ground, they saw the Duc de Morny start the Watteau craze, they saw the Louvre restore La Tour, Fragonard, and Chardin to places of honor, they saw, in short, the apotheosis in the public taste of that eighteenth century of which they had meanwhile become the elegant and exact historians. As they were precursors in fiction, so they have been precursors in artistic taste. After passing through a period of furious discussion and ferocious criticism, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt are now acclaimed masters in the modern school of novelists, they are proclaimed indisputable authorities on the history of the eighteenth century, and no price is considered too high for the masterpieces of that art whose charm they were the first in this century to recognize. "L'Art du XVIIIème Siècle" of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt was originally published in eleven parts, containing simple critical biographies of Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, La Tour, Greuze, Fragonard, Prud'hon, Debucourt, the St. Aubins, Gravelot, Eisen, Moreau, and Cochin, illustrated by eau-fortes of Jules de Goncourt (Paris, 1850-70). Only two hundred copies were printed of this edition, which has become a bibliographic rarity and fetches four hundred or five hundred francs when a copy happens to appear in a sale. Since the death of his brother, M. Edmond de Goncourt has continued working at this history of the art of the eighteenth century, the success of which is proved by the fact that this year the third and final edition of the work has appeared in two forms,-an édition de luxe (2 vols. 4to), with seventy plates, and a cheap edition in three 12mo yellowcovered volumes, containing the complete text of the work. The plan of "L'Art du XVIIIème Siècle" is now a biographical and critical study of each artist, accompanied by notes and documents and a catalogue of the artist's work. The present edition is peculiarly rich in unpublished documents, letters, notes, and details of all kinds collected from the varied débris of the past, that contain so many precious facts for those who know how to interrogate them. Each chapter, besides being a biography and a criticism, is a page of the life of the eighteenth century. Like the century itself, the art is coquettish, libertine, witty; its ideal was prettiness, its function was to adorn the "petites maisons" of the grand seigneurs and the boudoirs of the lovely marquises. Take Watteau, for instance, "that great master who," as Théophile Gautier says, "created a new aspect of art and saw nature through a prism peculiarly his own." Watteau has a drawing, a color, types, and a kind of composition of his own. He is original. His work is graceful, elegant, and easy, and his art is serious, if his subjects seem frivolous. Concerts, balls, gallant conversations, hunting-rendezvous, Decamerons in fine parks laid out by Le Votre, Mezzetins serenading Isabelles, Columbines finicking with their fans, pleasure - parties, "bergerades," everything smiling and amiable that imagination could invent, such are the subjects of Watteau. When we look at these pictures, so gay, so bright, so witty, with their ethereal blue distances, we could imagine Watteau to have been a man of joyous humor and happy life. M. de Goncourt, on the contrary, tells us that he was a valetudinarian, a melancholic, who saw everything gloomily. Boucher, a true artist in temperament, without ever being unworthy of himself, squandered his talent in a terrible fashion during his long career. He painted ceilings, panels, portraits, mythological pieces, scenes for the opera, models for tapestry; he decorated clavecins, screens, sedanchairs, gala coaches. He was the idol of a century that preferred prettiness to beauty, piquancy to style, and wit before everything. But what an insight we get into the life of the century in studying the life and work of such a man! How amusing it is to follow St. Aubin in his incessant promenades, sketch-book in hand, to every hole and corner of Paris! What more curious commentary could we find on Rousseau and Diderot than the sentimental and liber tine moralist Greuze, that painter who excels in depicting woman in her first bloom, the opening rose-bud, the passage from childhood to girlhood? What more sincere and scrupulously honest representation of the calm middle-class life of the eighteenth century than the paintings of Chardin ? For in these different masters we find the expression of all the different phases of the ante - Revolutionary period. Besides the painters of the fêtes galantes, besides the vignettists and illustrators of the elegant frivolity and charming corruption of the age, there are the portraitists, like La Tour and Chardin, Chardin one of the greatest of French painters, La Tour ce peintre de la physionomie française," there are the Moreaus and Debucourts, who have engraved the manners and costumes of their epoch; there is Prud'hon, enamoured of the ideal, the creator of a new grace and of a new beauty. All these masters have a marked individuality, qualities of observation and of execution, and a distinct faculty by which they convey to us a kind of pleasure which no others can give. They are not masters of the calibre of Rubens or of Michael Angelo, but in virtue of their individuality they, too, have their place in the history of art and in the resources of general culture; and it is for those who feel their charm strongly to interpret it to us. This is the task which M. Edmond de Goncourt has undertaken, and which he has been able to accomplish with singular success, thanks to a peculiarly happy artistic temperament, a temperament of excessive refinement and acute impressionability. "L'Art du XVIIIème Siècle," in its complete form, is a model of æsthetic criticism and of exact and full statement of facts. T. C. LITERATURE "Military Life in Italy." Sketches by Edmondo de Amicis. Translated by Wilhelmina W. Cady. