The first volume of the life of Varina Howell, wife
of Jefferson Davis, by Eron Rowland (Macmillan, 17s.), is very, discursive. It contains a good deal of repetition and one cannot help wondering if the volume yet to come could not have been compressed into this—perhaps because we are in a hurry to read it. No one will go through Mrs. Dunbar's easily written pages without feeling that life in the Southern States in the old slave days had a wonderful charm—for the rich slave-owners at least. For the " poor white trash " it must have been but little pleasanter than for the negro. The rich men, however, seem honestly to have believed that there was no slavery. " The poor struggling whites, and the lowly serving class that the unthinking called slaves, but who were in reality a race slowly coming forward from the dark environs of savagery, were both getting here the chance that had been denied them elsewhere. To them the picture was as it should be." Southern patriotism and political ambition took Varina and her husband to Washington, -where she developed a well-regulated passion for society. Jefferson Davis was a much-admired man among politicians of all opinions until he became the leading Secessionist and the head of the Southern Confederacy. Varina liked celebrities whatever their views. She herself, a pretty, proud, preten- tious young wife, was " of the South, Southy "—as are the sympathies of her biographer.
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