6 FEBRUARY 1892, Page 25

The Atlantic Monthly threatens to become painfully conventional, although it

contains as large an amount of literary matter as ever. There are only two notably good things in the February number— Mr. Nathaniel Shaler's " The Border State Men of the Civil War " and Mr. A. M. Ewell's "An Echo of Battle," a pathetic story of the Spartanism of a plain, hard Confederate woman.