The Palace Hotel. Visitors to San Francisco will hereafter be struck with a new and conspicuous feature in the face of the young giant town. Seven stories high, with a base of 96,250 square feet, at the corner of Market and New Montgomery, there now looms up the Palace Hotel. Its huge brick walls are ribbed from top to bottom with tiers of bay-windows, and spotted like the sides of an iron-clad with bolt-heads that clinch the great rods running over and under and through-and-through the building, making it a kind of Cyclopean openwork iron safe, filled in and lined with fireproof brick, where all treasure of human life and limb should be secure against fire or earthquake while the peninsula stands. It is, indeed, to this element of security that we would draw special attention, while so many buildings are going up to-day in our great cities which are a disgrace in flimsy and tawdry pretension and a danger in their inflammable and carelessly thrown-together materials.

The whole work of constructing this hotel was done by the day's work and not by the piece, and so done carefully and well. Seventy-one partition walls of brick run from the foundation up through the roof, and two feet above it, and the roof is of tin. There are four artesian wells, two in each outer court, with a tested capacity of 28,000 gal. lons of water per hour. Under the centre court is a 630,000-gallon reservoir, with walls of brick and cement five feet thick and buttressed. On the roof are seven tanks of boiler iron, with an aggregate capacity of 128,000 gallons. Seven steam-pumps force this water through the whole house by a system of arteries and mains, with 392 outlets in the corridors, provided in each case with three-inch hose, from ten to 100 feet in length, with nozzles. Under the sidewalks without the building there are eight four-inch fire-mains connecting with the city water, by means of which the city engines can, if found necessary at any time, force water into the ho

tel mains.

In every room and passage there is an automatic fire-alarm, by which any extraordinary heat will be instantly and noisily known at the central office of the hotel; and six watchmen will patrol day and night every

part of the structure, and touch, half-hour by half-hour, at seventy-nine stations, which will report by electricity and fix the place and time of a dereliction of duty.

Through the heart of the hotel from top to bottom runs a fire-brick tunnel, within which is a solid brick and iron staircase opening on each floor. In five like tunnels are five elevators, run by hydraulic power, be. sides six additional stair-ways from garret to basement. Wood is avoided where possible. In the construction of kitchen, oven - room, bakery, store-rooms, steam-pump room, water-heating room, coal-vaults, ash-vaults and shafts, and corridors, wood is supplanted by asphaltum and marble, iron beams and brick arches. If the Palace Hotel can burn, the lessons of Chicago and Boston are lost, and all human precaution is vain against fire in this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-five.

Architect J. P. Gaynor was instructed by the owners to travel and study the best hotels elsewhere before submitting his plans for the Palace Hotel, and Warren Leland-mine host of the old New York Metropolitan Hotel, of the Leland family famous as hotelkeepers-was appointed lessee of the house, and manager of all things. The sunning and ventilation of the 755 rooms for guests are excellent, every room opening on the open light, having a fire-place, and a separate flue of four by eight inches running clear through to the roof. Every second room has a bathroom attached, most rooms are twenty feet square, and none of a less size than sixteen by sixteen feet. Two thousand and fortytwo ventilating tubes open outward on the roof of the hotel.

Three great cañons or courts, cut down from roof to base, air and lighten the mountain building. The centre court measures 144 by 84 feet, is covered with glass, made brilliant by the lights of the pillared verandas surrounding it floor on floor; with a tropical garden, fountains, statues, an instrumental band of music in the evenings, and a circular carriage - drive fifty-four feet in diameter. Opening upon this "garden floor " there is an "arcade promenade," four yards wide, with a show-window looking on the promenade from each of the stores under the hotel. Letter tubes, pneumatic-dispatch

tubes, and electric bells knit all this miniature Palais Royal and the hotel into one body of wonderful life.

Ministering to the 1,200 guests that can be accommodated, are four clerks, two bookkeepers, a French head-cook who is a brilliant particular star in his profession, five assistant cooks of rising name, and three specialists—namely, a chief confectioner from Milan, a chief baker from Vienna, and "Muffin Tom" from New York, an old Negro the fame of whose egg-muffins and corn-bread has made him the aristocrat of his race for the last half-century from Charleston to Long Branch. The 150 waiters are to be Negroes also. Forty chamber-maids and a host of Chinese will see that the beds and the bed - linen are white and fresh. This is the kind of hotel we keep in San Francisco.

