Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic; Earth's worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me! I have wings.

That has even some of the merits of the victim, and could only have been written by one who had read her with delight. There is only one of Swinburne's parodies which is an attack upon the writer parodied, and that is a long dull failure.

But parody at best is a trivial kind of humorous poetry. It only ceases to be trivial when it is practised incidentally, as by Aristophanes, and with some larger purpose. The parodist has his material provided for him, and if it is a well-known poem he is sure to make some one laugh. But in other kinds of humorous poetry the writer has to provide his own material; and he must be judged by the quality of that as well as of his execution. Hood, for all his ingenuity, is becoming obsolete because his material is usually poor. He makes verbal jokes round a subject-matter that is not essentially humorous. But the "Ingoldsby Legends" are still good to read because their subject-matter is humorous, and the "Bab Ballads" are likely to last for the same reason. There are sound prosaic merits in both. Like Barham, Sir William Gilbert, of whom it is sad to speak suddenly in The Times.

the past tense, had usually a good story to tell. Like Barham, too, he had an original mastery of comic verse, and could laugh in it as the poets sing in poetry. Of the two Barham was superior in energy and Gilbert in idea. It was Barham's peculiar gift to combine a headlong volubility of speech with a mechanical perfection of versification so as to make us laugh at their incongruity. This was not a mere trick, for his high spirits were real, not affected for literary purposes, and he seems to write in verse rather than in prose for the same reason that a child dances when it might walk. Gilbert also had high spirits, but he had more satiric power than Barham. He thought more, and combined ideas with high spirits as he combined extravagance with demureness. He could make prosaic sentences dance in verse as if they were solemn people mesmerized. Neither he nor Barham assumes a humorous manner; their fun seems to grow naturally out of their attitude towards life; they are like good actors whose art is being rather than acting. And that is the secret of all humorous verse. You must be humorous before you can write it.. No desire to ridicule things, no verbal dexterity, no trick of style, will give success. Unfortunately, the man who is not humorous by nature is the last to suspect his own deficiency.

"Four in a Family," purports to be the autobiography of a dog, but the author, Florida P. Summerwell, has not succeeded very well in her attempt to portray dog-nature. The other three members of the family are dubbed the "shiny man, the white woman and the pup"-which is supposed to be the dog

way of characterizing the man, wife and daughter who own the dog. The humor is strained and the story itself is of very slight interest. The closing chapters, which are concerned with the romance of the daughter of the house, have some passages which are treated with discernment and delicacy, and the

author appears to forget that the dog is telling the story and reverts to a better style, which is a relief. Bobbs, Merrill Co.

"Love Under Fire," Randall Parrish's latest novel, is a light, readable story of the Civil War in which the principal parts are taken by one of Sheridan's young lieutenants and a piquant little Southerner who carries despatches between Beauregard and Johnston. The movements of armies concern the plot but little, but there is some vigorous fighting around the old mansion-house in which the hero has taken prisoner the heroine, her father, and her fiancé, when a relieving force of Confederates attacks them there. Full-page illustrations in color are contributed by Alonzo Kimball. C. McClurg & Co.

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An admirable historical novel of the best popular type is "The Path of Glory," in which Paul Leland Haworth embellishes skilfully a plot that follows the French and Indian War for the five years including the defeat of Braddock and the fall of Quebec, with an imaginary love-affair between the daughter of a French commandant and one of the Virginia Randolphs. has availed himself freely, but not indiscriminately, of the picturesque possibilities of the period, and has bestowed a care on his character-drawing which one does not always find in stories where romance and adventure play so large a part. He has been particularly successful in describing the perils of the frontier-life of the time, and the fate of little Barnaby Currin, carried away by Indians from his home in the Shenandoah Valley, will hold the interest of some readers as closely as that of the fascinating Alfrède, apparently doomed to be the bride of her lover's bitterest enemy. Little, Brown & Co.

