers are ready to make ventures for the sake of introducing a new writer of force and talent, they do not republish old books as a matter of entertainment. If old books are reprinted from time to time, it is because there are readers who want them and who buy them. The constant reappearance, therefore, of the standard writers in new and handsome issues furnishes good evidence of the survival of the habit of serious reading and of the renewal and extension of the circle of those who know and care for good books.

One can imagine the satisfaction with which Wordsworth would have studied the long row of sixteen attractive volumes in which the Macmillan Company (New York) are now issuing his complete poetical works; for this dignified and attractive Eversley edition, with its suggestion of library rather than of railroad use, is in itself a declaration that the verse it contains has classic quality and. standing. Better still, this noble body of poetry receives its proper homage of thoroughly intelligent editing. Mr. William Knight has long been a student of Wordsworth; he edited a library edition of the poems ten years ago; published a life of the poet years later;

three

William Wordsworth

wrote a very pleasant book on "The English Lake District as Interpreted in the Poems of Wordsworth," and prepared the "Memorials of Coleorton," which every lover of the Lake poet has read. In this edition the poems are arranged in the order in which they were written; the changes of text made by the poet in successive editions are given in foot-notes; several pieces of verse are printed for the first time in a complete edition; a new bibliography is added; eight volumes are devoted to the poems and two volumes to the prose works; the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth and the letters of Dor

othy and of the poet are given; with a new life of Wordsworth in one volume. Each volume contains an etching of a locality associated with the poet, and a new portrait of Wordsworth or of his wife or daughter or sister. The edition leaves nothing to be desired.

It is no very violent change of atmosphere and feeling to pass from Grasmere to Thrums; to exchange the oldtime English dalesman for the sturdy Scotch weaver. Mr. Barrie, like Wordsworth, is a lover of nature and of man in his primitive estate. He cares supremely for those simple expericnces in which the life of men finds a common consciousness and out of which the human drama is compounded. It is too early to assign Mr. Barrie his final or even his relative place, but there are many indications that he has come to stay. His popularity has waxed so much

of late that one trembles when he remembers that the writer of "Sentimental Tommy" is so young. There is that in his work, however, which allays such an anxiety. Mr. Barrie has a real insight into life, and such an insight is an immense safeguard against the corrupting tendency of popularity. He is, moreover, a true artist, and a true artist never wholly succumbs to the lower temptations of success. Those who care, therefore, for the sensitive genius of a writer who puts his heart into his books, without any sacrifice of that reticence which is the guard of every fine nature, may take unalloyed satisfaction in the fact that the reading public has found Mr. Barrie out and has profited by the knowledge. The man who wrote "Sentimental Tommy " has the stuff of literature in him, and Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons have made no mistake in giving his work, that dignity of form which was once reserved for writers who had passed all the barriers and taken their places among the classics. When the ten volumes of the Thistle Edition stand together, there will be few to withstand the charm of the fair page, the noble type, the judicious illustration, and the tasteful binding. Such books, by their happy combination of old-fashioned dignity and modern decoration, are a credit to American. book-making.

The Riverside Press has so thoroughly defined its aims and so long illustrated its workmanship that its imprint has become a synonym for sound and beautiful work. One by one the older American classics have come in final forms from this press, and no one who cares for our literature can look through the long list from Hawthorne to Mrs. Stowe without recognizing the service which this press has rendered to American writers and readers. For it is no small matter that our classics are now in our hands in forms so harmonious and appropriate that the very shape and dress of the books are significant of the quality and value of the text. To this company of beautiful editions the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, in sixteen volumes, are now being added. One reads the pages without being conscious of the type, and the volumes are so well dressed in color and stamping that one fails to note any single feature of binding or lettering; and this is saying that the edition is in perfect taste. The title pages are worthy of special attention, and each volume is to contain an etched portrait or other illustration. This edition is the truest memorial of a writer who was not only the foremost woman who has yet appeared in this country, but who was also the most widely read of Amer

ican authors. The great vogue of "Uncle Tom's Cabin " has passed, but that striking story will long find readers to be stirred by its dramatic power and moved by its passionate intensity of spirit. Mrs. Stowe's best work as a novelist is to be found, however, in her sketches of New England life. and character.

