reader will find this delightful little book to be a small gift perhaps, but from the larger gods. All too seldom does it happen that a lecturer is at once literary, genial, witty, practical, full of insight, and gifted with the magic of personality. Professor Gilbert Murray, however, shows himself possessed of these traits in this the sixth memorial lecture in honor of the late Moncure D. Conway-American, Methodist minister, Unitarian minister, freethinker, philanthropist, cosmopolitan—a modern stoic whose memory may well be kept green in this lecture on Stoicism.

Take this as a sample of the author's power of clear-cut and simple yet eloquent interpretation: "Rank, riches, social distinction, health, pleasure, barriers of race or nation—what will those things matter before the tribunal of truth? Not a jot. Nothing but goodness is good. It is what you are that matters - what you yourself are; and all these things are not you. They are external, they depend not on you alone, but on other people. The thing that really matters depends on you, and on none but you. From this there flows a very important and surprising conclusion. You possess already, if you only really knew it, all that is worth desiring. The good is yours if you but will it. You need fear nothing. You are safe, inviolable, utterly free. A wicked man or an accident can cause you pain, break your leg, make you ill, but no earthly power can make you good or bad except yourself, and to be good or bad is the only thing that matters." What is goodness? "It is living or acting according to Phusis [Nature], working with Phusis [Evolution] in her eternal effort towards perfection. . . . Living according to nature . means living according to the spirit which makes the world grow and progress." Following this is a felicitous statement of the Stoic idea of Nature as a "law which is alive, which is itself life." [Compare Bergson.] But the Stoic 'Phusis' has more 'sense' than Bergson's élan vital, for Phusis is purposeful, “like a foreseeing, forethinking power-Providence."

But Nature is not all. It is but God's instrumental self: His essential Self wants coöperation from us. Say the Stoics: "God might have preferred chained slaves for his fellow-workers, but, as a matter of fact, he preferred free men." Play the Game! God "is not a fool to judge you by your mere success or failure.

Success or failure is a thing He can determine without stirring a hand. It hardly interests Him. What interests Him is the one thing which He cannot determine—the action of your free will and conscious will."

Professor Murray sums up Stoic religion in a phrase borrowed from Professor Edwyn Bevan: "A Friend behind phenomena !" Possibly a reviewer should sometimes reward his readers. If this idea be permissible, perhaps the reviewer may be pardoned for helping to perpetuate Professor Murray's illustration of antistoicism as shown in the celebrated "eighteenth-century lady's epitaph which ends: 'Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim, and of such is the

kingdom of heaven."" Let us (perhaps pharisaically) rejoice that the epitaph and the spirit that animated it were not "made in America"! THOMAS PEARCE BAILEY.

WHAT SHOULD I BELIEVE? AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATUre, Grounds AND VALUE OF THE FAITHS OF SCIENCE, SOCIETY, Morals and RELIGION. By George Trumbull Ladd. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1915. Pp. xiii +275.

Twenty-odd years ago President Stanley Hall, the celebrated encyclopædist of adolescence, reviewed one of Dr. Ladd's books; though admiring the solid scholarliness of the work, he complained of the heaviness of the style. And now we have this same Dr. Ladd writing philosophy for the man in the street! The last score of years, however, have seen the genial author in many lands, and have mellowed his style as well as his thought. Although occasionally he ventures on a trunkline sentence (on page 161, for example, there is a sentence of six-score words), his writing is always clear, often fitting, sometimes felicitous, never cheap. Even when he "quotes" slang for pedagogic purposes, as on pages 173, 175, 177, he dignifies the slang instead of degrading his thought. When we find him speaking (on page seven) of the "petty methods of the questionnaire or the psychological laboratory" (Stanley Hall's pet methods), we can imagine the veteran Ladd still unconsciously "hitting back."

This book is one of a series. Its predecessors have been: What Can I Know? and What Ought I To Do? A fourth book

is promised: What May I Hope? May we hope that Dr. Ladd will give us a little treatise on What Should I Admire ?-practical æsthetics.

Since the series is evidently meant to furnish some "Wisdom Literature" of philosophy for the intelligent cultured layman, we can best do justice to the book by setting down some of its choicest thoughts. Here are a few samples: "Choose your beliefs according to their harmonies with your total experience and with the experience of the wise of the race; and according to the reasonable satisfaction they afford to your own self and to the needs for the safe-conducting of the practical life" (p. 122). "Some men's knowledge are by no means so rational as other men's beliefs" (p. 149); "To get from Nature to Spirit . . . . we have only to get more deeply into nature" (p. 158); "Virtue is the realization by the actual and historical Self of an ideal selfhood" (p. 194); "Of course man makes his own gods and his own Alone God; . . . . man has no other way of perceiving or conceiving or imagining anything, than his own man-like' way" (p. 247).

