book in itself is a work of art; it contains a double set of at least ninety photogravures of Turner's best pictures, together with a number of sketches and drawings reproduced in color tints. Scribner has also published a new and enlarged edition of Mr. W. C. Brownell's "French Art," with a new chapter devoted to Rodin and some additional illustrations. Mr. Bernhard Berenson's essays on Italian art contributed to the New York Nation and other periodicals have been published in two volumes by Macmillan, under the title, "The Study and Criticism of Italian Art," with illustrations of the various works of art discussed. The most original thing in the work is the theory advanced that certain pictures attributed to Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Filippino Lippi may easily have been the work of one man at present unidentified. This same firm publishes a new and revised edition of Mr. Percy H. Bate's "The English Pre-Raphaelites." A comprehensive survey of the whole field of art endeavor in America is found in Mr. Sadakichi Hartmann's "History of American Art." It traces the rise of different schools, the introduction of various fads and fancies, the expansion of art in new directions, and gives brief sketches of our representative artists.

Turning from these critical works to a class of publications known as art-books, we naturally give first place to Mr. Charles Dana Gibson's "A Widow and Her Friends" (Russell). We fancy that a year ago we called "Mr. Pipp" Mr. Gibson's masterpiece, but even Mr. Pipp will have to make way for the

Armstrong's Gurner

A History of American Art
Gibson's Drawings

widow. From the standpoint of workmanship there seems to be a decided gain in the tendency to produce completed pictures. Mr. Gibson used to be content merely to suggest a scene, but here there is something besides the costumes of the characters and a few necessary accessories to indicate whether the scene is a fancy-dress ball or a convent garden. Each drawing has completeness and atmosphere. Mr. Gibson is further to be congratulated on making six men so radically different in character and feature all wear the same expression. The spare Dr. Bottles, the fat Mr. Waddles, and the four younger and handsomer swains, all look at the widow with the same eyes. As to the widow, she is charming, that goes without saying. A delicious vein of humor runs through this whole series, which opens with the widow longing to drown her grief in the peace of a convent and closes with her seeking refuge there from her friends who, in monastic dress, are picturesquely grouped in the background-still faithful, still gazing adoringly at their charmer.

An excellent plan for making a book which is oneof art as well as one of beauty has been adopted in "Beautiful Women in Art" (Page), by Armand Dayot. This work is a review of the art of the greatest sculptors and artists of all ages in so far as it found expression in the portraiture of beautiful women. Another happy idea is that of illustrating Rossetti's translation of "The New Life of Dante Alighieri” (Russell) with Rossetti's pictures of the story. This beautiful book thus becomes an enduring monument both to Dante and his love for Beatrice and to Rossetti and his devotion to his model-wife, who corresponded exactly, in form, feature, and expression with his con

Music lore has been enriched this year by the "Music Lovers' Library," a series of popular volumes on various important branches of the art of music by writers of recognized authority, including "The Orchestra and Orchestral Music," by Mr. W. J. Henderson; "Songs and Song Writers," by Mr. Henry T. Finck; "Choirs and Choral Music," by Mr. Arthur Mees, and "The Opera, Past and Present," by Mr. William Foster Apthorp. Mr. Mees tells of the beginnings and development of choral singing; of the origin of choirs, their constitution, and the nature of their work at different periods; of the history of the most important choral forms, particularly the oratorio; and of the qualities necessary to the efficient chorus singer and chorus conductor. Mr. Apthorp's work on the opera is a clear and connected account of the establishment and gradual evolution of this form of music. He begins with its earliest manifestations and brings it down to Gustave Carpenter's "Louise" (1900), which Mr. Apthorp regards an entirely original leaf in the book of opera.

From a Russell Calendar

Mr. Henry Lahee's "Grand Opera in America" (Page) recounts the features of the various periods of opera in our country: The English versions of Italian opera inaugurated in 1819 with Rossini's "Barber of Seville"; Italian opera under Max Maretzek, Hackett and Ullman, Strakosch and De Vivo, and Mapleson; German opera under Damrosch; mixed grand opera of recent years under Grau; concluding with the attempt to inaugurate grand opera in English. All music lovers will read with interest the reminiscences and criticisms of the famous musicians of the past half-century written by the venerable composer and interpreter, William Mason, in his "Memories of a Musical Life" (Century).

