cide between seeing him content with love-in-idleness, or giving him the poison by which he may give full scope to his best self, and she decides the problem very promptly. How she decides it the last page of the story explains. Doubleday, Page & Co.

Possibly if Sir W. H. Gilbert had never written "Bab Ballads," Mr. Thomas Ybarra would never have had the courage to indite such verses as those composing his "Davy Jones's Yarns and other Salted Songs," but in writing them he has not imitated either the English humorist or Mr. Guy Wetmore Carryl, hitherto the American author most resembling him. Sir W. H. Gilbert would hardly have written a story of finding an Icecreamberg, and selling it to the Swiss Admiral, or the tale of the Mince Pirates who escaped death from the deadly Swiss battle buns by the special intercession of Davy Jones because it was his birthday, for in each is an element of exaggeration purely American; but he will certainly rejoice in them, and in the story of the Davy Jones's battle equipment of kittens, a kitten in each pocket and a kitten in each hand, thirty-six lives besides his own. Ybarra may look forward to very great success in his chosen field; he is not commonplace; he is not eccentric; he does not mistake coarse rudeness for fun; he writes fun as fastidiously as he would indite a ballad to his mistress' eyebrow. Henry Holt & Co.

Mr.

Mr. H. G. Wells is an admirable brake on the fancy and the inaccuracy of English writing authors. When his countrymen and Americans gayly write and sing of novel inventions, and halffledged sciences, and picture them as causing great disturbance, but, after all, leaving little change in their track. he shows the same inventions and sciences in unchecked action, and compels

his readers to see that a new force is

no trifle. A score of authors, hundreds of journalists, have babbled of aerial fighting. His "The War in the Air" shows New York after receiving the assault of the German air fleet, and this is much; but he continues to show the effect of the spectacle upon a world desirous of conquest, and then inexorably demonstrates its further effect upon individual greed; the invention and employment of cheap individual flying machines, the collapse of civilization, the extinction of manufactures and arts, the reduction of man to the condition of his ancestor, the cavedweller; the reduction of his luxuries and comforts to the things which he can make with his own unaided, unskilled fingers. The book is a genuine warning, but no one is going to heed it. Meanwhile it is a piece of excellent writing, and abounds in thrills. The Macmillan Co.

Among the volumes of fiction included in the latest instalment of Everyman's. Library (E. P. Dutton & Co.) are George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss," for which Dr. Robertson Nicoll furnishes an appreciative introduction, partly biographical and partly critical; Alexandre Dumas's "Marguerite de Valois" or "La Reine Margot," one of the most dramatic and powerful of the great novelist's books, which depicts with a master's hand the tragic intrigues of the reign of Charles the Ninth; Charlotte M. Yonge's striking historical novel, "The Dove in the Eagle's Nest"; Thomas Love Peacock's well-nigh forgotten "Headlong Hall" and "Nightmare Abbey," with an Introduction, longer than usual, by the late Dr. Richard Garnett; John G. Edgar's thirteenth-century tale "Runnymede and Lincoln Fair"; Anne Manning's delightful "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," and its sequel, "Deborah's Diary," with their quaint and

intimate pictures of grim John Milton; Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination," with an introduction by Padraic Colum; Jules Verne's famous and bewildering tale "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"; and Florence Converse's romance of the England of Chaucer and Langland, "Long Will." Here is a variety which attests the broad scope of the Library.

S. MacNaughtan's "The Expensive Miss Du Cane" instantly challenges comparison with two other stories, Mr. F. J. Stimson's "In Cure of her Soul," and Miss Cecily Hamilton's "Diana of Dobson's," in which a poor girl, by lavish expenditure of money coming into her hands by chance, secures an opportunity to masquerade as a lily of the field, but it is much more agreeable than either of its predecessors. The American author found the substance of his story in real life, and it is said that Miss Hamilton was similarly fortunate; both of their heroines desired to shine in society to which they had no natural right to be admitted, and curiosity was the warmest sentiment which either of them could evoke. Miss Du Cane, apparently condemned by her widowed mother's foolish second marriage and chronic bad health to a life of obscure drudgery, contrives, by the help of an influential friend, to secure an annual respite of three months, during which she is a much desired and extremely well-dressed visitor at the houses of her friends, and spends every penny of her personal income. She is an altogether charming girl; gentle, unselfish, courteous, charitable, with a voice as beautiful as her face, and naturally Geoffrey Arkwright, who after some years of hard work has succeeded to a fortune large enough to support a bachelor, is much chagrined when he discovers that she is not the wealthy young person indicated by her dress and by her habits as far as he knows

them. He behaves according to his kind and she according to hers, and their friends the guests at a country house play chorus. The company is remarkable; each one a twentieth century type and none profligate. It is good to find a British writer who can believe in the possibility of such a group, and very good to note that his book is far more attractive than the scores which mimic the Lettered Elizabeth. E. P. Dutton & Co.

