ing for silhouette and spaces, his design is too strung out and wiry to agree with soft apparel.

Mrs. Davis, on the other hand, completely realizes that a fan-leaf must be designed for special ends; as far, that is, as she takes a fan seriously. So charmingly congruous with the quality of delicate rich apparel are her fans that women would do well, buying them, to dress to them, having their color scheme and pattern echoed throughout. It is worth note that her most delightful pieces are arrangements in which black and white, silver and gray predominate, such, for instance, as Nos. 4, 24, and 55. Her use of a clear white ground and simple trellis in No. 58 is distinctly pleasant amid examples suffused with the sumptuous color rhythms of K'anghsi porcelain, of precious stones and plumage. And another thing impresses one, the spirit of experiment that keeps Mrs. Davis's large collectionsome seventy fans in all-fresh and stimulating. Passing from the hot, grit-filled air of the streets into her room, so cunningly appointed, so charmingly hung with quiet, cool silk, one captures a sense of leisure and of taste, the breath of an age in which beauty grew profuse and delicate.

In this atmosphere a dream that
The Saturday Review.

would seem starkly fanatic in Bona Street or Knightsbridge might be indulged; a vision of women's dress ordered by art, not by the caprice of trade. Were the question of fan-sticks taken seriously these leaves of Mrs. Davis would provide an inspiration and a nucleus of fair fashions: suggesting fabrics, pattern, color harmonies, all that would make dress beautiful and sane. Then leaving the elect high air of precious perishable pictures fans would come down to play their proper rôle. Here and there stir rumors concerning the reunion of art with trade: there is talk even of municipalities encouraging the genuine effort that is making for a school of frescopainting. But before fans can take a part other than toy in this reunion more must be considered than completing them with fitting sticks. The comparatively high prices now asked for the painted leaves alone may be well enough for collectors' cabinets. But, as I have suggested, they are not practicable for purposes of general use and commerce. Fans of the high order Mrs. Davis shows, with sticks of worthy quality, designed for the painting and executed by artist craftsmen, can be fairly sold for half the sum demanded for those leaves.

C. H. Collins Baker.

Under the title "The Gleam,"-a title suggested by Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam,"-Mrs. Helen R. Albee writes a narrative of most intimate spiritual experiences, through which she passed from a partial acquiescence in conventional and orthodox religious beliefs into a sense of close communion with the unseen world and of continuing and daily guidance by unseen

forces. She expressly deprecates the conclusion that her book is intended as an attack upon orthodoxy or Christian teachings; and she describes it as "a finger, pointing to a neglected region that lies outside of dogmatic theology, where a reverent seeker may find for himself evidences of Deity in the world about him." This "neglected region" she has traversed by the aid of auto

and

matic writing, telepathy, strange psychic experiences, mental suggestion, mental healing and much else beside until she has attained an intimate and comforting- consciousness of the Divine presence the reality of things unseen. It was perhaps inevitable that, in describing her experiences, she should criticize sharply the religious beliefs and habits which one by one she was led to discard; and her apprehension that her book may be looked upon as an attack on Christian teachings is to that extent justified; but, whatever estimate may be placed upon her conclusions, her sincerity will scarcely be doubted even by readers who find the paths which she travelled quite as vague and baffling as more ordinary religious experiences seem to her. Henry Holt & Co.

At the psychological moment. surely, just as the world is agitated over the disappearance of the famous painting, comes "Monna Lisa; or The Quest of the Woman Soul." A work of fiction, as the publishers explain, it is ingeniously presented by the author who signs himself Guglielmo Scala, in the form of transcripts from freshly discovered journals and letters of Leonardo da Vinci, and purports to describe the incidents which marked the growth of love-late but intensebetween the painter and the original of the famous portrait. The theme is a daring one, and needs a poet's treatment. But the magnanimity and many-sided genius of the master stand out distinctly, and the historical detail has been carefully filled in. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

A significant mark of the present religious and social unrest in France has shown itself in a recent English translation of "The Re-appearing (Il Est

Resuscité!)

He

A Vision of Christ in Paris," by M. Charles Morice, a French art critic. The book is Gallic in its method, its daring and its real cleverness, but the questions the author raises are universal. The novel tells how on December 11, 1910, and for several days thereafter, the evening papers of Paris contained great blank spaces. The matter puzzled everyone until it appeared that everything false, misleading or not strictly honorable had been omitted. On the 14th a paragraph in small type announced: "The Son of God has no need of advertisement. He is staying at L'Hôtel des Trois Rois on La Place de l'Etoile. will receive, from midday to midday, all day long, this 14th of December and to-morrow." The journalists flocked to the hotel and there, in three hundred different rooms, Jesus received at one and the same time three hundred interviewers. Their stories in the next morning's papers were amazingly good. "The journalists had surpassed themselves, because unconsciously each one had drawn a portrait of himself in colors of glory." The rest of the developments of Christ's stay in Paris are less daring as allegory and more consistently realistic. In every case the basis of modern culture and society are opposed by Christ's quiet assumption of an absolutely opposite standard. In the end, incipient commercial panic inevitably brings about the exile of the Son of God by the authorities. Though "The Reappearing" probably will not create the interest here that it is said to have aroused in France, it deserves recognition as strong satire; it is skilfully written, stimulating to thought and discussion and instinct with stern honesty. It differs from the many other books written around the same idea in its breadth of view, and its lack of devotion to any single ethical purpose. George H. Doran Co.

