natural, antic style, the censure is directed against "the Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers." And, being a poet, he adds to the phrase of another the touch which heightens prose into poetry. For instance, here is a passage which he entitles Jactura vitæ: "What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the better part of his life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner." As far as the word "plays" this is a liberal version of Quintilian. And then the poet speaks. "Making a little winter-love in a dark corner!" That is Jonson's own, and it justifies his claim to the whole passage. In brief, whatever he chose he turned to his will, changing the old to new and inspiring the dead with fresh life.

Yet so closely did he assimilate what he borrowed to what he owned that he would be a bold critic who on internal evidence alone would presume to separate them. Thus he writes in a passage which bears the true impress of originality: "Some words are to be called out for ornament and color,"he is discussing the never young, never old question of style,-"as we gather flowers to straw houses, or make garlands; but they are better when they grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though the mere grass and greenness delights, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify." That, we should say, has the authentic imprint. But if M. Castelain tracked it to Vives or Quintilian, we could profess no surprise. On many a page, however, it is the easiest thing in the world to acknowledge defeat. "Such as torture their writings and go into council for every line." Could any

But

phrase be more genuinely modern than that? And there it stands, textually exact in the Latin of Seneca: "Illi qui scripta sua torquent, qui de singulis verbis in consilium eunt." And again: "There cannot be one color of the mind, another of the wit." It sounds like an Elizabethan commonplace, and it is Seneca's still: "Non potest alius esse ingenio, alius animo color." the passage which takes you most suddenly aback is that in which Jonson describes the lovers of a broken, fantastic style. "These men err not by chance," he writes, "but knowingly and willingly; they are like men that affect a fashion by themselves; have some singularity in a ruff cloak or hatband; or their beards specially cut to provoke beholders and set a mark upon themselves." Surely nothing could belong more intimately to his century than this comparison. also may be traced to the mighty father of all noble commonplace.

Yet it

Ben Jonson's success in annexation is not remarkable. He holds an honored place among the great translators. The poet who rescued the daintiest of songs-"Drink to me only with thine eyes" from the prose of Philostratus had nothing to learn in the art of interpretation. And the exquisite tact with which he made his selections matches the fidelity of his Englishing. To compare his essays with their originals is to see the perfect craftsman at work. He took no jewels which were not handsome in themselves and which were not wisely suited to their place. And the ground of his search was still untravelled. The continent of Latin literature had not yet swum into our ken. Though Lodge had already reclaimed the lost province of Seneca, though Holland had, so to say, colonized the treatises of Plutarch, the most of men looked upon the classics as upon a strange and distant country. Jonson, therefore, in his "Discover

ies," was making known the unfamiliar; he was pointing the unaccustomed eye to lofty mountain-peaks. He was, in his modest fashion, a Hakluyt of Roman criticism, a Purchas whose pilgrimages led him in the remoter bypaths of literature. It is not for us, therefore, to brand him with the crime of the freebooter. Rather we would welcome him as one who, after a perilous voyage, has returned home laden with rare and precious spoils.

Whatever Ben Jonson discusses, be it morals or letters, he speaks with the voice of authority and tradition; and his "Discoveries" cannot but magnify our respect for the wisdom of the ancients. The precepts of old have lost nothing of their truth. Their application to modern history is precise and exact. The younger Pliny had already divined the dangers of democracy, and is thus interpreted by Ben Jonson: "Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed; nor can it be otherwise in these public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality; for there, how odd soever men's brains or wisdom are, their Blackwood's Magazine.

power is always even, and the same." Might not that have been thought and written by a Tory of to-day? And what could be more to our present purpose than this, which Jonson writes in Latin, and which M. Castelain has not tracked to its lair? "A Puritan," thus Jonson, "is an heretical hypocrite, whose pride in his own perspicacity, by which he thinks he has detected certain errors in the dogmas of the Church, has disturbed the balance of his mind. And so, excited by a sacred fury, he fights madly against the magistrates, and believes that, in doing this, he pays obedience to God." You would search the literature of all ages in vain for a better definition of the Passive Resister. That, indeed, is the supreme worth of this work: it is packed with criticisms of life and books, whose truth the passage of time can never destroy. Wherever Ben Jonson found his wisdom, he made it his own and ours; and we are grateful for M. Castelain, who has given us the best edition that we have of a rare masterpiece, and who has performed a pedant's task in the spirit of a man of letters.