From China and India and Japan a stream of invalids and visitors pours yearly in upon this city, the great sanitarium of the future for the languid oriental world. From the islands of the peaceful sea, from our own east and north, from Spanish America, a great host shall make a Babel of the Palace Hotel, whose builders have not been confounded. Its white towering walls, dotted with the gilded iron bolts that bind the great rods of the building together, shall be familiar to strange eyes from far lands. The sick Down-easter shall abandon his nutmegs of wood and satisfy his soul with the grapes and the oranges of our State; yellow aristocrats from Siam and tawny revolutionists from Bogota shall join hands and pass the sirup over the steaming triumphs of Muffin Tom.

We have seven big world-wonders now: the Bay of San Francisco, the Central Pacific Railroad, the Big Trees, the Bonanza, Yosemite, the Geysers, the Palace Hotel-and Assessor Rosener.

Honoring Byron.

We have received the following from Mr. Frank Soulé: “After an apparently studied forgetfulness of the honors due to the great bard, Byron, second in the crown of literary gems only to Shakspeare — a forgetfulness of more than half a century, during which his memory has been but occasionally recalled, and chiefly for the purpose of crowning it with entailed hatred and abuse-I see that the sober second sense of the British mind has awakened to a consciousness of its criminal neglect of the ill-used poet and hero. "It mattered something, Missolonghi, where

The resting-place of Byron's bones should be;
His last breath gave thee fame, but yet not there
His relics lie, but far across the sea
Within the land he loved not, and could dare

To treat with truth and scorn-a land that he,
Although it used him ill, more glorious made

By his grand verse: there should his dust be laid. "But not where they have laid him: with the great, The men of thought, of grand creative brain, With men whose voices shook the throne and state, Or vanquished hosts upon the land and main, The heroes that succumbed alone to fate

With kings and queens, and bards in whose fair train

Of bright creations his might mingled be,
And find, as he would find, fit company-
"With men who swept o'er battle-fields afar,

Red Blenheim's plains and field of Waterloo-
The little man of mighty Trafalgar,

Who ruled o'er Neptune's ancient realm of blueWhere dust of intellectual giants are,

There should he rest the rolling cycles through, Where later genius on life's ebbing tide Might lie, though wrecked, in honor by his side. "Perchance 'tis well! It may be better so: He stood alone, one heart against them all, And said his say, and had his way; and no Sham passed unwhipped where his fierce lash might fall;

To false pretense he was alive the foe,

And even in death his presence might appall. 'Tis better thus for him alone to rest

With Nature, whom of all he loved the best."

Of prominent living English statesmen, Mr. Higginson's preface says: "It is easy enough to find books which portray these men, and that with much wit and vigor; but they are all written by Englishmen for Englishmen: they all include many details to which an American is indifferent, and they all omit or take for granted a great deal that an American wishes to know." It is to remedy these from his point of view-faults that Mr. Higginson takes pen and scissors in hand, and the result is an instructive and convenient résumé —for the most part in the words of the original writers — of all that is written and known concerning the gods of the Westminster Olympus.

Bismarck excepted, this is not an age of notably great statesmen; there is too much eking out of the lion's skin with the fox's. Yet Gladstone and Disraeli are enviable names; and Bright is not far removed from them in state. A conservative at first, Gladstone soon found his true place in the advancing ranks of the whig party. His mercantile origin and his mathematical genius have made him the greatest financier and chancellor of the exchequer of modern times. His profound and constantly cultivated scholarship has given his practical business qualities additional lustre, and his economic, his Homeric, his political, and of late his polem ic works, have influenced a mighty public whom his spoken words could never reach. With all these gifts, with features compared by Higginson to those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, full of earnestness, of ingenuousness, of blended severity and sweetness, and a voice clear and sonorous as a silver bell, he is a born debater and leader of men-not perhaps of parties as parties, but of the nation in general. "We have said," writes Mr. Wemyss Reid, "that Mr. Disraeli was a great party leader. To party leadership, in

the ordinary acceptation of the term, Mr. Gladstone can lay no claim. Mr. Gladstone has many of the best qualities of a great leader. Like Mr. Disraeli, he can inspire on the part of his followers a high degree of personal enthusiasm. Out of doors he has a still greater command over the popular feeling than Mr. Disraeli; nor is that fact to be accounted for by any question of politics. For while Mr. Disraeli's qualities, however much they may be admired by cultivated men of all political opinions, are 'caviare to the general,' Mr. Gladstone's are essentially popular. He has the passion, the enthusi asm, the fluency of speech, the apparent simplicity of action which are so dearly lov ed by the multitude. His name can be made a tower of strength for his party; it might be adopted as the watchword or the rallying cry of a nation."

