• A Philosovher's Romance. By John Berwick. (Macmillan and Co.)—Mr.
Berwick's " Philosopher " is not after the model of Socrates, Plato, or Epictetus. He is an Anglo-Italian who has run through his fortune, and earns a livelihood in an Italian town by acting as a scribe for illiterate lovers, mending clothes and shoes, and other more or less kindred occupations. His philosophy consists in an imperturbable content with what he has, a whole- some power of forgetting the past, and a resolute refusal to look forward into the future. One winter things go badly with him, and at an acute stage of his distress he renders a small service to an English gentleman,—restoring to him a cap which the wind had blown off his head. Will he thank him as one gentleman thanks another, or will he pay him for the service ? Starving as he if!, he prefers the thanks, and that is the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and of the story which the Philosopher tells of Thomas Willoughby and Irido Mancini. Irid6, we must explain, is the daughter of a certain Baron, alias Moses Lazarik, against whom the Philosopher has vowed an undying vengeance. One part of this vengeance he gets amply, for he admirably out- 'wits the Baron in the matter of his daughter—nothing could be better in its way than the description of the finesse with which the Philosopher works out his plans—the other is stran gely baulked. Altogether, this is a charming story.
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