CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Universal Review. No. 3, July. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)—This is a very good number, the illustrations being, to the eye of the present writer at least, unusually good and numerous. We cannot say that we find much in Mr. O'Connor's reply to Mr. Hill on the subject of Home-rule which we have not seen in all the Home-rule pleadings for the last few months. But it is temperate in tone. Mr. Quilter's second paper on "The Salon" is written in his best style, and is to a non-expert unusually interesting. Mr. Henry James begins a short story characterised by his peculiar style and by his usual skill ; and Mr. Samuel Butler is amusing in spite of a rather obviously mighty resolve to be so. Mr. Llewelyn Davies writes a singularly wise and thoughtful paper on " The Problem of Poverty." George Fleming finds that the chief deficiency in women is " the feminine in- capacity or radical disinclination (the word matters little) for serious, concentrated, and continuous thought,"—which, however, would hardly have been the deficiency we should have attributed to George Eliot, or Mrs. Browning, or Harriet Martineau. And
Mr. H. Arthur Smith replies in a really brilliant paper to Mr. Grant Allen's curious challenge on behalf of the Celt v. the Teuton.
Mr. Henley's little poem is certainly one of the poorest of his that we have read. On the whole, however, the number seems to us decidedly attractive.
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