Our clergy hated her voluntary system, the Tories hated her democrats, the Whigs hated her parvenus, the Radicals hated her litigiousness, her insolence, her illusive, adolescent ambitions. Mrs. Stowe was hailed as a candid rebel in the enemies' camp, an enfant terrible who knew all their weak points and would blab them to the entire world. Democrats, she showed, might still be tyrants; a coronet was not the only passport to a cold heart, nor a mitre to a calculating hypocrisy. The prejudice against slavery was already strong, but Mrs. Stowe first provided the telescope which enabled Europe to watch it closely in operation and realize what it meant. President Lincoln was not far wrong when he described her as the little woman who had made the war. Her two books, "Uncle Tom" and "Dred," will therefore long retain a place in chronology as historical pamphlets. They represented active principles in politics for the time being. But it is not by standing on the same level with political mobs and repeating their transient commonplaces through a trumpet that works of permanent importance are written. The diffuseness, exaggeration, and unction of these once celebrated performances render them tiresome at the present day. The apocrypha of "Dred," the lost slave of the dismal swamp, are terrifying to the modern reader. Assisted by slave politics, these two books were the gospel of the fifties, and achieved results beyond the record of Scott, Thackeray, or Dickens. At Stafford House their author was presented by Lord Shaftesbury with an address of welcome and appreciation from the women of England. "While talking with Lord Palmerston I could but remember how often I had heard my father and Mrs. Stowe exulting over his foreign dispatches by our own fireside." The report of Stafford House made abolitionism

"fashionable" in America. In Scotland Mrs. Stowe was received like a princess. In Switzerland it was "O Madame Besshare, do write another! Remember our winter nights here are very long."

Her

Mrs. Stowe was an evangelist. She had no capacity for organizing worldly success, and little discretion in concentrating her attention upon matters congenial to her peculiar gifts. later books, "A Minister's Wooing" and "Oldtown Folks," expose her deficiencies as an artist. Her denunciation of Byron was actuated largely by the profound regret that a man of such magnificent powers should have done nothing for Christ. "Oh! what a harp he might have swept!" Mrs. Stowe had always written for dollars to eke out her scanty housekeeping. With the proceeds of "Uncle Tom" she built at Hartford, Connecticut, a perfect white elephant of a house. As a summer dwelling it was delightful, but in winter no amount of fuel would heat it. Water-pipes were freezing and bursting all day long, and a provident plumber, to whom the house meant a fortune, arranged a complicated system that kept more than one man in steady work during the entire

season.

The professor predicted daily that the family would end in the workhouse. One day in a spasm of economy he attempted to mend a broken pane of glass in one of the cellar windows with a sheet of tin, two shingle nails, and a tack hammer. After breaking out all the remaining glass in the sash he went to his room in an agony of despair. The incident is characteristic. Every one in the countryside thought that Mrs. Stowe had made a fortune out of her books, and all were piously resolved to relieve her of the dangers and temptations of great wealth as far as lay in their power. Heavy war losses and natural troubles beyond her fair share saddened the

ebbing life of the impressionable little woman. She outlived her fame by many years; and what remains is assuredly not that of a great writer but of a great missionary, who carried a

The Times.

smoking torch between two continents and at a given moment made it flame brightly with righteous wrath and indignation.

In "The Professor's Mystery," Wells Hastings and Brian Hooker collaborate in a detective-story whose interest centres in the romantic attachment of a young college professor to a distressed damsel of a New York suburb over whose family hangs a vague cloud which threatens to darken their happiness. Automobilists, reporters, Italian bravoes, alienists and psychics play their part in resolving a mystery which proves agreeably harmless after all. The Bobbs-Merrill Co.

Some hitherto unpublished letters of Napoleon from the Vienna Archives will be a feature of the new and enlarged two-yolume edition of Fournier's "Napoleon I." to be issued early in July by Messrs. Henry Holt and Company. The translation of this new edition is by Miss A. E. Adams. The original appeared in Germany-three volumes. The same American publishers issue a translation by E. G. Bourne of the original one-volume edition which at once took its place in the front rank of Napoleon studies and is still widely regarded on the Continent as the best of the shorter Lives of Napoleon.

