insulted. We shall imitate Prof. Rawson, and attempt little criticism of his book, which fills a temporary need, and may, for aught we know, prove also to possess permanent value. If any hostile criticism is passed upon it by foreign writers, they will need to clear themselves of the suspicion that they are jealous of the space occupied by the Professor's native country. Of his twenty battles from Salamis to Santiago, America figures in eight. We ourselves are not prepared to say, however, that he has erred in his judgment as to the fitness of a single battle for his pages. Other ancient sea fights besides Salamis and Actium are of great importance to the historian, but hardly to the readers. these volumes will mainly reach. The battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama is famous enough for inclusion, even though one feels that it settled no great issue, for the power of the Confederacy had been broken before. In other words, criticism of the kind we have hinted at is not needed, and the volumes may be heartily commended for the purposes of the general reader.

BALZAC'S OPINIONS.

THE PERSONAL OPINIONS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1899.

This very handsome book forms Volume XXXIII. of the Centenary Edition of Miss Wormeley's well-known translation of the works of Balzac. With the previously published memoir it admirably supplements the volumes of the "Human Comedy," which have already gained so many readers for the great Frenchman, and are likely in this delightful edition to gain him many more. Miss Wormeley has recognized the fact that the five large volumes containing Balzac's correspondence and miscellaneous writings would be at present caviare to the general, but she has not erred in thinking that a book of selections from these volumes would be welcomed by many readers.

She seems to us to have accomplished her task successfully. In lieu of a preface she translates M. Brunetière's

excellent address delivered in the theater at Tours, May 6, 1899, the centenary of Balzac's birth in that city. M. Brunetière finds, as Taine did before him, that the secret of Balzac's success is his possession of the "gift to make living”—a phrase which is in some respects better than Taine's famous "storehouse of human documents." Naturally, this formula does not exhaust the greatest of novelists; but what formula could?

The main work is divided into ten chapters. The first three give us an insight into Balzac's views on historical and political subjects. The next two are concerned with literature and art. The sixth gives in an abridged form Balzac's "Monograph of the Parisian Press." The last four chapters deal with his views as to his own works.

In these chapters we have found very few uninteresting pages. Even if we cannot agree that they prove Balzac to have been a great publicist and philosopher, or even a great critic, any more than his opinions vented in the "Human Comedy" do, still we cannot but confess that, whether he writes upon the Jesuits, or upon Fourierism, or M. Thiers, or Mehemet Ali, or the relations between Russia and the United States, or Lord Byron, or Fenimore Cooper, or Brillat-Savarin, or, finally, on his own great novels, Balzac always impresses one who has previously read the "Human Comedy" as being not merely a remarkably versatile and powerful man, but as possessing a really titanic mind. We hardly believe that a reader, judging Balzac from this book alone, would necessarily regard him as anything more than a man with a brilliant and versatile intellect; but the reader of this volume is likely to be Balzac's admirer already.

We have not space to comment minutely upon any chapter, or even any section. But we may call attention to the curious fact that a generation before the Franco-Prussian war Balzac saw that the interest of France lay in befriending Prussia and the cause of German unity, rather than in opposing them. We may also remark that very few American critics have ever recognized so clearly or praised so warmly the genius of our own Cooper as this Frenchman

and greatest of all novelists has done. Sometimes, of course, the Titan errs, even to the point of making one smile-as when he concludes that Byron will lose his popularity on the Continent, but will continue to be read in England on account of his form-almost precisely the opposite phenomenon having occurred. But Balzac's slips are trivial, while his insight into men and books and events is often marvelously clear. We conclude by advising every one who is really interested in Balzac, and who has not ready access to the original volumes, to read this book, for which Miss Wormeley deserves hearty thanks.

MR. SWINBURNE'S NEW TRAGEDY.

ROSAMUND, QUEEN OF THE LOMBARDS: A TRAGEDY. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1899.

Albovine, King of the Lombards, having conquered the Gepida and killed their king, Cunimund, with his own hand, took his daughter Rosamund to wife. At the height of his power, while intoxicated at a great feast, Albovine compelled Rosamund to drink wine from her father's skull. She, in revenge for this, induced two soldiers to murder him while asleep. Such is the historical basis for Mr. Swinburne's small book of verse, entitled "Rosamund: a Tragedy." The story is followed only in the large, there being many variations.