If Mr. Lauchlan Maclean Watt's "Attic and Elizabethan Tragedy" were shorn of its long translated and quoted passages its bulk would be greatly di minished and it might be more effective with those fully qualified to judge of its subject matter, but the presence of these passages opens the book to all readers of English, so ample are they and so well interpreted. The volume is about equally divided between its two topics, the two developments of the drama being conceived by the author to originate in similar circumstances, among races for the time at least resembling one another in passions, feelings and hopes and in the high subjects towards which their thoughts were turned. The tragedies of the Atreidæ, the Labdaci and of the Heracleida are taken in groups, and the few on miscellaneous topics are set in separate chapters. Shakespeare occupies nearly all the space allotted to the Elizabethans although Mr. Watt renders due homage to the pathetic shade of Marlowe, dead ere his prime, and sketches both Peele and Greene with feeling and taste. Summary the book has none, nor can it be thought to need any, for its subjects are sufficiently linked by the introduction, and the cursory verification of the principles therein enunciated is ample. Mr. Watt's translations or paraphrases, as he truly calls them, are great improvements on many accepted versions. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The courses of domestic and foreign affairs are more or less connected in every country, but nowhere so intimately as in the Dual Monarchy. Nearly all its peoples have their racial centre of gravity outside its frontiers. On every side external events may exercise the most vital internal effect. The transformation of Austria proper by the introduction of universal suffrage has been recognized. If it had been realized that as a matter of course these internal changes must exercise a strong and, perhaps, decisive influence upon external policy, the surprises of the last few weeks would have been received with less amazement. British public opinion, and even British policy, would have found themselves better prepared. Baron Aehrenthal's diplomatic antagonists might have riposted with a surer hand. Sufficient warning might well indeed have taken from Baron Aehrenthal's action in securing the right of direct railway communication from Salonika; from the vigor and obstinacy of his resistance to Sir Edward Grey's projects for Macedonian reform. These things, however, were regarded as the evidences of mere obstructiveness rather than as the serious signs that an innovating, an adventurous, and even an aggressive régime had been introduced at the Ballplatz. The internal distractions of Austria-Hungary, it was passively assumed, would still incapacitate that power for positive action abroad. The venerable maxim was repeated that from the Hapsburg point of view, even more unconditionally than from the British, peace must be regarded as the greatest of interests, and peace at any price must be maintained. However sweeping might be the triumph within the monarchy of the democratic spirit, it was held, in a word, that Austria-Hun

gary was condemned among the Great Powers to a rôle of compulsory conservatism. However unpalatable to the recipients might be the most maladroit of all the German Emperor's compliments, the policy of Vienna could never be more than "a brilliant second" to that of Berlin, and could not again play an initiating rôle in Europe. The events of a single week have swept away that assumption. Austria has shown that she can still act, and has dared to act with a vengeance.

The Dual Monarchy was supposed to be of all Powers the most anxiously concerned for the preservation of the status quo. It is Austria which has destroyed the diplomatic basis upon which that status reposed. Without the assurance of Austrian support Bulgaria would not have risked a daring coup. Then followed the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in repudiation not only of the general engagement to Europe by the Berlin Treaty, but of the pledges to Turkey contained in the secret clause of 1878, and repeated with less emphasis in the Convention of 1879. In preparing this action Baron Aehrenthal took certain Powers into his confidence, but not others. This country was conspicuously ignored. Not only So. Baron Aehrenthal's refusal to regard our signature to the Treaty of Berlin as a matter of practical importance is described by the organs of the Ballplatz as a deliberate blow at British influence. The AustroHungarian Minister must have been perfectly well aware that the Servian race already as effectually vivisected by the original occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as was Poland by the first partition-would be thrown into a perilous agitation which would not soon subside; that Montenegro and Crete would repudiate in their turn such