For a long time after the appearance of the first of Owen Johnson's Lawrenceville stories, graduates of that school insisted on laying before the author their claims to be the originals of his schoolboy heroes. Mr. Johnson at first sought refuge in the traditional disclaimer of having had any definite

models in mind. Later the pressure must have become irresistible, for a photograph taken at a recent school reunion shows Owen Johnson in the company of the prodigious Hickey, Turkey, Reiter, Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnigan, and the Old Roman. A tribute to Owen Johnson in a recent number of the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine is from the pen of "Snorky."

A perfectly impossible adventure plot, a double romance, and the contrasted charms of fashionable life and that in a small southern town are put together to make a novel, by John Reed Scott, called "In Her Own Right." The tale concerns itself with the fortunes of a clubman who loses all but a beggarly pittance and a house near Annapolis, where he goes to live. In a secret drawer he discovers directions for finding certain pirate treasure and makes thorough attempts to locate it on a nearby point. He meets with absorbing and troublesome adventures, such as the kidnapping of his fiancée, and finally after the love affairs are settled, he discovers the treasure in his own cellar. The characters are nothing more than types, and the reader is interested chiefly in the mechanics of the plot. On the infrequent occasions when the action flags, the gaps are filled with would-be Anthony Hope dialogue which rather fails to sparkle. On the whole, however, the work is better done and better knit than the usual "dashing" novel. J. B. Lippincott Company.

If Milton could describe Paradise, which, unless we believe in the migration of souls, he certainly never saw: if Schiller, who never left his German native land, could so wonderfully describe the Swiss landscapes: and if, on the other hand, we remember the Greek saying that nothing is so difficult as to know oneself, in spite of the fact that one never leaves oneself for a second while life lasts-then we may conclude that it is the more easy to describe things the less one knows of them. And there is something true in this paradox. The more superficially we come into contact with men and their surroundings the more apparent will be their peculiarities.

The modern means of communication bring nations so close together that their habits and customs become almost one, and it has become difficult to show wherein exactly the differences lie. It may therefore seem presumptuous to want to speak about the English. For many years a stream of travellers has flowed across the Straits of Dover and the North Sea and emptied itself into our country, in consequence of which our upper classes are steeped in English customs. We "lunch," we take "five o'clock tea" with "toast," we play "golf," "cricket," "lawn tennis," and "bridge"; we watch "football matches," and, after dinner, for which we have put on our dinner jackets, we drink our "brandy and soda" in the "hall" or the "bar." In summer we go to a "garden party," in winter to a "rout," and at Christmas we decorate our rooms with mistletoe. Our houses, too, are English, and our hygienic ideas we get from England. The high claims put forward by our working classes are of English origin, as are also our "strikes" and "inter

views." And when we regard this strange fact from a higher plane, we see that nearly all Europe has adopted the English system of two Houses of Parliament. Nevertheless, I venture to say that we know less of the English than perhaps we do of the Patagonians, as these primitive creatures are easier to fathom than the complicated peculiarities of the English.

We Austrians, inhabitants of a country which can be traversed in a journey of thirty-six hours, can with difficulty picture to ourselves the British Empire, on which the sun never sets, and which contains 400,000,000 human beings. We, who for decades have been quarrelling and fighting without being able to settle our petty disputes at home, are lost in amazement when we contemplate a statesmanship which is able to give a form of constitution to the enlightened Hindus, the half-sayage Kaffirs, the Egyptian Fellahin, and the clever Canadian French. Only men endowed with extraordinary characteristics could, under the most varied and difficult circumstances, exercise such power-which power, on its side, has to exercise a great influence on the formation of character and the conditions of life.

Education explains why it is that England has expanded so enormously during the last century. At school sport takes the first place, books the second. The development of the body is at the foundation of all education. Physical exercises give a boy a taste for adventure and equip him with energy, initiative, perseverance, calmness, self-confidence, and an extraordinary self-control.

In England the school, which prepares a man for the battle of life, strives to develop individuality and