of its follies and its crimes. And while Mr. Watson continues the story to Napoleon's accession to the consulate, it is evident that the mean and sordid spirit of the directorial régime has for him but slight interest, and his treatment of it is perfunctory. But in the real purpose of the book, in its exposition of events from the accession of Louis XVI. to Robespierre's fall, it is a masterpiece in its way.

G. B. ROSE.

FROM THE LAND OF ART AND ROMANCE.

BEATO ANGELICO, by I. B. Supino. BOTTICELLI, by the same. Florence: Fratelli Alinari.

To the student of art, photography is the greatest of all blessings. Until its discovery satisfactory art study was impossible. No man, however powerful his memory, could intelligently compare a picture attributed to Titian or Raphael at Madrid with another at London or St. Petersburg. Nor did engravings materiall assist in the comparison. Into them the personality of the engraver enters too largely. But when the late Prince Consort made his collection of photographs of all the pictures attributed to Raphael, the scientific study of art began. Then it was possible to compare them, to determine the characteristics of the master's style, to recognize the true and reject the false.

Substantially all the great pictures of the world have now been photographed with a perfection that would have been impossible in the days of the Prince Consort; the scientific system of Morelli has revolutionized art study, and the student who is a few years behind is behind indeed.

Of all the workers in the field, the great photographic house of Alinari Brothers at Florence are easily the first. They have brought photography to an unsurpassed perfection, and the diligence with which they have sought out masterpieces in the remotest parts of Italy and reproduced them regardless of expense and trouble can never be sufficiently commended.

They have now turned their extraordinary proficiency to the reproduction of pictures by process work for the illustration of books, and the two before us are marvels of the bookmaker's art. Each contains numerous reproductions of the works of the illustrious painters with whom they deal, executed in a style that is at present unsurpassable, combining softness, clearness, accuracy, and beauty in equal degree. And all this for ten francs, a sum for which you could not have bought a single plate a few years ago.

And the text is worthy of the illustrations. Sig. Supino is one of the most accomplished of art critics, thoroughly conversant with his subject, and master of a style that makes reading a delight.

The work on Fra Angelico can be had either in French or Italian, and that on Botticelli will no doubt soon be translated into French. Would that there were a sufficient demand in English-speaking countries to justify the issue of the books in our own tongue! Every one who contemplated a journey to Florence, where alone these great masters can be seen in their perfection, could prepare himself by a study of these books; every one who had gazed upon their mastērpieces in the Uffizi, the Academy, and San Marco could turn to the books and see visions of grace and beauty rising again before his eyes; and the many to whom a pilgrimage to art's great center is an impossibility could have some idea of the glories that they are never to see.

IL Fuoco. By Gabriele D'Annunzio.

The publication of a work by D'Annunzio is always an event in Italy, for he is easily the foremost among Italian men of letters. For some years he has devoted himself to the drama, and has produced several morbid but intense and powerful works. When it was announced that he had returned to the novel, expectation was on tiptoe; but when his new work appeared, it was greeted with a universal chorus of hisses, in which every reader has joined.

In the first place, its indiscretion is gross and unpardon

able. The characters portrayed are unmistakably himself and Signora Duse, the great actress. It is an obvious account of their liaison; and for a man so to expose the woman who has loved him is an offense that death only could atone.

Then the colossal vanity of the man is revolting. He writes of himself in a way that would be extravagant if applied to a Shakespeare or a Homer. In reading such ravings one can only wonder if he is not going to follow Guy de Maupassant, the brilliant young Frenchman whom in some ways he resembles, into the gulf of insanity. It makes us suspect that the old fashion of starving children of genius to death was better than the modern one of turning their heads with adulation.

And, finally, the book is dull. In his search for fine phrases he has lost the vigor and directness of his style, and has become précieux to an exasperating degree.

If Sig. D'Annunzio has nothing better to write, he would best devote himself to politics, upon which he has entered, and which is perhaps responsible for his decline. But it is to be hoped that the universal chorus of hisses which has greeted his latest venture will bring him to his senses, and restore him to literature with a contrite heart.