A new generation of novelists has come upon the stage since the brave days when Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot were writing those great novels which have become a part of our literature. Time has dealt gently with Thackeray, whose soundness of substance and whose beauty of workmanship become more clear as the years go by; it has searched Dickens with dispassionate scrutiny, and has rejected half a dozen stories which our elders. once laughed or cried over; and it has not left George Eliot's work intact. It has discarded "Daniel Deronda," "Theophrastus Such," the great majority of the poems, and it has had misgivings about "Romola;" but it has put "Scenes from Clerical Life," "Silas Marner," "The Mill on the Floss," and "Adam Bede" with the books that endure; and it has postponed final judgment on "Middlemarch" and "Felix Holt." On the whole, therefore, George Eliot has fared extremely well, and is likely to go down to posterity in the company of a goodly array of works of noble quality. During those fortunate years when the artistic temper was in the ascendant, and the philosophic temper was its servant, she was a really great writer; a master of some of the deeper elements of human experience, and of a style at once capacious, vigorous, and eloquent in a worthy sense. of that much-abused word. Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co. have put the work of this gifted woman in a Standard Edition which is both dignified and agreeable; the books

Charles Kingsley

veracity, to antagonize the popular movement in which. so many of his friends were enlisted. Time always works for a writer of such insight and mastery of form, and the lonely novelist has already had his reward. The six novels which bear his name, with the volume of sketches which first made Russia completely aware of the conditions of serf life, are now recognized as masterpieces. They ought to be in the hands of every young novelist; for their restraint, condensation, balance, and deep-going energy of style are corrective of some of the worst faults of contemporary writing. No writer ever submitted himself more loyally to the discipline of art; none was ever more entirely free from carelessness, haste, crudity, and unbalanced emotion. It was a service to American readers to secure a fresh translation of this noble group of novels, and to give them so convenient a form as that which they have received at the hands of the Macmillan Company in nine small volumes.

Thomas Hardy brings to the writing of fiction the greatest natural force now at work among English novelists. Less intellectual than Meredith, he is far more dramatic. At his best he easily stands in the front rank, and in one field he has no superior in English literature." Under the Greenwood Tree," "Far from the Madding Crowd," and "The Woodlanders " are stories of classic quality; in power of natural description, of vivid portraiture of rustic life, in humor and keen characterization, they are unsurpassed. They have a Shakespearean breadth and vitality of treat

Thomas Carlyle

ment; their roots are deep in the soil out of which they grow. In sheer dramatic power, "Tess," "The Mayor of Casterbridge," and "The Return of the Native" belong also in the front rank. Mr. Hardy is, however, a fatalist, with a tremendous grasp of the irony of life as it appears from his standpoint, and with a limitation of interest and vision which, in later years especially, have told heavily against the truth of his interpretation and the beauty of his He has had a great theme in his creed that the man should be punished as severely as the woman for sexual sins; but in some of his later stories his touch has not been sound nor his taste healthful. "Two on a Tower' and "A Group of Noble Dames" are distinctly repulsive. It is a misfortune that so great a writer should have gone so far astray. Aside from this small group of books, he is an artist of commanding force and interest, to whom the future, with dispassionate discrimination between his sound.

art.

J. Fenimore Cooper

and his unsound work,

will assign a greater place than that which he holds to-day. In the new edition which bears the imprint of the Messrs. Harper & Brothers his works are presented for the first time entire and in uniform style to American readers.