The contributions to poetry during the year have been exceedingly meager. The only ones of importance are Mr. William Vaughn Moody's "Masque of Judgment" (Houghton, Mifflin); Sir Edwin Arnold's epic, "The Voyage of Ithobal" (Dillingham); Mr. Lloyd Mifflin's sonnets, "The Fields of Dawn" (Houghton, Mifflin); Mr. Edwin Markham's "Lincoln" (McClure, Phillips); Mr. William Henry Drummond's "Johnnie Courteau" (Putnam); Margaret Sangster's "Lyrics of Love" (Revell); James Whitcomb Riley's "Home-Folks" and Frank L. Stanton's "Songs from Dixie Land" (Bowen-Merrill). Mr. Moody's work is an ambitious and very able performance, which has received high marks of appreciation. It has been said of Mr. Moody that he has shown a greater capacity for receiving the passion and power of American life in his heart than any other poet of the hour. He takes his art seriously; his ideals are in harmony with the great traditions of poetry; he enters into the experiences of his own age and people; and his technique is marked by simplicity and sureness of touch. Sir Edwin Arnold's epic is based on an old legend found in Herodotus. Ithobal, on his return to the court of Pharaoh, describes all his manifold adventures in the circumnavigation of Africa. The poem is a series of beautiful and bril

liant pictures; it is stately and well-poised, but the general verdict upon it is that its fundamental qualities are by no means great.

Mr. Mifflin's volume is composed of forty-five sonnets, picturing southern Pennsylvania upon the Susquehanna, with a musical ringing in of nature's changes. Few American poets have succeeded in producing more exquisite, mellifluous, redolent verse than these pastoral sonnets. The sale of 25,000 copies of a book of poems is such an unusual occurrence as to call for remark. This has been the good fortune of "The Habitant," by Dr. Drummond, whose latest work, "Johnnie Courteau and Other Poems," continues the same theme, the life of the simpler and more primitive Canadian folk. The merit of the work rests on the sympathetic and wholesome interpretation of the tragedies of the humble lives portrayed. Mr. Riley's work was a distinct disappointment. We looked in vain for those springs of mirth and pathos that used to bubble up in unexpected places, and for those delicate fancies that wore even the homely garb of Hoosier speech gracefully.

"What is there in America for the poet?" was one of the questions discussed at the annual banquet of the "Society for the Study of Life," and the fact that all the poets in this list, except Sir Edwin Arnold, are Americans makes it of moment here. Mr. Edwin Markham, in ánswer to this question, said: "The poet who is worth while is one who has something to do with the larger movements of humanity-a prophet and a seer. We need a new ideal for the poetic and literary life, and I believe that the social and industrial movement at the present time presents a higher theme than the poets have yet dealt with. I believe that we are coming to a new conception of religion that will be the application of the golden rule. We need not men to make money, but money to make men. We lack a great past, but we have a spacious future. America has been reserved to these later ages for some great manifestation. Something seems destined to come out of this great experiment of democracy, and I believe it will be in the solving of the problem of the struggle of capital and labor, and that we will solve the problem of industrial freedom. We have closed the study of kings and taken up the study of man. The old epic was of arms and the man, but the new epic will be of tools and the man.”

One of the most ambitious attempts in the line of new editions of the poets is the Dowden Shakespeare (Bowen-Merrill), of which two volumes, "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet," have been issued. One is first impressed by the effective book-making; the neat and substantial binding, the wide margins, and the large, clear-faced type. The editorial work of Professor Edward Dowden, so favorably known through his "Shakespeare's Mind and Art," points to a vast amount of painstaking research and scholarly appreciation. Thomas Y. Crowell has issued a beautiful edition of Keats, in five small volumes, the most complete edition published. Mr. H. Buxton Forman, the editor, has gathered together everything which could be found from the hand of the poet; he has set out fully in foot-notes all authoritative variations of text and rejected passages; and has elucidated and illustrated from all available printed and manuscript sources. A new edition of Omar Khayyam (Putnam) contains a valuable biographical sketch of the Persian poet by Mr. E. D. Ross.

The love letters of the year, real and fictitious, have been prolific and, for the most part,

Dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell
Among the fragments of the golden day.

The most noteworthy are "The Love Letters of Bismarck" (Harper) and "The Love Letters of Victor Hugo" (Harper). In neither of these has the public any legitimate interest. The Bismarck letters contain scant reference to public affairs, and give, so far as they reveal anything of the writer's personality, a very misleading impression of him. That Bismarck was a loving, tender, and faithful husband and father is already known: the fact has no bearing upon the Bismarck in which the world is interested; he remains the man of blood and iron. The "letters of early manhood, virtue, love," to which Victor Hugo refers in his "Feuilles d'Automne," are spread out before us with all their extravagances, their bursts of joy and despair, their little scoldings, their caresses, and all the fond and foolish moods in which a lover allows himself to revel because he feels that a love letter is by its very nature a sacred thing. There is not the slightest evidence that these letters of Hugo's were written to be seen by other eyes than those of the girl he loved; he constantly entreats her to burn them. Mr. Meurice, in his introduction, says that they are all the more valuable on this account. wonder why. They are, we grant, singularly pure and delicate in tone, but they are the unreserved outpouring of a boy's heart, and we read them with the guilty feeling of an eavesdropper.

