discovered to stand high in the favor of at least one of the heroines-serve as complicators of the plot, which comes to a pleasing disentanglement in the end. As a simple and light-hearted romance for girls, the story will be much liked. A. C. McClurg & Co. Tolstoi is not the only novelist who can portray passion, seduction, despair and degradation with a masterly though revolting realism. But in the intense moral conviction which unites with a knowledge of human nature at its worst, a belief in its imperishable capacity for the best, he stands unrivalled. To describe a man of confirmed and vicious habits as awakened by a sudden meeting to a sense of his responsibility for the victim of an almost forgotten passion, as sacrificing career, position and even reputation in the effort to rescue her from the depths to which she had gradually sunk, and as finally succeeding-this is the task which Tolstoi sets himself in his latest novel, "The Resurrection." The action and the reaction of the two lives upon each other affords opportunity for the display of his great powers at their best, and in spite of passages of almost brutal candor, the whole effect of the book is not to depress, but to inspire. The translation by Mrs. Louise Maude is clear and direct. Dodd, Mead & Co. The pioneer who is the hero of Rowlande Robinson's story of the Green Mountain Boys a century and a quarter ago, "The Danvis Pioneer," is one Josiah Hill, who sets forth, as a young man, to make a home for himself in the wilderness over which Ethan Allen acts as self-appointed guardian. The adventures of the youth, the growth of his acquaintance with Allen, his successes and failures, his connection with much that concerned "Fort Ti," his fights with Indians, his romantic marriage that yet was not a romance, and the after-course of a sturdy, effective, well-rounded life, make up the book. It abounds in shrewdness and a humor that is also shrewd, and is a graphic study of stirring times. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The order of everyday life in Poland is still so remote to the intelligence of the average novel-reader that it must serve to give an added zest to a love story of which it forms the setting. In "One Year," by Dorothea Gerard, the heroine is Jadwiga, the beautiful daughter of an aristocratic Polish family. The plot is worked out partly by means of letters written home to England by the cool-headed English governess, who watches the manoeuvres of the rival lovers, with a clear understanding of their respective limitations. The tale is not without a tragic note, and the suggestion of a past mystery is well developed. Dodd, Mead & Co. are the publishers. The "Practical Agitation" to which Mr. John Jay Chapman invites, in the group of essays bearing that title, which the Scribners publish, is, for the most part, an agitation for the realization of ideals in politics and government-with some excursions in the fields of literature and journalism. Mr. Chapman preaches strenuously, but he has also acted strenuously in the directions which he points out; although, as he would himself frankly admit, with indifferent success. His tone is not hopeful, his estimate of public men and policies is decidedly too pessimistic; but it is always somewhat refreshing to hear a voice crying in the wilderness, and it is not necessary fully to accept his judgments to appreciate his sincerity. By M. Cardinal's Musketeer, The. Imlay Taylor. A. C. McClurg & Co. Price, $1.25. Chinatown Stories. By Chester Bailey Fernald. W. Heinemann. Danvis Pioneer, A. By Rowlande Domestic Blunders of Women, The. Fortune of War, The. By Elizabeth istics of the. By Herbert Mortimer Luckok. Longmans & Co. Glimpses of Old Bombay and Western India. By James Douglas. Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. Hearts Importunate. By Evelyn Dick- Heart of the Dancer, The. By Percy Euvres Complétes de Moliére. Oxford Moliére. Clarendon Press. One Year. By Dorothea Gerard. Dodd Mead & Co. Price, $1.25. Opportunity, and Other Essays. By J. L. Spalding. A. C. McClurg & Co. Price, $1.00. K. Friedman. