CURRENT LITERATURE.
The June number of Longman's Magazine is rather a poor one, the miscellaneous articles being neither sufficiently serious nor sufficiently light, and Mr. Val Prinsep's story of the French Revolution, under the title of " Virginie," having become melo- dramatic and stagey. The " smartest " and most readable paper is that of Mr. Brander Matthews on "The Art and Mystery of Collaboration." It proves little more than that collaboration succeeds under certain circumstances and with certain persons, although we do come upon these two dicta, that " collaboration fails to satisfy when there is need of profound meditation, of solemn self-interrogation, or of lofty imagination lifting itself freely towards the twin peaks of Parnassus," and that "collaboration succeeds most abundantly where clearness is needed, where pre- cision, skill, and logic are looked for, where we expect simplicity of motive, sharpness of outline, ingenuity of construction and cleverness of effect " Miss May Kendall for once fails—or at least succeeds only in being cleverly conventional—in her short story of "Judith ;" and Mr. Lang's chat, "At the Sign of the Ship," is positively dull.
There is a considerable and inevitable resemblance, as regards contents, between the new numbers of the Magazine of Art and the Art Journal ; both find it necessary to deal at considerable length with the pictures of the summer. Singularly enough, also, there is a flavour of Browning about both numbers, as, in the Magazine of Art, there is an article—the third of a series by Mr. W. M. Rossetti—on " Portraits of Robert Browning," and in the Art Journal Mr. Percy Pinkerton writes pleasantly of Pippa's country. The best of the other articles are Maurice Hamel's delightfully fresh paper on that eminently conscientious French artist, Jules Dupre, in the Art Journal, and Mr. Walter Armstrong's on " The National Gallery of Ireland."
The outstanding feature at the present moment of Lippincott's Magazine is the appearance in each number of a complete novel. " Circumstantial Evidence," by Mary E. Stickney, which is the novel in the June number, is, in some respects, rather dis- appointing. It is worked out almost too elaborately, and it leaves at the close an air of "much ado about nothing." At the same time, the characters in " Circumstantial Evidence" are sketched
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