When Dr. Ladd flings at pragmatism (p. 207), the judicious grieve to note his lumping together of pragmatists and Nietzscheans; one even suspects that patient, sympathetic, and generous analysis may find more sanity and idealism in Nietzsche than Dr. Ladd's othodox soul can discover.

That our author is not, however, dangerously orthodox, let this last quotation, gravely humorous, attest: "We are quite determinedly opposed to the conception so current and so seductive in unreflecting minds, which would have us regard the beliefs of religion as essentially to be taken in the form of 'pap' prepared by the 'Unknown' for sensitive nerves and weak digestions, rather than as strong meat fed from the divine hand to those who crave nourishment that shall fit them for the intellectual as well as moral struggles of the present life" (p. 221). William James would have enjoyed this thought, which represents some of us as being advanced from the spoon stage to the fork stage, without any handling of the fork by ourselves!

T. P. BAILEY.

SAPPHO IN LEVKAS AND OTHER POEMS. By William Alexander Percy. Yale University Press.

Mr. Percy, as a poet, loves best the woods of Sicily and Greece, but he learned to write poetry in the woods of Sewanee. It is a pleasure to record here the distinction which so loyal an alumnus has already won as a poet, and to mention some of the qualities of his Sappho in Levkas and Other Poems. The volume contains forty-two poems. Two of these are monologues of some length, ten are sonnets; the rest are odes, songs, and brief lyrics usually of a descriptive character. The poems deal with a diversity of subjects, ranging, for instance, from Sappho to St. Francis of Assissi, and they have apparently been written over a period of years. But through them all we see certain qualities

more or less constant: a fineness of tone and sentiment, a love of beauty especially perhaps of music and of color,- a delicate taste in the choice of words, a command of smooth and harmonious metre.

Many may find "St. Francis to the birds" the most winning and thoughtful poem in the work. But in its prevailing tone it is apart from most of the other poems. The dominant mood of the volume,—the mood which seems to find the most earnest and happy expression,-is one of gentle sorrow, of sweet and contemplative melancholy. The poet with a music-lover's heart delights in the song of the mocking-bird chanting the triumphal hymn of young America. But as he listens he thinks how much fairer yet is the song of the Sicilian nightingale,—“sharp with a hundred centuries of pain." April charms him, but he loves autumn better than the spring. Often he sings of love and joy in retrospect. In "Longing," "The Happy Isles," "Arcady Lost," he muses over bygone pleasures that once turned woods and isles. of earth to Paradise. Sappho, about to die, celebrates in "fragrant fiery song" the beauty and the wildness of her passion for that beloved one whose presence she has fled.

Certainly, except for "St. Francis to the Birds," this poet's "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." But if we are tempted to gauge the genius of the poet from this particular volume, we have to remember that these poems are only the first fruits. Fine as they are, they give promise of a yet larger achievement.

G. T.

THE HISTORY of English BALLADRY. BY Frank Egbert Bryant. Boston: The Gorham Press.

This is a collection of essays by the late Professor Bryant of the University of Kansas, whose untimely death cut short his work at the very beginning of his career. Though his study of the ballad is a mere preliminary historical sketch, extending through the reign of Elizabeth and designed as an introduction to a comprehensive work on the whole subject, it gives evidence of critical judgment and sound scholarship. It covers a field that has not been sufficiently investigated, and the results attained lead us to regret that Professor Bryant did not live to complete his original design. Besides the title essay, the volume contains an analysis of Lessing's theories in the Laocoon (a study which won the praise of German critics); "On the Conservation of Language in a New Country"; some comments on lines in Beowulf; a translation of the Thrymskwitha in alliterative form,- all papers exhibiting originality of thought and freshness of treatment.

THE HOME BOok of Verse FOR YOUNG FOLKS. Selected and arranged by Burton E. Stevenson. Decorations by Willy Pogany. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

This volume of more than five hundred pages, handsomely bound in blue and gold and artistically decorated by Pogany, contains four hundred and twenty-five verses and poems judiciously selected and skilfully arranged so as to suit the varying tastes of children from the nursery to the college. The poems are arranged in the following groups: In the Nursery, The Duty of Children, Rhymes of Childhood, Just Nonsense, Fairy Land, The Glad Evangel, The Wonderful World, Studies in Rhyme, My Country, The Happy Warrior, Life Lessons, A Garland of Gold. In the Index is given the date of birth and death of each author, and the list of authors extends from the time of Shakespeare to the preseut prehensive in its range and so choice of genuinely good verse, household.

day. Such a book, so comcomplete and thorough it its ought to find a place in every