CURRENT LITERATURE.
A Guide to the Eastern Alps. By John Ball, M.R.I.A. (Longmans.) —This is a new number of the invaluable series of Alpine guides prepared by the late president of the Alpine Club,—by far the most scientific and complete guides to which the English traveller has access, —and though not perhaps quite so well adapted to a lady tourist's purpose as the English translations of Baedekor's guides, because furnishing less information about inns and prices and matters of that kind, yet almost essential, if she understood the real art of enjoying Alpine scenery, even to her. This number in the series includes the whole Tyrol from the eastern border of Switzerland and also the Alps of Carinthia, Styria, Carniols, and Venetia, as far east as the valley of the Mm
(the longtitude of Bruck, Gratz, and Marburg), and as far south as the line of railway between Trieste and Venice. The northern boundary of the district dealt with is the latitude of Salzburg, and the western boundary is the eastern border of Switzerland. The geological and botanical features of every district aro most carefully given ; there is an admirable geological map as well as the general map ; there are five most careful and useful smaller maps of subordinate districts ; and a little key map to the whole, of the most convenient kind. We have examined the Guide very earefully,—indeed, it is so interesting as to have no small attractions for the general reader, even without the additional stimulus of any intention to follow the various routes discussed,—and so far as our own experience of the Tyrol goes (which is not large), it is beyond praise.
A Third Year ill Jerusalem. By Mn. Finn. (Nisbet.)—A. slight thread of story serves to connect together some bright and pretty pictures of life and manners in the Holy Land. "Passion Week in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," "The Flowing of Kedron," "The Pilgrims to the Jordan" are some of the many which struck us as being particularly good. Mrs. Finn, who is, we believe, the daughter of a distinguished llobraist, and friend of the Jewish race, the late Dr. Mtlaul, has an hereditary idterest in this subject, and she has had opportunities of personal observation. Wo are glad to see the general kindliness and breadth of her sentiment, even on a subject on which English people find it difficult to be tolerant, the Christian communities of the East. And we certainly have no wish to cavil at the judgment, more favourable than travellers have commonly formed, of the character of the Jerusalem Jews. And it must be allowed that she has had opportunities of forming an opinion which do not fall to the lot of travellers. There is probably no race which shows such divenio sides to friends and strangers. Altogether this is a book which we can thoroughly recommend.
Catena Classicorum. 'The Wasps of Aristophanes. Edited by W. E. Green, M.A. (Rivingtons.)—Though the "Wasps" is certainly not in the first class of Ariatoph.anes' plays, few people will agree with Schlegel, who ranks it as his very feeblest. But Schlegel, as the world has long since discovered, was in no wise infallible. We have nothing, it is true, in modern life that exactly resembles the habit which the poet ridicules in his fellow-countrymen. An excessive fondness for sitting upon juries is a folly from which wo may justly claim to be free, and which it is even difficult to conceive. So it happens that this play has in a peculiar degree lost its force, but it contains single strokes of humour which equal anything in Aristophanes. The old man detected in weeping through the chimney, and accounting for himself by the explanation Kaervb; ;yew/ iVpxoizai, is very fine, and so is the pathetic reason he gives for his son's excessive care of him, Mt:* yap wiosi; io'rno ir rXis ilkoa. The play, too, has the advantage that it may be read through without much interruption from coarse passages. Mr. Green has done his work of editing very well. On the whole, perhaps, the critical notes are better than thoso which aim at explaining historical and other allusions. On lines 62-3, for instance,— same out brilliantly, thanks to good luck (rather than to good management). Though Cleon did owe his name to good luck, the Knights, Aristophanes says, was enough of a dressing for him." Now the i'Acc/-64,6 Oj T6X21; 26415 must refer to Cleon's brilliant piece of good luck in the capture of the Spartans at Sphacteria ; and the "making mince-meat of him" was done by the Knights, acted in the winter of the same year ; and Aristophanes means to say that though it was all through luck that Cleon got his reputation, he will be satisfied with one dressing of him. Mr. Green very probably knows all this, but ho does not put it in his notes. On the whole, however, we may say that they are quite worthy of the excellent series in which they appear.
Mirelle. From the Provençal of F. Mistral. Translated by H. Crichton. (Macmillan and Co.)—The success of Mr. Morris's Earthly Paradise and Life and Death of Jason has given, we have no doubt, a considerable impetus to the production of narrative poems conspicuous for the:r extreme length and their extreme simplicity. Accordingly, Mr. Morris is by no means the only aspirant to be "the idle singer of an empty day." It is, of course, much easier for a man to say his say at great length, than to be brief and terse, vigorous and restrained. But easy writing is apt to be very hard reading. Every one who understands the language of Provence will probably ere this have read M. Mistral's pastoral epic Allireis. We do not recommend the translation to those who don't read the original. It was hardly worth doing. That is the worst we will say of it. Mr. Crichton has taken pains, and has produced three hundred and fifty pages of smoothly-turned rhyme ; but there is not much in it. If English literature did not exist,—if Goethe and Schiller, and Heine and Uhland had never written,—the world of London might have turned with some degree of interest even to a translation of what M. Mistral's admirers toll us is no loss graceful as a poem than creditable to the man who composed it under difficulties. Bat, as matters are, we do not find much that is profitable or amusing in the narrative verse with which Mr. Crichton has presented us.