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In a volume upon "The Business of Congress" Mr. Samuel W. McCall, representative in Congress from the 8th Massachusetts district, publishes with some revisions and additions the substance of a course of lectures which he delivered at Columbia University some months ago. No more illuminating volume upon Congressional procedure has been written or is likely to be. Mr. McCall was a journalist before he was Congressman, and the combined training has given him an unusually clear and forcible style and a proper sense of proportion. From nearly twenty years' experience in the House he has gained familiarity with all details of Congressional business; and there is not a step in the process by which projected legislation finds its slow and difficult way to the statutebook which is not accurately described in these pages. The book makes an admirable companion to Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert's just-published history of Parliament, and like that, is not only interesting for present reading but extremely useful for reference. Columbia University Press: Lemcke & Buechner, New York, sales agents.

In "Old Reliable" Mr. Harris Dickson presents an old negro in many mirth-provoking experiences. His laziness and his lying seem to be incurable, but despite his many faults, his perpetual good nature, fertility in resource, and ingratiating manner, make friends for him. Fortune favors him through many tight places and his escapades and trials are very amusingly portrayed, the best chapters, perhaps, being those that tell of his employment by Col. Spottiswoode, a southern planter whose understanding of the devious ways of the typical southern darky is complete. Old Reliable's testimony as a court witness, his experiences as the Colonel's agent in securing workers for the plantation, the

hunt, conducted by the Colonel, at which Old Reliable assists, are some of the more ludicrous incidents. When, by an accident, Old Reliable "saves the country" by saving a bursting levee from disaster and the grateful planters give him a home for his declining years one finds oneself smiling indulgently at his closing remark that "dey mout a' throwed in a nigger to work some of dis lan' for me." Bobbs, Merrill Co.

Professor A. S. Mackenzie, head of the department of English and Comparative Literature in the State University of Kentucky, is the author of a work on "The Evolution of Literature" which is constructed upon altogether new lines. It is a study of comparative literature, but in a broader sense than is usually given to that term; for the author treats the study of literary art as one of the subdivisions of anthropology, and in the pursuit of this study compares drama with drama, lyric with lyric, narrative with narrative, beginning with the primitive literatures of Africa, Oceania, Asia and America, and the primitive dance and drama, lyric and narration, as found among the peoples of those continents and then passing in review and subjecting to comparison the barbaric literature of the same divisions, thus leading to a study of the various forms of literature as they developed, first under autocratic and then under democratic conditions. Much the larger part of the work is devoted to the earlier branches of the study,-tribal literature in its primitive and barbaric forms; but this is not to be regretted, since these are the least familiar departments of inquiry. There is no lack of manuals in which the literatures of civilization are compared; but the thoroughness of research which carries the investigation, in this volume,

"The War Maker," by Horace Smith, purports to be the true story of the adventures of Captain George B. Boynton, a soldier of fortune, who died a few months ago in New York after a life-time devoted to adventure for adventure's sake. Serving at different times under eighteen different flags, and bearing a number of different names which he does not think it necessary to record, Captain Boynton distinguished himself as a professional filibuster, buccaneer, and promoter of revolutions in Latin America. There is material for a dozen romances of adventure in the narrative which Captain Boynton confided to Mr. Smith toward the close of his life, not the least thrilling of which is the story of his brief association with a beautiful pirate queen in the China Sea. Captain Boynton told his tale, apparently, without the slightest qualms of conscience, and only with "scorn for sympathy and contempt for criticism." In Hayti, in Venezuela, in Brazil and in other hotbeds of Latin-American revolution, and again in Africa and in China and in Europe, he followed his thirst for adventure as if war and peril were his manifest destiny, only to die peacefully in his bed at last, at the age of sixtynine. The editor of the narrative explains that Boynton-whose real name, by the way, was not Boynton,-was the original of Richard Harding Davis' "Soldier of Fortune." A. C. McClurg & Co.

We will sail those secret sea-ways which no keel has ever partedOh, hard shall be our portion, but we'll never more come home.

Never more come home, till the winds are tired of battle,

Hanging weary pinions, storm-draggled, wet with rain;

Then we'll gather in the harvest, and we'll watch the sheep and cattle, And card the wool, and feed the flocks, and live with you again; But the ships are straining seaward where the winds have flown before us

(Laughing high amid the clouds, they called us as they flew.) Can we pause, can we linger, when the winds and seas implore us?

Oh! when the winds turn home again we'll come again to you. Margaret Sackville.