The aristocratic Disraeli, son of a Hebrew and ex-apprentice of a solicitor-Disraeli, of the graceful figure and the sphinx - like face

is a wonderful product of all things, most of all of himself. Inscrutable, sarcastic, dar ing, careful, scholarly, he is a great party leader, a great novelist, and, so far as a hap py mixture of invective and "specific levity" (Edmund Quincy's term), a great debat

er.

"Mr. Disraeli has acquired such a reputation for witty antitheses, and for odd combinations of words, that the most commonplace of his replies is quite enough to elicit an anticipatory titter from both sides of the House." He is full of that business. lightening geniality and humor that the House of Commons so values in a leader, and which it misses so much in Gladstone. He is brief and concise in his speeches-a grand quality in a parliamentary speaker. Fraser's Magazine says that he "is often bombastic, often enigmatical, but he is never circumlocutory. . . . If a question is put to him, he either replies at once affirmatively or negatively as the case may be, or lets his questioner understand, in as few words as

...

possible, that the subject is one on which he declines to give any information. He is humorous or contemptuous; he administers a snub, or he launches an epigram; he is solemn, or he is flippant; but he is always terse and sententious. Silence wherever silence is possible, and if not silence a pregnant brevity, is the lesson which Mr. Disraeli perpetually labors by his own example to inculcate upon his followers." Such a man is surely worth his weight in gold in any parliament or congress.

Space fails us to touch on Bright and the other prominent men whom Mr. Higginson portrays in his short but valuable and fascinating English Statesmen.

WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS: or, the Records of an Unfashionable Street. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: J. B. Ford & Co.

Mrs. Stowe's last novel is rather witty, moderately romantic, somewhat religious, and eminently practical and "proper;" in this last respect an improvement on her Byron mêmoires pour servir. It is full of good advice, direct and indirect, to young ladies, on the duty and benefits of making home a happy and attractive place, and on various other every day subjects, all of which the young ladies most concerned will, let us hope, read and profit by. Mrs. Stowe is strong and sound on the marriage question, and believes that young persons contemplating matrimony should be long, or at least intimately and fully, acquainted with all the turns and shades of each other's characters before joining themselves for better or for worse. She says:

"The wail and woe and struggle to undo mar. riage bonds in our day comes from this dissonance of more developed and more widely varying natures, and it shows that a large proportion of marriages have been contracted without any advised and rational ef

fort to ascertain whether there was a reasonable foundation for a close and life-long intimacy. It would seem as if the arrangements and customs of modern society did everything that could be done to render such a previous knowledge impossible. Good sense would say that if men and women are to single each other out, and bind themselves by a solemn oath, forsaking all others, to cleave to each other as long as life should last, there ought to be, before taking vows of such gravity, the very best opportunity to become mi

nutely acquainted with each other's dispositions and habits and modes of thought and action."

Mrs. Stowe is religious, but by no means too "other-worldly," as Charles Lamb would put it, nor inclined to palliate a not wholly unknown clerical fault. This is what she puts into the mouth of one Episcopalian clergyman addressing another of conventual tendencies:

"God made you a gentleman before he made you a priest, and there's but one way for a gentleman in a case like this. If there's anything I despise, it's a priest who uses his priestly influence under this fine doesn't belong to him, and that he never can return and never ought to.'"

name and that to steal from a woman love that

We think this a finer sentence than any to be found in Norwood.

Mrs. Stowe says that "nothing is so tiresome as perfect correctness," and by the continual use of provincial English and French words and phrases, with a sprinkling of Latin, she effectually avoids tiresomeness in the di

rection mentioned; but on the whole We and Our Neighbors is a sound, interesting, wellflavored story.

A MANUAL OF DIET IN HEALTH AND DISEASE. By Thomas King Chambers, M. D., Oxon., F. R. C. P., London, etc. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea.