The place of the play is Verona. The time is the month of June, 573. The persons are Albovine, Almachildes, a young Lombard warrior, Narsetes, an old leader and counselor, Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, and Hildegard, a noble Lombard maiden. Cunimund was slain, though, as Narsetes says to Albovine,

Manfully, but by thy mightier hand than his,
Manfully mastered.

Almachildes and Hildegard, the young lovers, are not historical, and Narsetes, the old counselor, is merely a helping figure to the drama. As a matter of fact, Rosamund lived with Albovine some four or five years before the crowning

outrage of her love to her father was offered. The poet, however, by condensation, makes the marriage recent, and presents Albovine as madly in love with his beautiful captive, but jealous with an elder man's jealousy for his young wife. This jealousy furnishes the motive to the ordeal of drinking from the skull, for thus is Rosamund's loyalty to her father to be compared with her love for her king. From the first we feel that Rosamund feels her position, in spite of the fact that she defends her expressions of affection to the king on the ground that she has been treated as an empress and not as a prize of victory. Her "I loved thee never more than now" is a remark of bitterly double meaning, after she has drunk from her father's skull; she cools the rising anger of the king and Almachildes, and goes off to plot her husband's destruction. Here the overelaboration in the plot that comes from the use of the two lovers weakens the effect. In history it was in a rage of passionate recollection of a father's love that the murder was decided on, and the instruments were two hired soldiers. Hildegard confesses the love Almachildes has for her, and is bound by an oath to the queen, on her love for the latter, to obey her commands. This is to get Almachildes to speak to her by nightfall, telling him that the queen, for her hatred to the king, will not give her maiden to a man beloved of him; but that if it were an utter shame that they wed not, she could not choose but yield. The meeting which Hildegard appoints for her lover is at night and silent, and Rosamund is to substitute herself, and thus win a weapon to strike with. Rosamund feels the wrong she is doing to secure vengeance, but it is necessary not only for revenge, but to release her from what is to her an imperial prostitution, a living with a lord she hates. Before Almachildes can come to the queen after hearing Hildegard's proposal, the king has told Rosamund that he repents his deed of the last night, but she steels her heart against repentance. When Almachildes does come, his hatred of the shame to ensue to his bride is overcome by the queen's

"Shamed she cannot be

If thou be found not shameless!"

She assures him also that the secret cannot come forth, and assigns as her reason for this some oath sealed in haste but not to be broken. The double injunction of darkness and silence is laid on him, and his reluctance is overcome. Rosamund, after the meeting, requires of the king that Almachildes take the maid to wife, and then is left alone with the young warrior, whose frantic gratitude is turned to horror when he learns that On it was not Hildegard but Rosamund with whom he lay. the threat that Hildegard shall die the harlot's death of burning for seeking him, which she cannot deny, Almachildes is forced to kill the king at a banquet. Rosamund then slays herself by a poisoned cup which she had prepared in case her arm, Almachildes, failed her.

This is clever, but it is not great. It is too subtle, the motives too elaborate, and at times obscure. The tragedy is the work of a man who can write poetry, and, choosing deliberately a subject that he fancies, sits down to write on it, and the result is not satisfactory. The speeches are not inevitable, the characters not firmly drawn, and though there is abundance of poetic phrasing, the lines struck from the poet's heart are more rare than the emotions which the subjects would seem to call for.

The blank verse is, in general, easy, with many liquid lines and alliterations that we associate with Swinburne, and it has many verbal reminiscences of Shakspere. Where the verse is obscure it is bad-that is, it is obscure not from the packing of thought such as is found in "Antony and Cleopatra," or of some passages in Milton, but from the laborious arrangement of words to get the required blank verse form (cf. on p. 35, beginning "Not she"). Besides the verse there are two other features distinctly taken from Shakspere: the emphasis on the hot Verona summer, and its effect on the passions, directly from "Romeo and Juliet," and the trick by which Almachildes is deceived, the most famous prototype of which is in "All's Well that Ends Well," though of course Shakspere did not originate the plot of either of these plays.

A taste which is not normal to Anglo-Saxons, or rather which