should be willing to put his time and talents upon such carnal evidences of our human weaknesses when the world is so full of better themes.

To return to "The Choir Invisible." If we consider the book from a historical point of view, we may safely affirm that, as to the facts of the period of which it treats, they are accurate; and we might well place a high estimate on Mr. Allen's power to describe past events, to estimate historical values even. Witness the description of the battle of Blue Licks, the discussion of the political situation, the influence of beautiful, passionate France, the enthusiasm for Citizen Genet, the Jacobin clubs, the tricolored cockades, the vituperation of Washington in his steady course of neutrality. These and a hundred other points are strongly brought before us. But the atmosphere of the past is not in the book. One never spontaneously thinks of it as a historical ro

It is only when the author introduces some fact of history that we remember that we are reading about persons who lived in another period. The characters seem to belong to the latter years of the nineteenth century rather than to the latter years of the eighteenth. The art of the historical romancer is to keep his reader in the period of which he writes; to make him feel the history, fight the battles, hate the enemy, love the partisan; to make him forget that he lives in the present; to transport him to other times, so that when he lays aside the book to look around himself, he finds himself in the broad light of his own times as by a bound from the mysterious atmosphere of those gone days. Mr. Allen fails in this. He does not catch the spirit of the age, he does not transport one into the atmosphere of a hundred years ago; and, while his history is accurate, he has not breathed into his pages the breath of the past. Hence, as a historical romance, "The Choir Invisible" seems to be a failure.

But let us turn now to a consideration of Mr. Allen's style of composition, leaving aside, for the present, his creative ability. There is something in the flow of his words, something in the quality of his style, which charms. There

is nothing pedantic, nothing unmusical, nothing abrupt in all his pages, even if at times an effort for effect is noticeable in his word paintings. The prose rolls along almost with the rhythm of verse; in fact, the poetic element predominates. There is a wonderful wealth of exquisitely wrought imagery in his out-of-doors pictures. One would say that he excels in descriptions. He sees clearly and draws the outlines of his picture firmly, filling in the delicate smilax and mosses of detail with a skillful hand. The sunlight fairly dances over his landscapes. The manypeaked clouds become wandering Alps under his touch; the cold brook creeps over the gray-mossed rocks; nature walks abroad as if to salute some imperial presence; a hundred green boughs wave on every side; a hundred floating odors rise; the flash and rush of bright wings catch the eye; and all the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies soothe the tired mind. I know of no present-day writer who gets nearer to nature's heart than James Lane Allen. Love for nature is almost universal, and if a writer is in such intimate communion with our common mother as to be able to deliver some special message through his books, we are ever ready to welcome him as a friend.

Aside from this close communion with nature and this skillful manipulation of words in scene painting there is little to praise. There are two noticeable characteristics of Mr. Allen's stories: they either tend toward sadness, or toward immorality, or even vulgarity. The former, though unpleasant when pressed to excess, is not so much to be condemned; but there is no excuse for the latter, even behind what may be termed the author's art. Mr. Allen is not, in my judgment, a great writer. He is a disciple of Thomas Hardy, without the genius of the Englishman. But, after all, he is a modern novelist whose office is to please or to while away a vacant hour, and there are many who find genuine pleasure in his books, for they are light, and breezy with nature, and restful. He deserves credit, too, in that he has led the way into the pioneer history and customs and life of Kentucky. He has added his State to the meager

list of States which find themselves represented by a literature peculiar to themselves. He has put Kentucky alongside of Hawthorne's Massachusetts, Irving's New York, Page's Virginia, Cable's Louisiana, Craddock's Tennessee, and Harris's Georgia, though as to his relative rank in this list of authors I should place him last.

L. W. PAYNE, JR.

THE WHIGS AS ANTI-EXPANSIONISTS.

COMPARISON of the utterances of the politicians of the time of our war with Mexico, touching the subjugation and dismemberment of that country and its annexation, in whole or in part, to the United States-in short, the question of expansion, as it was even then often called-strikingly justifies or illustrates the old saw that there is nothing new under the sun. When it is found that public expressions regarding our present question of expansion are very much like expressions on the same question during the Mexican War, we have a curious illustration of the tendency of ideas, and more particularly of political notions, to run in a groove. The present one-sided partisan discussion of the many-sided question of expansion must stimulate men of intelligence and fairminded, logical temperament to wish for the time when some Beresford may confidently write of the break-up of parties, just as of the impending "Break-up of China," whose institutions are possibly no nearer obsolescence, and no farther from fitness for the functions they assume, than present political parties in this country or in England.

The most childish, perhaps, of all the "arguments" of the Philippine question are those which denounce critics of the present Philippine policy of the administration as copperheads and traitors, and the most benighted of all prophets those who predict disaster to a political party which shall denounce that policy, and on the ground that parties that have opposed wars in this country have always thereby suffered defeat. Denunciation of critics of the present Philippine policy, for disloyalty or lack of patriotism, reaches back and brands also nearly every Whig of consequence enough to attract attention at the time of the Mexican War, many of whom subsequently became the illustrious leaders of the Republican party during the War for the Union. Andrew Jackson, with an expansion appetite which "nothing short of empire could satisfy," as early as 1833 had begun systematically to

provoke the troubles which led inevitably to the Mexican War; the provocation was deliberately kept up by his Democratic successors, and notably by President Polk, whose efforts were crowned with success. This policy, it should be said, was in accordance with the uniform policy in this, as in civilized countries in general, to appropriate the territory of weak peoples by conquest whenever it should be desirable and practicable to do so. If in the fortunes of political warfare the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, had been elected President instead of the Democrats Jackson and Polk, it is quite likely that Whig politicians would have been champions of Mexican dismemberment and American annexation, while Democrats would have taken the place of the Whigs as the censors of the Mexican War and the opponents of American expansion. The abandonment by the Whigs of their pet anti-slavery measure, the Wilmot Proviso, for the sake of success at the presidential election of 1848, would seem to purge this remark of cynicism. Nevertheless, though Whig opposition was so largely fortuitous, yet many of the reasons given for this opposition were both well founded and well spoken.

What was contemporaneously charged as to the injustice and moral indefensibility of the Mexican War is now generally conceded, though very lightly regarded. It may perhaps be said in palliation of "this robbery of a realm," as Channing characterized it, that the moral vision of its censors was too narrow and was confined to the point of view of mere individual transactions. At any rate, it is unnecessary to grope in the vagueness or mystery of manifest destiny or providential design to account for this alleged national outrage. The motives and methods of its perpetrators were perfectly sane, natural, and explicable, from the ordinary human point of view; and the perpetrators are now regarded by the world as a group of men of unusual capacity for affairs, of elevated patriotism and high moral character. The inevitable appropriation of Texas and California by a dominant and aggressive nation, such as ours, is apparent and explicable, as being in the natural and perceptible course of social progress.