"The Carroll Girls," by Mrs. Mabel Quiller Couch, is a pleasant illustration both of the slightness of the wall dividing English and American feeling and of its actuality. Here is the wellknown story of the family of children left by various chances without their natural guardians, but managing to grow up all that they should be and to be useful to their elders; one reads at least twenty American versions of it every holiday season, and wonders at the ingenuity that gives every version a differentiating trait, a family wit, a

wonderful pet, a hidden treasure, wonderful bravery, pre-eminent beauty, or what not, but "The Carroll Girls" tells of average folk. They are four in number, no one in the least remarkable, and being left in charge of a hitherto unknown aunt while their parents try the experiment of living in Canada, they develop in the direction of selfsupport chiefly by good luck in meeting adults capable of assisting them. Compared with Americans of their own age they are babies in independence, but in thought and speech and manners

they are five years older. It would be interesting to compare them minutely with Joe and Beth and Amy, or with some of Mrs. Blanchard's girls, or with "The Little Colonel" and her friends, the only American fictitious girls nearly approaching them in maturity of mind. One would like to see the four confronted with "Rebecca" and her schoolmates, and perhaps mothers and teachers might do worse than to recommend such a procedure to their pupils. E. P. Dutton & Co.

When that sturdiest of sensible men, John Fiske, fell upon the Baconians, and routed them with heavy slaughter, simple folk, profoundly content, fancied themselves henceforth free to enjoy their Shakespeare undeafened by exhortations to call him somebody else. Bootless boast! Here is Mr. Latham Davis, with some five hundred fair pages of print nominated "Shakespeare, England's Ulysses," all contrived and written to show that Shakespeare was Robert Devereaux, second Earl of Essex. He is as confident as the fair Delia herself, as William O'Connor or Ignatius Donnelly, and he has shaped the sonnets into something which he conceives to be both a play, and proof that Essex wrote the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare. The "proof"

The

is couched in elaborate "Emblems" compared with which the Donnelly cipher is as the multiplication table to the differential calculus, and it is reenforced by quotations from contemporary poets and statesmen. chief objection to the testimony of this great cloud of witnesses is that its admission leaves the supposed secret a matter of common knowledge in court and literary circles, and unlikely, therefore, to have remained unknown for centuries to the world at large. evidence given of the literary capacity of Essex is all the anonymous verse of the time, generously attributed to him

The

by Mr. Davis, upon no particular authority, and two links of such weakness destroy any value which the entire chain might have. The book is a curiosity, nothing more. Stechert & Co.

"England and the English," Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's intelligent attempt to explain London, and the heart of England, and the spirit of the English to the American visitor is something more than an agreeable book written in a spirit of kindly intelligence; it is a proof of an immense advance in mutual understanding since the days when Americans were grateful for observations made in England by an Emerson or a Hawthorne. In this one volume there is more of London, more of the England of down and dale and immemorial elms, and more of the spirit of the Englishman than can be found in all the books, novels included, of every American who has written of England, Washington Irving and Richard Grant White excepted. Indeed, with Sir Walter Besant's "London" and Mr. Edward Thomas's "The Heart of England," Mr. Kipling's "Puck" and "Stalky & Co." and this, one could dispense with the entire library in which Englishmen have striven to explain themselves in answer to critics, Gallic, Teutonic, and American. The "Author's Note" and "L'Envoi" in which Mr. Hueffer himself is most easily found are valuable because they confirm the reader's opinion of the author's judgment of his own land by showing his capacity for understanding the United States and Americans. He is as just and as penetrative as Professor Munsterberg, and he has that spirit of divination of American character denied to all but those to whom English is the inherited vernacular. In exterior the book is a square octavo, and it is illustrated with good pictures by Mr. Henry Hyde. McClure, Phillips & Co.