CHARLES PHILLIPS ("The Naked Washington"), a favorite with all our readers, is daily doing more and better literary work, in spite of his onerous duties as Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is an effective foil for present-day iconoclastic biographers.

J. CORSON MILLER ("MoonMeadow"), whose verse has appeared frequently in THE CATHOLIC WORLD in past years, is a member of the Poetry Society of America and a contributor to leading non-Catholic as well as Catholic periodicals. His work is also represented in several issues of Braithwaite's and other anthologies. Mr. Miller lives in Buffalo, and was educated at Canisius College in that city. His first book, Veils of Samite, published in 1922, is on the syllabus of schools of Buffalo.

JOSEPH J. REILLY, PH.D. ("Some Critics and Cardinal Newman"), writes again with authority and charm on the fascinating character of whom he has made such a profound study.

BERTHA RADFORD (MRS. FREDERICK O.) SUTTON ("Marie-Thérèse") lives at Lourdes, and her true stories bring home effectively its wonder and its beauty. Our readers will welcome this latest one from her pen.

ROXANNA GRATE ("The Building of the Gothic Cathedrals") makes

her first appearance in our pages. She is a native of Ohio, was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Brown County, and has a degree of Litt.B. from Notre Dame. She has contributed verses, stories, and articles to many Catholic periodicals in this country and in England.

WILLIAM J. KERBY, S.T.L., LL.D., PH.D. ("In the Household of the Virtues"), the eminent Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University, is the author of several articles in The Catholic Encyclopedia, and a contributor to many leading reviews. Our readers will remember his fine article on the late Maurice Francis Egan, whose intimate friend he was, published in our issue of February, 1924.

EMIL JACQUES ("Flemish Nationalism," Part II.) concludes his penetrating study of the conditions in Belgium, which was begun in the January number.

REV. WALTER E. CASE, C.M. ("Expectancy"), is a graduate of De Paul University, Chicago, and made his clerical studies at St. Mary's Seminary, Perryville, Mo. He is Instructor in English at the University of Dallas, Dallas, Texas. This is his first contribution to our pages.

NEIL BOYTΟΝ, S.J. ("Sanger Courts"), is stationed at Georgetown Preparatory Academy, Garrett Park, Md. He is a graduate of Holy Cross and has been a frequent contributor to Catholic magazines. His

The Letters of Maurice Hewlett. Edited by Laurence Binyon. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $5.00. The Heart of Emerson's Journals. Edited by Bliss Perry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $3.00.

The second of these two volumes is much the more satisfying. Perhaps that is no more than one would have expected. To be asked to compete with Emerson in the field of his special inspiration-informal, intimate, personal revelation is a particularly exacting requirement, and one which, moreover, the late Maurice Hewlett was particularly unfitted to meet. His gifts, though unquestionable, were of the sort which lent themselves rather to the confecting of a brocaded, pageant-like fiction than to the delicate pursuing and fixing of irrevocable personal moments in the life of their possessor. Mr. Binyon has done his work carefully, and the letters constitute a very complete biography of Hewlett, as well as a record of his mind. But the fact remains that, though he lived actively, knew most of his interesting contemporaries, and

worked hard, the chronicle has not the color or the deep human meaning which alone would compensate us for the perusal of so thick a volume. Almost anyone, one conjectures, would rather read Hewlett's Richard Yea and Nay or The Queen's Quair than these, his patiently assembled and excellently edited private letters. They have a little the effect of an anti-climax after those remembered splendors.

Coming to the other book, it should be recalled that the great natural advantages inherent in the temperament of Professor Perry's subject were somewhat counterbalanced by the peculiar difficulty of winning over the reader to precisely the project represented by Professor Perry's volume. That project was the cutting down to the compass of three hundred odd pages of the famous ten volumes of Emerson's Journal, which were published between 1909 and 1914. It is the more convincing evidence of Professor Perry's discernment, taste, and sense of proportion, therefore, that his book does not seem fragmentary or superficial, but that it

rolls smoothly forward through the maturing and mellowing stages of Emerson's life and seems to give, for each stage, glimpses that are significant and sufficient.

