full selections from the literature of æsthetic criticism, British, American, French, and German; the translations from the latter being made by the Rev. Dr. Furness. A bibliography of editions of the play and of criticism upon it closes the work, and indexes to each volume (that of the second volume is erroneously named a Table of Contents) are given. We can find little fault with this painstaking edition, except to say that a key to the abbreviations used in these two volumes is lacking; though Mr. Furness had promised, in the preface to his "Macbeth," to make the volumes "as far as possible independent and complete each in itself." We may add, too, that Mr. Furness's style displays sometimes a looseness, as on pages vi, xii of his Preface, that is out of keeping with the accurate and scholarly style in which he has executed his editorial task; and we are sorry that he has not reproduced the original plot of "Hamlet" from Saxo Grammaticus.

14.-L'Art d'être Grand-Père. Par VICTOR HUGO. Paris: Calmann Lévy. 1877. 8vo. pp. 323.

CURIOUSLY enough, the essential trait of Victor Hugo's genius is precisely what popular criticism, British and American, denies to French poetry it is power. M. Hugo is an elemental force in literature: this Frenchman and French poet displays the same grandeur and pettiness combined, the same beauty and extravagance, the same feral roughness and magical tenderness, and in the same profuse abundance, that we find in the greatest of the great masters of poetry from the beginning. Whether we like or dislike Victor Hugo's work, we cannot ignore him; he is not to be put aside any more readily than other elemental forces; his writing is the lashing of the wind in the forest, or of the sea upon an iron shore, or perhaps his genius suggests rather the power of the lion. One who has felt the touch of it will never forget it; and never, indeed, has such impetuous and ardent pressure as that of his poetry and prose been brought to bear upon French literary forms sometimes falsely called fixed or dead. From Han d'Islande, the despair of the critics of 1823, to the present delightful book, the pleasure of both the critics and the public, no genius has been in more active or flexible movement than his; and in these poems its tenderer side appears. They are for the most part studies of child-life, and of its reaction upon the writer, - of that subtile reflex influence by which the child teaches the parent; and the sketches of the ways and talk of children, quite as delicately drawn as anything in Wordsworth's "Sparrow's Nest" or "We are Seven," present also strains of humor and of philosophy that were beyond the scope of the English poet. The first verses under the heading La Lune,

"Jeanne songeait, sur l'herbe assise, grave et rose,”

the scene at the menagerie, Ce que dit, le Public, and the little poem describing Jeanne en pénitence,

"Jeanne était sur pain sec dans le cabinet noir,”

are real masterpieces of child-nature, flashes of insight into that world which early becomes a forgotten world by all but gentle or poetic spirits. The childhood that Victor Hugo draws is not the childhood that Wordsworth drew, at least in a thousand external features; but he seizes the internal element in its character, and his studies of its waywardness and charm, and particularly of the sentiments of age toward childhood, are new things in literature. Their results, as given here, are so abundant, as well as so good, that they give M. Hugo a clear and special title to be called the poet of childhood.

15. Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph. By T. WEMYSS REID. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co. 1877. Square 12mo. pp. 236.

MR. REID fails to show any other reason for the publication of this little book than that it is always pleasant to talk about the Brontës. In his Preface and opening chapter, it is true, he conveys the impression that he has at his disposal a considerable amount of new material, collected from Charlotte's letters to her nearest friends; but as the individual letters themselves appear in the text, we find that many of them have already been in the hands of Mrs. Gaskell, who published other parts of them than are here given, or sometimes even left them unused altogether, apparently because they had too little importance or individuality as compared with those that she selected. Mr. Reid's monograph, therefore, only supplements what he himself calls "one of the most fascinating and artistic biographies in the English language" by adding to the number, rather than the interest, of the published relics of the Brontës, and by giving us his own opinion as to Charlotte's character and life.

Briefly stated, this opinion is that her character has been pictured as too "morbid and melancholy," and her life as much too "joyless." "That during the later years in which this wonderful woman produced the works by which she has made her name famous her career was clouded by sorrow and oppressed by anguish, both mental and physical, is," says Mr. Reid, “perfectly true. . . . . But it is not true that she was throughout her whole life the victim of that extreme depression of spirits which afflicted her at rare intervals, and which Mrs. Gaskell has presented to us with so much vividness and emphasis. ... Those

who imagine that Charlotte Brontë's spirit was in any degree a morbid or melancholy one do her a singular injustice." This is the case which Mr. Reid sets out to prove, and which, to our mind at least, he fails so signally in proving as to suffer his own citations to defeat him. We turn from the reading of his evidence with a renewed conviction that the author of the admirable and now fairly classic "Life of Charlotte Brontë" not only studied her whole subject with most rare exactness, but that her portrayal of Charlotte's character was aided and perfected by a keen and appreciative sympathy as well. Certainly, if the letters quoted here are valuable in any way, it is as confirmation of the judgment which Mrs. Gaskell had pronounced. She "set out with the de-termination," says Mr. Reid, "that her work should be pitched in a particular key." If this is so, it was because her artist's instinct showed her that that haunting minor was the key with which the life she wrote of had accorded.