We

A very suitable companion to the "Beautiful Women in Art," to which we have already referred, is Mr. William Dean Howells's "Heroines of Fiction" (Harper). In the first we see that "the great painters of women, in seeking to immortalize on canvas the triumphant, fleeting charms of the most beautiful of their contemporaries, found the noblest and purest expression of their art." In the second we have an opportunity to study women as the inspiration of the novelist, a delightfully entertaining study of a hundred heroines representing the diversity and kinship of womankind.

Other works to be recorded in this department are Mr. James L. Onderdonk's very complete "History of American Verse" (McClurg), the translation of "The Dramatic Works of Honore de Balzac" (Laird & Lee), and a new edition of Henrik Jaeger's critical biography of Henrik Ibsen (McClurg).

AN AMERICAN GIRL

From Russell's Portfolio of American Girls. Drawn by Thomas Mitchell Peirce. Reduced from a Photogravure

BOOKS OF

H

ALL SORTS

ERE are grouped the books of general interest published during the year that do not fall naturally in any one of the special subject classes. The topics treated are many and various, ranging from Mr. J. P. Mowbray's "Journey to Nature" to Margaret Sangster's "Winsome Womanhood," and wandering far aside into many strange fields of thought and speculation.

A few of the books to be included in this summary might be roughly denominated studies of nature, and in considering them the first place should be given to the book mentioned above, Mowbray's "Journey to Nature" (Doubleday, Page). A New York business man, threatened with heart disease, is sent by his doctor into the woods, with only a small boy and a yellow dog to bear him company. The charm of the book is in the author's sense of the calm, healing power of the woods, a feeling that extends to the reader and is not disturbed by the slender web of a love-story that is interwoven with the dreamy idyll. The same power is shown in the "Making of a Country Home" (Doubleday, Page), by the same author. It is the account of the trials and joys of two city-bred folks who determine to set up for themselves in an abandoned farmhouse; Mr. Mowbray almost persuades his readers to forsake the town and all its ways and try the lot of home-makers and home-keepers in the unspoiled wilderness.

Mr. Ernest Seton-Thompson has added another volume to his animal studies in "Lives of the Hunted" (Scribner). The most insistent thing about it is its appeal to the sympathies of the reader. We feel the same indignation over the death of Krag, the Kootenay ram, as over the unjust taking off of a human hero. It is unnecessary to add that the illustrations and the ornamentation are as good as only Mr. Thompson can make them. Sir Martin Conway's "Bolivian Andes" (Harper) deals with quite another sort of out-of-doors, the mountains and forests of Bolivia. Even those to whom the sport of mountainclimbing has no attractions will find here much matter of interest in the descriptions of the country and the

From "Constantinople." Reveli

IN A COFFEE HOUSE

some pests may be destroyed is the best part of the book. On this point it is the standard authority. A good word may be spoken for Willard N. Clute's "Our Ferns in Their Haunts" (Stokes), Dr. Daniel Trembly MacDougal's "Practical Text-Book of Plant Physiology" (Longmans), and Mary C. Dickerson's "Moths and Butterflies" (Ginn).

Turning from the nature books to the works of a semi-scientific character, the first and most important one to be noted is Prof. H. W. Conn's "Method of Evolution" (Putnam). This is a review of the work of the three great evolutionists, Darwin, Lamarck, and Weissmann, as modified and extended by the younger students. The discussion of the point of issue between Lamarck and Weissmann, the nature and method of heredity, is eminently fair and scientific and the presentation of the chief points in the evolutionary theory is clear and appreciable. "Twentieth Century Inventions" (Longmans), by George Sutherland, is an attempt to forecast the probable direction and character of the inventions of the new century. Wave motors, steam turbines, and the cheapening of the transmission of electrical energy are among the means suggested by which mankind is to be relieved from much of the physical drudgery which is now the lot of the race. An important result of the cheapening of energy will be the decentralization of industry and the dispersion of the laboring population over a wider territory. Two works on psychology have attracted some attention. They are: Dr. Bernard Hollander's "Mental Functions of the Brain" (Putnam) and Father Michael Maher's "Psychology" (Longmans). Dr. Hollander's thesis is the localization of the functions of the brain, and is supported by examinations of 800 cases of deviation from the normal mind. Some will object to the author's confounding of mind and brain, but his conclusions are at least worth a hearing. The other work, Father Maher's, is philosophical rather than psychological. He denies the claims of the sensationalists and attempts to show the distinction existing between mind and brain, sensibility and cognition, the self-realizing ego and mere states of conscious