To comment with even passing adequacy on this epic of the growth of the great transcendentalist, is obviously impossible within this space. One can merely note the phases of development covered, and pass on. Emerson was seventeen and still in college when the earliest surviving pages of the Journal were written. These first passages present the usual ambitious resolves of an intellectual boy: "I here make a resolution to make myself acquainted with the Greek language and antiquities and history with long and serious attention and study (always with the assistance of circumstances)," interspersed with a perhaps more than usually precocious and realistic power of selfcriticism: "I am unfortunate also ... in a propensity to laugh, or rather, snicker. I am ill at ease, therefore, among men. I criticize with hardness; I lavishly applaud; I weakly argue; and I wonder with a 'foolish face of praise.'" But there are also separate entries which foretell the sturdier future: "I dedicate my book to the Spirit of America," and "I see no reason why I should bow my head to man, or cringe in my demeanour."

The next period in his life covers his ordination and his later sojourn in the Carolinas. There are echoes here of his detestation of slavery, and this succinct demonstration of a great truth: "If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His wellbeing is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal."

There followed the happiness of his marriage with Ellen Tucker, which was tragically ended by her death two years later. The entry here, though intensely sad, is full of a simple Christian hope for reunion, which, even in a second successful marriage, Emerson never lost. Before closing this section, one can note a passage curiously like the saying of St. Francis de Sales: "Don't tell me to get ready to die. I know not what shall be. The only preparation I can make is by fulfilling my present duties. . .'

Emerson's increasing estrangement from Protestant orthodox tenets led, in 1832, to his resignation from the ministry. His first trip to the continent and Englandin which latter country he met most of the living great, evidently on equal terms, and had the first of his famous contacts with Carlylecame between 1833 and 1835. He sums it up by thanking "the great God who has led me through this last schoolroom. He has shown me the men I wished to seeLandor, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth; he has thereby comforted and confirmed me in my convictions." And then, after praising them, he adds, acutely, this American of thirty, that all are deficient "in different degrees, but all deficient-in insight into religious truth. They have no idea of that species of moral truth which I call the first philosophy."

There followed his second marriage and a time of expanding activity, both on the platform and in the study. "The American Scholar" and Nature were written. His literary comments are short and inspired: "Crabbe knew men, but to read one of his poems seems to me all one with taking a dose of medi

cine"; "Tennyson is a beautiful half of a poet"; and, further on, this poignant and solitary entry: "Also I hate Early Poems." He, too, the gentle pantheist, sighed for the importation of slang into literature: "I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page in the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run . . ." and he said, penetratingly, of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written." There is this terse comment on Brook Farm: "The fault of Alcott's community is that it has room for only one," and later, apropos of nothing, this intimate gleam: "Hard clouds, and hard expressions, and hard manners, I love."

In 1847 Emerson lectured in England, and multiplied there his earlier personal triumphs. One reflection of this trip is short enough to quote: "It is certain that more people speak English correctly in the United States than in Britain." A little later he made a lecture tour of our own West. In the midst of these scholarly occupations there bursts out his furious indignation at the Fugitive Slave Law: "This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God." In another place he says bitterly: "The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan." "It is impossible," he avers, "to be a gentleman and not an abolitionist," and he has this en

try, also, "George Francis Train said in a public speech in New York, 'Slavery is a divine institution.' 'So is hell,' exclaimed an old man in the crowd."

Most of the entries on the War itself have been omitted, presumably as not lending themselves to easy excerpting. Almost the last comment included here was written when Emerson was seventy-two: "The secret of poetry is never explained, is always new. We have

not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits."

M. K.

Jesus a Myth. By Georg Brandes. Translated from the Danish by Edwin Björkman. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. $2.00. "For we have not by following artificial fables, made known to you the power and presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ; but we were eyewitnesses of His greatness (2 Peter i. 16) so the Prince of the Apostles assured his converts nearly two thousand years ago. Similar, too, are the assurances and declarations of the Apostle of the Gentiles: "for we are not as many, adulterating the word of God; but with sincerity, but as from God, before God, in Christ we speak" (2 Cor. ii. 17). Mr. Brandes sweeps these assertions aside, and in addition, all the New Testament, and twenty centuries of faith and works, by roundly asserting that Jesus is a myth. To prove that Our Lord is a myth in some 190 small pages, ma foi, il faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, but boldness, or to be perfectly frank "gall," is Mr. Brandes's outstanding characteristic. His book is a tissue of the most preposterous statements without any real attempt to prove them.