There is, indeed, something curiously naïve in Mr. Reid's unconsciousness that it is he who is endeavoring to "make a case," not Mrs. Gaskell, and something more than naïve in the fatality with which he contradicts himself at every turn. What are we to make of his assertion that Charlotte, when young, was "a happy and high-spirited girl," beside his picture, a few pages later, of the "ideal life led by the forlorn little girl" at six, wherein her brain was filled with alternately fantastic and gloomy pictures, and her nervous fears clearly so morbidly sensitive as to make much of her life a torture? Or with his sketch of the

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strange, lonely, old-fashioned children," who made of their fellowscholars the pitiful request that they would "teach them how to play"?

There is but one other matter in Mr. Reid's "monograph" to which we need refer, his theory that Charlotte's visit to Brussels was the "turning-point in her life, which changed its currents, and gave to it a new purpose and a new meaning"; and, further, that "the 'storm and stress' period of Charlotte Brontë's life was not what the world believes it to have been." We desire only to point out that, inasmuch as he does not bring an atom of proof to the support of this belief, but only hints and grows mysterious over it without other effect than to leave the reader in the dark as to his meaning, he commits a sin, as a biographer, beside which any "fixed determination" of Mrs. Gaskell's is but trifling. When he will tell us what that "truth" is which he says "must be told" about the sorrow of her life in Brussels; when he will show us how "her spirit, if not her heart, had been captured and held captive in the Belgian city," he will do more than he has done between these covers to throw new light upon the life of the writer of "Jane Eyre."

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

The Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch. By HYDE CLARK. London: N. Trübner & Co. 12mo.

pp. 88.

Kinetic Theories of Gravitation. By WILLIAM B. TAYLOR. Washington Smithsonian Institution. 8vo. pp. 78.

Serpent and Siva Worship and Mythology, in Central America, Africa, and Asia, and the Origin of Serpent Worship. By HYDE CLARK, M. A. I., and C. STANILAND WAKE, M. A. I. Edited by ALEXANDER WILDER, M. D. New York: J. W. Bouton. 12mo. pp. 48.

Goethe's Prose. Edited, with Notes, by JAMES MORGAN HART. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 16mo. pp. 199.

Mesmerism, Spiritualism, etc., Historically and Scientifically Considered. By WILLIAM B. Carpenter, C. B., M. D., LL. D., F. R. S., F. G. S., V. P. L. S. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 16mo. pp. 158.

General History of Connecticut. From its First Settlement under George Fenwick to its Latest Period of Amity with Great Britain prior to the Revolution, including a Description of the Country and many curious and interesting Anecdotes. By a Gentleman of the Province. London 1781. To which are added, Additions to Appendix, Notes, and Extracts from Letters, verifying many Important Statements made by the Author. By SAMUEL JARVIS MCCORMICK. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 285.

:

Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel. By B. VON MARENHOLZ-BULOW. Translated by MRS. HORACE MANN. With a Sketch of the Life of Friedrich Froebel, by EMILY SHIRREFF. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York:

Charles T. Dillingham. 16mo. pp. 359.

Samuel Brohl & Company. By M. VICTOR CHERBULIEZ. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 16mo. pp. 271.

By MRS. C. V. HAMILTON. Boston: Estes & Lau

ALL the great financial troubles which have occurred in the United States have been the result of a plethora of paper money, and the crisis has always been reached when its volume was the largest.

Up to the passage of the legal-tender acts, the protection against continued over-issues existed in the power of the States over their banking institutions, and in the force of public sentiment. In most, if not in all, of the States, banks forfeited their charters by suspension, and their suspension was tolerated for such a period only as was necessary to enable them to resume without too severe pressure upon their debtors, and too great disturbance to business. The suspension of the banks put a check at once upon credit and an end to over-trading and speculation. No such corrective power now exists.

Although the germs of mischief were contained in the legaltender acts, they would have been comparatively harmless if a most important provision which they contained had not been repealed. They were a war measure only, and members of Congress justified the votes in their favor on the ground that the notes whose issue they authorized were absolutely necessary to "float" the bonds which were to be offered to the public. Hence the NO. 259.

VOL. CXXV.

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