THE MAINTENANCE OF HEALTH. A Medical Work for Lay Readers. By J. Milner Fothergill, M. D., M. R. C. P. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

One of the most hopeful signs of the present is the advancing interest taken in bodily truths. It is coming in these latter times to be recognized, as it was in Greek and Roman days, that our bodies are sacred and precious things, to be cared for and protected, prayed for and worked for, as well as our souls. For there is a corporeal as well as a spiritual hell, with descent as easy and ascent as difficult as in the case of the theological AverThe day of physical judgment is ever with us; we ever stand on the right hand or on the left of the eternal throne of Hygeia. Have you fitly fed your hungriness, judiciously clothed and housed your nakedness? she asks. If you have not, your gold and your silver, your good repute, your good conscience even, will avail

nus.

you nothing. "Mene, mene, tekel," is written on every failing nerve and flabby muscle. In due measure of your transgression, from crown of head to sole of foot, the curse is upon you, the eating "curse of God's work discomfited." Doctor Fothergill says:

"If the missionary is a man careless and reckless of his own health in his thought for others, he will fall before the consequences of broken natural laws; when the slave-dealer, if selfish and circumspect, escapes. Morality has no influence over natural laws, and the sun shines alike on the righteous and the

wicked."

In the great plague of quack nostrums, quack advertisements, and quack books, now rained upon a deluded and credulous pub. lic, it is pleasant to find books like the two under our consideration coming to the front, written by men of great skill and reputation. They have no special drug or medical establishment or system to cry up. They believe in prevention and precaution by natural methods more than in materia medica and panaceas. They discuss questions of food and drink and clothing, of drainage and warming and ventilation, of exercise and sleep, that everyone is the better for being acquainted with, and through ignorance of which thousands go down yearly, prematurely, with sorrow to the grave.

These two books, especially the first of the two, are minute in detail to the clearest and most interesting degree. They are barren of theories and running over with instances, figures, and facts. They are more interesting than a novel, more instructive than a sermon, and amusing-alas! not at all, for they are sign-posts pointing the right road, and it is far from crowded. We almost all ignore many of the simplest rules of health every day of our lives, some through ignorance, some through deliberate choice of what they call "a short life and a merry one." To all but the last class these books of Doctor Chambers and Doctor Fothergill will be worth, in each case, an approximately calculable number of extra days of life.

THE RAINBOW CREED. A Story of the Times. Boston: William F. Gill & Co. This is one of those miserable books that appear in every age of religious upheaval

and doubt. It is, as we dimly comprehend its confusion, an attack on cant, bigotry, and superstition, but one of those attacks that can only make the things attacked more attractive. If its author possesses learning, or logic, or wit, or perspicacity, he has shown no trace of them here. Dull as a Boeotian, thick-witted as an Umbrian, his book must be an offense to men of no creed and to men of every creed. His free-thinking hero is the most stupid and affected idiot in the whole book, and the heroine is no one knows what, except that she wears petticoats, and is inanely dull. There is no spot of human nature or human interest in the book. A man rises from its study ready to believe in Darwinism, and with a poor opinion of the intelligence of the race that can produce a work like this. The author talks of "chil dren of Death playing with peacocks' feathers on their father's hell-lit tombs; a Cath erine-wheel revolving furiously on the cross of Christ." He is a pot-house theologian well on in his cups, without reverence, culture, or a knowledge of the English language. One can see that he is aping the Sartor Resartus of Carlyle in the structure of his book and the manufacture of his phrases. Well for him he is out of reach of that grand but irascible man's walking-stick! Saint or sinner, Christian or pagan, can not read the Rainbow Creed without waste of time and hurt to temper and style. It is wholly, vulgarly, hopelessly dull and bad.

MISTRESS JUDITH. A Cambridgeshire Story. By C. C. Fraser-Tytler. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

This is a simple, interesting, and healthful novel. The interest hinges mainly on three characters-Mistress Judith Hurst, spinster and heroine of the tale, with her two lovers, Jesse Bullen and Amos Bullen, brothers. Jesse Bullen leaves his mother's farm, is educated at college, becomes "gen. tleman Bullen;" but wins for a long time little way into Miss Hurst's heart. Poor Amos stays on the farm, works hard, and he has few attractions except his honesty and industry; yet Mistress Judith is three-fourths in love with him. But he goes out into the world to make his way, while his elder broth