Diana's Crescent. By the Author of Mary Powell. 2 vols. (Bentley.) The author is an old friend whom we are always glad to meet. She cannot of course always find subjects equally good ; the quality of her writing varies accordingly. Here, for instance, it strikes us as being somewhat thin. But there are certain good qualities which she never loses. She can always give us lively little sketches of scenery and character, and can always point a kindly and sensible moral with shrewdness and humour. In Diana's Crescent, a title the surprise of which it is only fair to leave, she takes us back to the early years of this century, the time of the great war, and some of her most characteristic scenes, which have the air of being drawn from the life, bring before us the "invasion" panic of those days.
BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG.—Two Years of School Life, by Madame de Prossensd (Warne), and Four Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott (Sampson Low), are two little books meant for the young, but not to be disdained by older readers, very different from each other, but each charming in its way. The French authoress writes about the schoolboys of her own country, and about their mothers and friends, and makes a very pretty little story. She is naturally more successful with her female subjects ; surely even French boys do not talk with the epigrammatic brilliancy which here marks their dialogue, yet she draws them with a certain skill and naturalness, and her treatment of character is decidedly artistic. There is nothing of the sudden transition and violent change of which writers of didactic tales are so fond. We have instead just the sort of struggle and slow progress to better things which we can and ought to believe in. Miss Alcott is more entirely at home with her subject. She takes us to the other side of the Atlantic, and gives us some pictures from the home life of the four daughters of a family gently bred, but poor, the head of which is fighting in the Northern ranks. These are given with a genuine humour and pathos. The writer's strength is principally given to the portraiture of Jo, alias Josephine, a boy, we may call her, who by some misadventure finds himself or herself in the shape of a girl. She is, indeed, a person to be remembered. The character is not an easy one to draw, but it is managed without a shade of vulgarity or rudeness. Jo is always a young lady. The story of how she sells her hair, her one beauty, to have something to send to her father at the camp, and is woman enough to wake in the night and cry over it, is singularly good. Miss Alcott hints that she has something more to tell about her young heroines; by all means let us have it.—Marooner's Islatu4 by F. R. Goulding (Routledge), is a continuation of the adventures of "the Young Marooners," some young people who were towed out to sea by a devil-fish, and who have a very exciting sort of picnic for some weeks in consequence.—Busy Rands and Patient Hearts, translated from the German of Gustav Nieritz, by Aind• Harwood (Hodder and Stoughton), is a pretty little story, whist, tells us how a blind boy had his sight restored to him. Many of the incidents, as, for instance, that of the little girl who earns a few pence by modelling in clay for a potter, have a novelty of colourabout them which attracts.—On the Way, by A. L. 0. E. (Nelson), is a story fairly well told of how certain children adapt the allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress to the little difficulties of their lives.
Tossed on the Waves, by Edwin Hodder (Nodder and Stoughton), relates the adventures of two boys, one of whom deservedly comes to. happiness, and the other is permitted to redeem his faults by a noble end. It is a good story, without the extravagance which we have noticed before in its author.—The Ashtons, by Jane Kinley (Moffat : Dublin), is a well-meant little story, but certainly not exciting. This earns the commendation of a certain Rev. Mr. Whitfield, who writes for it a preface, in which among other remarkable things he says, "the high standard of the cross itself is lowered to human expediency and panders to a morbid taste. This is the malaria of modern times."— The Heroes of the Crusades, by Barbara Hutton (Griffith and Ferran), is an elegant volume, which the authoress seems to have taken great pains to make accurate. It takes the reader down to the return of Richard of England. Surely Miss Hutton might do more than indulge a hope that the story of how Richard thrust his hand down a lion's throat and tore out its heart, which he devoured on the spot is untrue? Could not the anatomists reassure her ? And why does she play such a trick with Coleridge's lines as to print them thus?—
" The knights they are duet, Their good swords rust, • Their souls are with the Saints, we trust."
—Land Battles, by Mrs. Valentine (Warne), gives a short sketch of great battles in which Englishmen have fought, from Hastings to Inkermann. We would sooner have had half the number told in more detail, and with maps instead of the pretty pictures of knights. Anything i& dreary which we cannot understand, few things are so hard to understand as the story of a battle. Mrs. Valentino deserves credit for carefulness and industry. Yet we must notice that the story of Waterloo is told in the old fashion of ignoring the Prussians. •
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