It is a satisfaction to come upon a new edition of Thackeray's Henry Esmond in a single volume, well printed, tasteful in dress, and of such moderate cost that it is easily within the

reach of all who desire to make the acquaintance of the

most perfect novel in the English language.

panion volume in form, although not in quality, is Charles Kingsley's Hypatia—a story of very uneven workmanship, but full of that vitality which characterized Kingsley, and disclosing a

certain picturesque force and pictorial quality which have given the novel high rank among books of its kind. In this same group belongs also a single-volume edition of Carlyle's characteristic Sartor Resartus, in which one may find the key to Carlyle's thinking; in fact, whoever knows "Sartor Resartus" thoroughly as regards its contents and its form, knows Carlyle's view of life and art, and his manner of practicing the one and formulating the other. These three volumes bear the imprint of Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons. There have been times in late years when it has seemed as if James Fenimore Cooper's day were over, but there is too much of the stuff of which real books are made in these stories to permit of their becoming merely monuments in our literary history. They remain, in their way, among the very best stories which have yet been written on our soil. They are distinctively American, characteristic in a peculiar sense of early American conditions and character; they are, in the second place, capital pieces of narrative. The workmanship is very uneven from the standpoint of the artistic thoroughness with which most writing of high quality is done to-day. Cooper's workmanship is often slovenly, and never, perhaps, discloses the very highest quality. The average of it is, nevertheless, for the purposes for which it is used, sound. Cooper was, in the third place, a capital story-teller. He knew how to dispose of his material, how to give it order and sequence, and he remains, in spite of many successors and competitors, a real figure among the group of American novelists. It was his good fortune that the writing of his life in these later times fell into the hands of Professor Lounsbury, who made out of the material which he found one of the best biographies yet written in America. There have been many editions of these novels, but none which, for popular purposes, has been more attract

ive than the Mohawk Edition, which is to be completed in thirtytwo volumes, large 12mo, printed .from very clear type, with numer ous illustrations, and substantially and attractively bound. This edition resembles very closely the Hudson Edition of Irving, an excellent model. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.)

Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. have grouped in five well-made volumes the Leatherstocking Tales, the most popular of all the Cooper novels. These volumes contain twenty photogravure illustrations by Frank T. Merrill. They are bound in green ribbed cloth, they are well printed, and they leave little to be desired in the way of a library edition of this particular group of stories.

If there be a book in our language which fits the mood of a leisure hour, and which takes its fortunate reader out of the rush of contemporary life and the agitation of contemporary discussion, it is surely Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler; that old-fashioned, meditative, leisurely, out-of-door

classic, full of the repose of the English landscape, of the charm of the gentlest of the sports, and of the quality which makes literature. This is one of those books which the reader who knows what he wants and provides himself with it likes to have close at hand, not for consecutive reading, but for sipping now and then; and this classic has certainly never been put into more convenient shape than in the new edition which bears the imprint of the Macmillan Company, which is prefaced by a characteristic introduction from the hand of Mr. Andrew Lang, and which is admirably illustrated by Mr. E. J. Sullivan.

Never, surely, was an old poet more fortunate than Omar Khayyam on the day when his verse fell into the hands of Edward Fitzgerald. As a result of this happy contact between one of the most gifted of English translators and one of the most suggestive of old Persian poets, Omar Khayyám has become to all intents a modern writer, and for that matter an English writer. It is of small conse quence, so far as the reader is concerned, how much Omar Khayyám owes to Edward Fitzgerald; the fact remains that the translation of the Rubáiyát has put into the hands of the English reader a body of verse entirely unlike any thing which he has read in his own tongue before; at once: stimulating, suggestive, irritating, and pathetic. This: translation comes from the press of Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co., in a single volume, compact and clearly printed.

Other Holiday Books

One of the most important of holiday books is Modern French Masters, edited by Professor John C. Van Dyke (The Century Company, New York). It is a sumptuous volume, and is one of the best contributions to contemporary art. Like the "Old Italian Masters" and the "Old Dutch and Flemish Masters," this book is made up of twenty biographical and critical monographs on the bestknown modern French masters, written by their American pupils and admirers. To those who know anything about contemporary American artists and their pictures, it is easy to see that in each case the writer has been chosen because of his knowledge of the painter of whom he writes, and because of his sympathy with his works. Mr. Will H. Low contributes the articles on MM. Gérôme and Boutet de Monvel; Mr. Kenyon Cox, those on MM. Puvis de Chavannes and Baudry; Mr. Carroll Beckwith writes of

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