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. IT was in LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE, if we are not mistaken, that the name of Edmondo de Amicis was first mentioned to American readers. In an article in the June number of 1877 Mrs. H. M. Benson described the literary début of the young soldier in 1869, told of his success, of his subsequent journeys to Holland, Spain, and Morocco, and the brilliant word-pictures in which they were recorded, and ended by giving, as an example of his manner, an outline of the touching story of Carmela, from his first book, "La Vita militare," of which a translation in full is now before us. That the writings of Amicis have found some acceptance in this country is proved by the fact that within the last two or three years his entire works, with one or two exceptions, have been issued here in translation, a compliment seldom paid OF THE with such promptitude to a writer of his stamp. Gautier has been coming to us piecemeal for years, while a complete and adequate set of Tourguénef in English is a boon we hardly dare look for. Meanwhile, we are glad to have such books as these of Amicis while the bloom of freshness is still on them, and we can enjoy their thorough modernité as well as their more enduring qualities. By an arrangement which suggests the complications of drawing on the block, the order of Amicis's works has been reversed in the translation, so that we have had the last first and the first last. We read first the "Studies of Paris," a book which brought a certain air of youth and freshness to a worn theme, but gave no idea of the warmth and energy which lay in the author's earlier work. The volume on Spain - above all, the Morocco-revealed all the brilliancy of his genius, his quick susceptibility to impressions, his remarkable power of seizing the color and movement of a scene and painting it in words with an effect almost similar to that of actual brush-work. Now comes his first book, to show that the enthusiastic traveller in Spain and Morocco, the youngest visitor at Paris, had a still earlier youth; that the impressions made by daily associations and surroundings were as keen and deep as those made by new and unfamiliar scenes. Amicis's exuberant vitality and power of enjoyment are as apparent in the sketches as in the travels, and his sympathy is almost painful in its intensity in touching upon some common pathos of soldier-life in his own country. Side by side with the picturesque features of his writing is a rare mobility and delicacy in the portrayal of feeling, which we are tempted to describe in the language of acting, as, to give any idea of his descriptions, one must characterize them in that of painting. It is the Italian dramatic power expressed in writing with an almost histrionic vividness. scribing the visit of the captain to an old man whose son has been killed in his regiment, the theme becomes heroic and is treated with a certain largeness. We have spoken of Amicis as a modern writer; but the man who can make such feelings the subject of his art draws his material from a different store-house from those frequented by most younger writers of the day, however he may resemble them in manner or technique. With only a translation at hand, it is impossible to ready.compare his style with theirs,-with that of Daudet, for example; but even from second-hand evidence it is plain that Amicis's style, which is said to reflect the colloquial Italian of his time, can be wanting neither in mobility nor crispness. A book like this, coming from the very school of Italian patriotism, from the army of Young Italy, is no unworthy firstling of the new Italian literature. It has both youth and vitality, and is marked by a moderation of tone hardly to be looked for in the ardent enthusiast of a new liberty and the advocate of a military system. There is not a trace of the boastful patriotism so common in Southern countries, nor of the arrogant tone which the German military rule has imposed upon its soldiers and civilians. In fact, these sketches are so thoroughly Italian in setting, and written moreover with such delicacy of touch, that it is difficult even to give any suggestion of them, much more to do them justice in a short review. The author's impressibility appears, judging from some of his studies, to be a national as well as an individual trait. The Italian soldier of the book, with his susceptibility to ridicule, his quick temper and warm impulses, would seem to be at a long remove from the ideal of stolidity set up by the British soldier. A sentinel is almost beside himself with fury at