G. B. ROSE.

A POSITIVIST CRITIC. TENNYSON, RUSKIN, AND MILL, AND OTHER LITERARY ESTIMATES. By Frederic Harrison. The Macmillan Co. 1900. It is always pleasant to read what one who has known and appreciated great men has to say of them. This is not only pleasant, but valuable also, when the person writing is sure to have some one writing an appreciation of himself after he has gone to his fathers. Mr. Frederic Harrison has in this volume essays on Tennyson, Ruskin, Arnold, Symonds, Froude, Freeman, and Mill, among his contemporaries; an address on Lamb and Keats; one on English prose; two reviews on Gibbon; and a dialogue poking fun at a "book trotter"-an Oxford man who can defend him

self for cutting a grind on Plato in order to spend an evening on half a dozen books from "King Solomon's Mines." through a volume of Lecky, to La Terre, a pipe, and Sporting Life.

In the articles on Gibbon, Freeman, and Froude we have a complement to Mr. Harrison's essay "On the Meaning of History," for here are studies of the two greatest recent historical writers, and a careful estimate of the personality of Gibbon. Of course no one can for a moment believe that Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Spenser, were otherwise than delightful men, as great in life as in works; but a contemplation of Gibbon's life reconciles us somewhat to the lack of positive information for fear of a bare possibility otherwise. This man, the wielder of style as stately as the imperial theme he chose, the laborious scholar, the sympathetic appreciator of Rome, Athens, and Byzantium, thought men like Grey who could dream of reform liable to cause trouble; he regarded a seat in Parliament as a piece of property; his estimate of the French Revolution was about as accurate as Burke's; and he knew less about Washington and America than did Dr. Johnson himself. To be sure, with all this, Gibbon was a cheerful companion, a faithful friend, and a self-sacrificing son.

Mr. Harrison sees as clearly as the newest Ph. D. in history the essential error of the historical method of a man who like Froude always holds a brief, yet he thinks emphatically that this history of England has a reason for its existence. Froude was disingenuous, careless, and it seems at times absolutely untruthful in the means he chose in trying to attain his three objects-the rehabilitation of Henry VIII., the glorification of the English Reformation, and the indictment of Elizabeth as a ruler-yet on none of these three points has he reversed the verdict of historians. What he has done is to arouse an interest in the past-one of the great functions of history—and to give us wonderful pictures and narratives deserving to live. The petty men of the school in which Prof. Freeman was a great historical writer will more

than offset with their laborious facts and criticism Froude's mistakes in judgment; his style they cannot approximate. Freeman's method is almost as mistaken as Froude's, though in an entirely different way. Tireless in his pursuit of truth, with a wonderful control of the most minute facts, and having no great power of condensation, he has produced a work to be read only by special students. Both of these men have done valuable work in history, and both are faulty, the one for his lack of scrupulous love for truth, and the other for his presumption that others are as capacious of detail and as unwearied as he himself is-i. e., for his lack of imagination.

The Symonds, the Lamb and Keats, and the Mill essays are the least interesting portions of the book; and those on Tennyson, Ruskin, and Arnold are the most inviting. However far one may be from Positivism, or how entirely. an admirer of these three men, at whose defects Mr. Harrison looks with quite open eyes, it is impossible to lay this volume aside without an increased respect for its author's judgment and acumen. This feeling comes to us especially in reading the estimates of Arnold and Ruskin, both of whom during their lives poured out the vials of wrath on the devoted head of the great follower of Comte. There is neither bitterness nor effusion, but a calm statement of facts, with a willingness to authenticate them in the strongest way. His opinions on Ruskin as a prophet are set forth in a dialogue between two men out for a walk over the Sussex downs on a glorious September day. The younger man is a painter established at Florence, full of an appreciation of the art of himself and his contemporaries, and with a thoroughly condescending view of Ruskin's ideas; and the older man a contemporary of Ruskin's, who saw in him a guide and a seer. The latter regards Ruskin as the real source of the sounder feeling for the beautiful that exists in England to-day, as against the hideous ideas prevalent in the early third of the nineteenth century. "It is very likely," says he, "that Carlyle was the inspiration of that book [‘Mod