THE KERRY COW. It's in Connacht or in Munster that yourself might travel wide,

And be asking all the herds you'd meet along the countryside,

But you'd never meet a one could show the likes of her till now, Where she's grazing in a Leinster field, -my little Kerry cow.

If herself went to the cattle fairs she'd put all cows to shame, For the finest poets of the land would meet to sing her fame; And the young girls would be asking leave to stroke her satin coat, They'd be praising and caressing her, and calling her a dote.

If the King of Spain gets news of her he'll fill his purse with gold, And set sail to ask the English King where she is to be sold:

But the King of Spain may come to me, a crown upon his brow,

It is he may keep his golden purseand I my Kerry cow.

The priest maybe will tell her fame to the Holy Pope of Rome,

And the Cardinals' College send for her to leave her Irish home; But it's heart-broke she would be itself to cross the Irish Sea, "Twould be best they'd send a blessing to my Kerry cow and me.

When the Ulster men hear tell of her they'll come with swords and pikes,

For it's civil war there'll be no less if they should see her likes: And you'll read it on the paper of the bloody fight there's been, An' the Orangemen they're burying in fields of Leinster green.

There are red cows that's contráry, and there's white cows quare an' wild, But my Kerry cow is biddable an' gentle as a child.

You might rare up kings and heroes on the lovely milk she yields.

For she's fit to foster generals to fight our battlefields.

"ONE CALLED HELP." You came to me, friend, with the chalice of help in your hand, With pardon, and healing for one who was wounded by shame. Ay, straight to my side you came down. through that desolate land;

You brought me the Water of Life: and you called me by name. You were not ashamed to be there in the palace of Sin:

You knelt by my side, and you bade me look out through the bars: Then shattered the bolts that could only be burst from within, And rose with captivity captive once more to the stars.

Muriel G. E. Harris.

The Westminster Gazette.

It has come at last, the democracy which many of us have looked forward to with as much apprehension as others have with hope. And it has come, like all great movements, with a certain dramatic suddenness. While we have been sleeping, the seed has been growing, and almost before we are aware, we have had the blade and the ear preluding the future harvest. "Like a thief in the night"-that is the only comparison which does justice to the suddenness of the phenomenon, or, rather, perhaps, to our sleepy misapprehension of the underground forces which have been working for so long in one single direction. Now, as we look back on the evolution which has been going on for several years, we seem to discover all sorts of signs and portents which might have warned us of what was to come. There was, to begin with, the extraordinary apathy of the English people within recent months, which politicians sought to explain as best they could, and deplored as significant of we know not what obscure social peril. Now we understand what that popular apathy and incuriousness meant. The people refused to be galvanized into interest by subjects like Tariff Reform, or the constitution of the House of Lords, or this or that panacea of strenuous party men in the House. Even on the subject of Irish Home Rule there was rather a sombre acquiescence than any positive decision one way or another. So far as they allowed themselves to be interested in anything, the people in two successive elections declared that if it were true that the House of Peers obstructed radical and popular legislation, they must be done away with. But they were not very keen on the matter, and now we know the reason why. The one absorbing preoccupa

tion in their minds was the social status of the working classes. When are we coming to our own? was the solitary question which arrested their intelligence, to the exclusion of everything else. When shall we, the democracy of England, attain to a position in which we can secure for ourselves that modicum of comfort and ease which we desire? No other topic was of the same burning importance, because, in that obscure fashion in which great movements are engineered, it had suddenly occurred simultaneously to all orders of democratic intelligence that now or never was the appointed time. The working classes were prepared to take the tide at the flood in the hope that it would lead on to their permanent fortune. Everything else held to be significant was only viewed from this political and social angle. Even the Coronation itself failed to impress the people as much as most spectators anticipated, because, preluded as it was by the shipping strike, it had to compete with that topic of tremendous interest, the emergence of Democracy into a position of definite power and authority.

As we look back, the course of development is clear. But, inasmuch as the majority of men take short views, it is not surprising that the sudden arrival of democracy seemed to be abrupt and unexpected. England was confronted with a not dissimilar crisis in 1832, when, as we have now heard ad nauseam, the Duke of Wellington thought it his supreme duty as a statesman to allow a Reform Bill to pass with which personally he did not agree, in order that his Sovereign's prestige might be inviolate, and the safety of the body politic secure. From 1832 onwards dates the rise of the middle