GLIMPSES OF THREE NATIONS.
Glimpses of Three Nations. By the late G. W. Steevens. ( W. Blackwood and Sons. 6s.)—In these collected sketches of London, Paris, and modern Germany the work of the late G. W. Steevens shows the same minute and searching observation, and the same power of summing up a situation in a phrase, that are so brilliantly displayed in "In India" and "Things Seen." His sketch of London is naturally incomplete,—a mere fragment of the magnum opus, "an account of modern London in its various and contra- dictory aspects," which he was intending to write when cut off
by an untimely death at Ladysmith. The reader will wish that it could have been completed. In the chapters on modern Germany, grouped under a title which seems unnecessarily melodramatic, the writer appears to the critic to have produced an excellent description of Prussia from the standpoint of a liberal and broad-minded Englishman ; but he has scarcely em- phasised sufficiently the marked distinction between North and South Germans, which makes the Bavarian so much pleasanter than the Prussian in ordinary social intercourse. Certain im- portant questions that are agitating the German Empire, such. for example, as the position of the Jews, the influence of the Roman Church in South Germany, and the great social changes threatened by the growth of a plutocracy, are scarcely touched. These omissions, however, were perhaps inevitable in a collection of brief impressionist sketches, and do not in the least detract from the excellence of a most interesting and readable book.
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