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.50. Prelude and the Play, The. By Rufus & Co. Mann. Houghton, Mifflin Price, $1.50. Poor People. By I. John Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Psychology of Religion, The. By E. Au Russian Literature, A History of. By Songs of the Glens of Antrim. Moira War in South Africa, The. By J. A. Waters of Edera. By Ouida. World's Mercy, The. By T. Maxwell IS IT POSSIBLE TO TELL A GOOD BOOK FROM A BAD ONE? A During the last few months a saying of Voltaire's has been sounding uncomfortably in my ears. It occurs in one of his amusing letters from England. He remarks: "The necessity of saying something, the perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire of being witty are three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest writer ridiculous." hasty assent to an ill-considered request has placed me where I am tonight. The popularity of Lord Rosebery has filled this hall, and I feel the direful necessity of saying something, whilst, at the same time, a rigorously conducted self-examination has made plain to me what is the perplexity of having nothing to say. As for the desire of being witty, there was a time, I frankly confess, when I was consumed by it; I am so no longer. This desire of being witty, sneered at as it always is, has in most cases an honorable because a humane origin. It springs from pity for the audience. It is given but to half a dozen men in a century really to teach their grown-up contemporaries, whilst to inflame them by oratory is happily the province of a very few, but to bore them well nigh to extinction is within the scope of most * An address delivered at Edinburgh oa November 3, 1899. men's powers. This desire to amuse just a little ought not, therefore, to be so very contemptible, springing as it does from the pity that is akin to love. But now, to me at all events, it matters not to whom this desire is related, or by whom it was begot. I have done with it. Ten years in the House of Commons and on the political platform have cured me of a weakness I now feel to be unmanly; I no longer pity my audiences; I punish them. on. Having made this point clear I pass There is something truly audacious in my talking to Edinburgh people on a question of Taste; but it is not only an audacious but an eerie thing to do. I remember, Lord Rosebery, how you were affected, so you have told us, the first time you addressed the society of which you are now president, by the air of old-world wisdom that hung about Lord Colonsay. But, at all events that venerable lawyer was then in the flesh. To-night I seem surrounded by ghosts in wigs, the ghosts of Edinburgh men all famous in their day, some famous for all days, who, at the very sound of the word Taste uttered after all this lapse of years in this hall, have hurried hither this wet and stormy night, full of doubts and suspicions, to hear how a theme, once their very own, may come to be handled by a stranger at the end of a century not their own. What else should tempt them back to taste our air Except to see how their successors fare? I shall say nothing to offend these courtly shades. I am far too much in doubt about the Present, too perturbed about the Future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential towards the Past. Besides, as they cannot speak, it would be ill-bred even to poke a little fun at them. I wish it were otherwise. I wish, how I wish that Lord Rosellery could now call upon Dr. Blair to ad dress you the great Dr. Blair, whose "Lectures on Taste" may still be had of the Edinburgh second-hand booksellers for a sum it would be ungenerous to state in figures. After all, the best books are the cheapest. Mr. Hume, the author of "Douglas," would, I daresay, conquer the shyness that pursued him through life and say a few words in response to a call; "Jupiter" Carlyle would probably prefer to reserve till supper time (the meal when mostly truth is spoken) his trenchant criticisms. It would be honoring the occasion too much to suppose that the great Adam Smith would care to attend, or a greater than Adam Smith, David Hume, a man who, though the twentieth century may slip his collar, has, more than any other single thinker, dominated the nineteenth from its tremendous beginnings to its sombre close. David Hume is, of all others, the Edinburgh man I should most like to hear on the "Standard of Taste." One hundred and fifty seven years have gone by since he published an essay on this very subject, to which I shall refer in a minute. I have raised the subject of taste and a standard of taste by asking the question, "Is it possible to tell a good book from a bad one?" This almost involves an affirmative reply. A well-known Nonconformist divine wrote a short treatise which he entitled "Is it Possible to Make the Best of Both Worlds?" But this world, at all events, always persisted (much to the author's annoyance) in calling the book "How to Make the Best of Both Worlds," whilst in the trade the volume was always referred to (curtly enough) as "Binney's Best." The world is a vulgar place, but it has the knack, the vulgar knack, of hitting nails on the head. Unless, in the opinion of the author it was impossible to make the best of both worlds there was small probability of a prosperous Protestant divine asking the question at all; and in the same way, unless I am prepared to answer my own query with a blunt