7 MAY 1892, Page 26

CURRENT LITERATURE.

The new number of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine contains "The Golden Fleece," which is one of the pleasantest and most wholesome stories that Mr. Julian Hawthorne has published for a long time. There is in it a little of that eeriness, or other- worldliness, a love for which evidently runs in the Hawthorne blood, in the double character and life of Miriam Trednoke, who for a time, and while she is under the influence of the old Indian seer, Kamaiakan, is Semitzin, and on her mother's side an Aztecan Princess. But there is, happily, not enough of it to

injuriously affect the flow of a manly Anglo-Saxon story. Harvey Freeman, the susceptible civil engineer, who would, no doubt, have married and been quite happy with Grace Parsloe, had he not met Miriam, is an improved edition of the hero-villain of "Fortune's Fool." An equally excellent sketch is Grace, the flaw in whose character is her half-snobbish, and surely not at all American desire to conceal from the man who marries her, the fact that she had been an assistant in a dry-goods store. Altogether, the contents of the May Lippincott are admirable, and as varied as they are admirable. Louise Chandler Moulton contributes a short, obviously quite sincere, and eminently sympathetic sketch of Mr. J. M. Barrie. Perhaps it is not surprising that she should confess to being rather puzzled by the character of Babbie in "The Little Minister," and that she should be much touched with the pathos of the final passages in "A Window in Thrums."