16 OCTOBER 1909, Page 28

We have received from Messrs. Cassell the first five-and-twenty volumes

of their series of " Cassell's Little Classics" (7d. net each). We place the earlier in date in order of time. They are Sir John Maundeville's Voyages and Travels; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More; The Schoolmaster, by Roger Ascham ; A Defence of Poesie, by Sir Philip Sidney (with Poems) ; Essays, Civil and Moral, by Francis Bacon ; John Evelyn's Diary ; The Pilgrim's Progress, Part I.; Sir Roger de Coverley (it would have been well to divide the author- ship of the various essays between Addison and Steele) ; Swift's Battle of the Books ; Horace Walpole's Letters ; and Basselas, by Samuel Johnson. To the nineteenth century belong The Essays of Elia ; Heroes and Hero-Worship; Thackeray's Four Georges ; Macaulay's essay on Warren Hastings ; Unto This Last, by John Ruskin ; Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, and The Chimes. Putting the poetry together, we have Milton's Earlier Poems, Childs Harold's Pilgrimage, Scott's Marmion, a selection of Poems by Wordsworth, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Tennyson's Poems, selected, of course, from the work that is out of copyright. (It would certainly be a great advantage if it were possible to give to all an author's work a simul- taneously expiring copyright. There is a great temptation to say that the part which it is lawful to print is the best worth printing.) Finally, in the drama we have Goldsmith's Plays and Sheridan's Plays.—We have to chronicle some additions to "The People's Library" (same publishers). In the department of " Belles-Lettres " we have The Four Georges, by W. M. Thackeray ; The Crown of lVild Olive, and The Ethics of the Dust, by John Ruskin ; The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving; and George Borrow's Lavengro. In fiction there are The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne ; The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas ; Jane Austen's Mansfield Park ; and The Master of Ballantrae, by R. L. Stevenson. The price is 8d. net each vol. —We may mention at the same time the first number of the Bicentenary Edition of Boswell's Johnson, Edited by Roger Ingpen (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 6d. net). The edition is to be com- pleted in twenty parts. It is needless to praise this edition; the illustrations alone make it a great success.