CURRENT LITERATURE.
The most interesting article in the September number of the Atlantic Monthly is, on the whole, the seventh—dealing chiefly with Paris—of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's series of papers on "Oar Hundred Days in Europe." Them articles are pretty and polite, no doubt, but we confess to finding them disappointingly thin. To speak of "the terrible storming youth afterwards renowned as Leon Michel Gambetta," suggests a lady stroking a lion with a kid- gloved hand. We may quote two of Dr. Holmes's criticisms, by way of consolation, for, "after the poor, unsatisfactory towers of Westminster Abbey, the two massive, noble, truly majestic towers of Notre Dame strike the traveller as a crushing contrast," we may take, "London out of season seemed still full of life ; Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid." The fiction, which is supplied by Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. T. B. Aldrich—as collaborateurs—and by Mr. Marion Crawford, is exceptionally good. " Le Roi Manque," by Ellen Terry Johnson, and "Franklin in France," by John Bach McMaster, are excellent historical papers. Mr. McMaster disposes of at least two inaccarate stories about Franklin. "A Study of Early Egotism" deserves a word of commendation as a oarefal psychological examination of certain aspects of savage life. The Atlantic Monthly has been very greatly improved by the competition of formidable rivals in America, against which, however, it now more than holds its own.
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