ELEGANT EXTRACTS.*
IT is always interesting to see an English anthology made by a foreign hand. Dr. Valgimigli, who has taught Italian at Manchester for many years, shows his wide knowledge and catholic sympathy in this collection which ranges in prose from Defoe and Addison to Gissing and the late Stanley Houghton's comedy The Dear Departed, and in poetry from Pope's " Man of Ross " to Francis Thompson's " Orient Ode." We must confess to some surprise at finding Mrs. Humans sandwiched between Keats and Shelley; Tennyson is only represented by one piece. while Whittier and Walt Whitman, whom we need not scruple to annex, have each two pieces. Among the prose extracts is a fragment from Jowett's translation of the Republic, with another page from his letters— a remarkable tribute to the Master which few English anthologists would have thought of paying. It is curious that the extract from Walter Pater's essay on Lionardo should not contain the famous passage about La Gioconda, beginning :- " The presence that time rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastio reveries and exquisite passions. Set A for a moment beside one of these white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of anti- quity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed !"
Now that is an "elegant extract," about a world-renowned Italian masterpiece, which Dr. Valgimigli really ought not to have missed. The countrymen of D'Aniumzio would appreciate Pater's haunting rhythms and subtle conceits.
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