After lengthy negotiations the Keats House at Rome is likely to become the property of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. Support has been privately secured, but more is needed. The actual purchase of the house will cost over $20,000. It is hoped to make the building the centre of a representative collection of relics of the poet.

Lovers of Trollope will note with interest the fact that the publication of "Barchester Towers" in Everyman's Library is attended with an intimation by the publishers that it may be followed by other of Trollope's stories until it is possible to possess a complete edition of the author in this delightful form. Trollope was so voluminous a writer that the acquisition of his works in the only editions now available, in which two or three volumes are taken up with a single story, is a serious matter. But if the books should be issued in this format, with each story complete in a single volume at a moderate price, there would be an eager demand for the series.

As to the current supply and demand for poetry The Academy remarks:

If there is a "slump" in poetrywhich, having regard to the number and the quality of the books of verses that reach us, we are quite unable to believe the fault lies not with critics or publishers' readers, but with the public, which never did and never will read poetry. If only it would! At no period of our history, save perhaps the middle years of the eighteenth century, has the leaven of poetry been more urgently needed than it is now. Book after book of very good verse is published: so far from buying or reading them, the public will not even read the very greatest of acknowledged masters. But we question whether the sale. in reality, much affects the pro

duction of poetry. The poet who looks to make a living of his work is introducing an element into his aim which has no right to be there.

An anonymous writer in the Scottish Review writes a slashing article on "The Decline of Mr. S. R. Crockett" and remarks that, although he trod a sure literary path with a firm step while he dwelt among the Galloway hills, the freshness and spontaneity of his earlier years seem now to have vanished. Of Mr. Crockett's latest book "Kid M'Ghie," the critic says:

The plot is forced, the writing is forced, the humor is forced. Mr. Crockett has ransacked the Newgate Calendar for episodes, and the whole thing seems to be designed for the syndicates that purvey wildly sensational serials at cheap rate for the weekly newspapers. Mr. Crockett has been pot-boiling with a venegance . . . He has evidently labored hard, almost frantically, at his task; but he has given us little to be set by the side of his earlier and healthier work. Only one character in the whole book seems clothed with flesh and blood . . . the rest is leather and prunella of a sadly inferior quality.

The ninth volume in the "First Folio" edition of Shakespeare, published by T. Y. Crowell & Co. is "Twelfth Night or What You Will." Like the others in the series, it is fully furnished with notes, literary illustrations, a glossary, variorum readings, bits of selected criticism, etc. The editors, Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, have done their work with painstaking thoroughness and discrimination; but the distinctive quality of the edition, as suggested in its designation, is that it reproduces the First Folio text of 1623, with the original spelling and punctuation, untouched by the guesses and emendations of generations of editors. To the ordinary reader therefore it

Dr.

The nineteenth and twentieth volumes of the reprints of Early Western Travels, of which Dr. Reuben Thwaites is the editor and the Arthur H. Clark Company of Cleveland the publishers, are mainly devoted to Josiah Gregg's "Commerce of the Prairies" originally published in 1844: though this is preceded by two briefer narratives, that of George W. Ogden, contained in his "Letters from the West" describing his journeyings in Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky in 1823-5, and William Bullock's "Sketch of a Journey Through the Western States," made in 1827. Josiah Gregg's work is by far the most important as it is the longest of the three. It recounts a series of journeys, made partly for health and partly for the pleasure of exploration during the fourth decade of the last century, mostly along the famous Santa Fé Trail, which the people of Kansas are about to mark with posts before it has become wholly effaced by the progress of civilization. Dr. Gregg added to an adventurous taste the faculty of keen observation and an admirably direct literary style. The account of his adventures attracted wide attention when it was first published, and it has not lost its charm with the passage of years. It may almost be regarded as a classic of the period in which it was written.

Mr. William B. Weeden's "War Government Federal and State" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is a fresh and curiously interesting study of the relations of the national and state governments as they were affected by the Civil War. While that great struggle was in progress, highly important questions relating to the interplay of the two forms of government were being worked out. Less attention was given to them at the time than they deserved, for interest was concentrated upon the great contest for the preservation of the Union. But it was highly desirable that some one should go over the records of the period, and study with some care and pains the cooperations and conflicts, the disputes and agreements which arose between the authorities at Washington and the executives of the Northern states. Mr. Weeden is well fitted for the task, for he was an acute observer of these conditions as they developed, and has reflected long upon the results which were reached. He has wisely taken as typical states Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Indiana, whose great "war governors" held continuous service throughout the period, and New York where conflicting conditions assumed the most critical form. But his study is a general one, and it constitutes a new and extremely interesting chapter of the national history. Mr. Weeden states his conclusions with force and pungency: and if the reader is not inclined to accept them all, he will recognize their sincerity and the broad grounds of experience and observation on which they are based.

There has hardly ever been in history a task equal in magnitude and difficulty to that which has been placed before the first Russian Parliament. In the religious and political struggles of seventeenth-century England, the fabric of society remained solid on the whole; tendencies like those of the Levellers and of the Fifth Monarchy Men were not widespread, and not difficult to restrain. The leaders of the Puritan Government came mostly from the ranks of the same middle class which subsequently carried out the Restoration; and the fierce civil war, which at one time seemed to endanger the very existence of the country, resolved itself into a compromise under the guidance of a parliamentary oligarchy. The French Revolution produced a deeper upheaval of the social order, and broke more thoroughly with historical traditions; but it never put national unity in question, and redeemed its most terrible features by an exaltation of patriotism which held Europe at bay, and reconciled to New France many of its staunchest opponents. The Russian revolutionary movement is aimed, not only at a complete reversal of a rotten political system, but also at a renewal of society itself by the most sweeping reforms of modern times. And, at the same time as the efforts of popular representation are concentrated in St. Petersburg in a death struggle with Ministerial bureaucracy, all the conquests and acquisitions achieved by Russia in the course of three hundred years are challenged by the minor nationalities subdued, but not reconciled, to Russian rule. And the predominant people itself seems to have entirely lost all sense of national personality, and all wish to assert its claims. It would be strange indeed if, under these cir

cumstances, the doings of the new Representative Assembly should not display, by the side of noble aspirations and regenerating ideas, the features of violence and passion, the onesided judgment and lack of equilibrium, so characteristic of revolutionary epochs.

Every revolutionary assembly is, in a sense, the direct offspring of the regime which it is called to overthrow: it is generally led by the law of contrast to assume the counterpart of what has been held before, and, for this very reason, acts on the same plane with its most deadly foe. Oppression engenders violence, centralism-disruptive tendencies, privilege-levelling schemes, militarism-pacificism. This spirit of contradiction does not conduce to high statesmanship; but it is not such statesmanship that seems wanted in the beginnings of a revolution, but the action of elementary forces. Only when those have spent themselves to a certain extent, the conscious, scheming agencies of political forethought begin to assert their right.

Quite apart from the complexity of the thousand and one questions accumulated before the Duma, from the impatient cravings of classes and groups pressing for recognition and satisfaction at the same time, there is the initial difficulty of dealing with an impossible and yet legally powerful Government. A new authority has to be created at all costs in the place of the old bankrupt one, which nevertheless holds the field in a formal and material sense. And this task has to be effected by means, not of a civil war, if possible, but of parliamentary action. Georg Brandes declared once that the Russian crest-the double-headed eagle -reminded him of one of those double