negative and to sit down, it becomes necessary to drop a hint or two as to how a good book may be known from a bad one. First. It is a very difficult thing to do, but difficulty is no excuse. Are there not treatises extant which instruct their readers how to tell a good horse from a bad one, and even, so overreaching is the ambition of man, how to boil a potato? both feats of great skill and infrequent achievement. Second. Not only is the task difficult, but the necessity for mastering it is urgent. The matter really presses. It is, I know, usual, when a man like myself, far gone in middle life, finds himself addressing a company containing many young people, to profess great sorrow for his own plight and to heap congratulations on the youthful portion of his audience. I am in no mood tonight for any such polite foolery. When I think of the ever-increasing activity of the Press, home, foreign and colonial-the rush of money into the magazine market, the growth of what is called education, the extension of the copyright laws, and the spread of what Goethe somewhere calls "the noxious mist, the dropping poison of half-culture"-so far from congratulating those of you who are likely to be alive fifty years hence, I feel far more disposed to offer those unlucky youths and maidens my sincerest condolences and to reserve all my congratulations for myself. The output of books is astounding. Their numbers destroy their reputation. A great crowd of books is as destructive of the literary instinct, which is a highly delicate thing, as is a London evening party, of the social instinct. Novel succeeds novel, speculative treatise speculative treatise, in breathless haste, each treading upon the heels of its predecessor and followed by a noisy crowd of critics bellowing and shouting praise or blame. Newspaper paragraphs about the books that are to be, rub the bloom off these peaches long before they lie upon our tables. The other day I read this announcement: "The Memoir of Dr. Berry, of Wolverhampton, will bear the simple title, 'Life of the Rev. C. A. Berry, D. D.'" Heavens! what other title could it bear! These paragraphs are usually inspired by the publisher, for nowhere is competition more fierce than among publishers, who puff their own productions and extol the often secret charms of their kept authors with an impetuosity almost indelicate. In the wake of the publisher and the critic there sidles by a subtler shape, the literary interviewer, one of the choicest products of the age, who, playing with deft fingers on that most responsive of all instruments human vanity, supplies the newspapers with columns of confessions taken down from the lips of the authors themselves, who seem to be glad to tell us how they came to be the great creatures advertisement has made them, how their first books got themselves written, and which of their creations they themselves love the best. Let us never be tempted to underrate the labors of the interviewer. There is apt to be far more of that delicious compound, human nature in the writings of the interviewer than in the works of the interviewed. If those authors only knew it, by far the most interesting character is their own. But not only is the output enormous, and what may be called the undergrowth rank, but the treatment is too frequently crude. Penmen, as bookwriters are now pleasingly called, are too apt in their haste to carry their goods early to market, to gobble up what they take to be the results of scientific investigation, and, stripping them bare of the conditions and qualifications properly belonging to scientific methods, to present them to the world as staple truths, fit matter for æsthetic treatment. There is something half comic, half tragic in the almost headlong apprehension of half-born truths by half-educated minds. Whilst the serious investigator is carefully “sounding his dim and perilous way," making good his ground as he goes, Till captive science yields her last retreat, these half-inspired dabblers, these ready-reckoners, are already hawking the discovery about the streets, making it the motif of their jejune stage plays and the text of their blatant discourses. To stay this Niagara, to limit this output, is, of course, impossible. Nothing can stop it. Agricultural depression did not hit it. Declining trade never affected it. It is confidently anticipated that the millionaires of the future will be the writers of really successful shilling shockers and farces that take the town. "Charley's Aunt" has made more money than would be represented by the entire fortunes of Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens all added together. Our concern to-night is with none of these fine folks. At the feet of Genius I for one am always ready to prostrate |