being called a Croat; a slur upon the army brings a quick flush to the face of a passing officer and leads at once to a duel. The same sensitiveness is shown throughout, and we can count the pulse of the peasant soldier who is depicted in one of the sketches waiting at the barrack for a visit from his old mother. One of the most exquisite things in the book is "The Disabled Soldier," in which we have all the perplexities and emotions of a returning soldier, who has refrained from writing to his friends of the loss of a leg for fear of grieving them, and on the way home is tortured with apprehensions in regard to the effect upon his parents and sweetheart of his sudden appearance in a maimed condition. A certain homeliness of tone pervades most of the sketches, taken as they are from the every-day life of the soldier; but here and there, as in the powerful pages de "The Modern Hagar. A Drama." By Charles W. Clay. (The Kaaterskill Series.) New York: George W. Harlan & Co. A CERTAIN breadth of scope about "The Modern Hagar," and an apparent easy handling of national and social questions of the epoch when conflicting ideas were fermenting and developing and massing men into two great brotherhoods, make it a book to be read. The author, whose pseudonyme may conceal her personality but not her sex, writes at blood-heat. She does not criticise her men and women from æsthetic stand - points, cares little for dilettantism: everything with her is sheer deadly earnest. Her good people (and she is no pessimist, most of her dramatis person being of the noblest) take heroic proportions, while her bad people assume a lurid and terrible aspect. She writes at times with the stimulus of a journalist who feels the stir of voices and whispers buzzing comment and conjecture, the movement hither and thither just before action, the vivid color and a superadded thrill of excitement over what is announced as an approaching catastrophe. This contin ual state of expectation is followed, however, by a feeling of unfulfilment and disappointment. Although called a drama, the story is in no sense dramatic, even if melodramatic at times: most of the action is narrated by spectators; the slow dénouement is encumbered by bad contrivances, and the final catastrophe is excessively painful and bears no relation to the actual plot. The readers of "Baby Rue," of which this book is a continuation, are supposed to be well acquainted with the characters, who appear upon the scene with the assured air of old acquaintances. But when, after recognizing the more obvious of these noble Virginians, one is confronted with phantasmal "Esmonds" and 66 Warringtons" and "Castlewood" burned down by the Union troops during the war, one grows a little sceptical and cold. Thackeray's pied à terre in the Old Dominion we hold too sacred to be invaded by other novelists. a The title of the novel indicates the intention of the story. A mere episode in "Baby Rue" becomes the influence powerful for evil upon many lives. Major Hartley, after marrying a young and proud woman, thrusts out the poor Hagar, whose child, however, he keeps. The depth of the young wife's impression of her own wrong makes it at first a motive for concealing her injury from the world. She grows, nevertheless, to learn that her fealty to her own ties and obligations rests on injustice and cruelty, and the logic of the story is frankly against any apologetic philosophy on the part of a wife. This main thread is closely interlinked with the continued story of Rue Leszinksy, who grows to womanhood in these two volumes and plays a princess-like rôle with an army of devoted followers. Her character possesses charm and piquancy, the contrasting sweetness and imperiousness investing her with a fascination which rouses chivalrous sentiments. Many situations and episodes in the book are left almost wholly without elucidation, giving the reader a consciousness of dimly-understood facts, of which Rue's engagement to Bradnor is a notable instance, The villain of the story, Major Hartley, is afforded a long opportunity to surmount and thrust down whatever opposes him; and when a losing destiny at last overtakes him, there seems no reason why his victims should not speedily be released from the tangles of the black morass into which he had led them. IF the present is not an age of great poetry, it is at least one in which the art of versification is not suffered to die out. The English bards of the day seem to exist as a society for the preservation of this art, rather than as a school of poetry properly so called. They are "skilled in legendary lore" and in antique modes of thought; they are learned in all the forms which verse has assumed in past ages, and can reproduce these forms at will, with flawless accuracy and fine sense of melody. They may be said to strew the path of learning with flowers, and find "roots of relish sweet" through laborious study into Greek roots. Their archæology is understood to be unimpeachably correct; their classicism is of the true, not the false, variety, and their mediævalism may be relied on as the actual thing. When they mix the two, it is with deliberate purpose. It may be doubted, however, whether such a plan as that adopted by Mr. Lang, of using archaic words for the interpretation of Greek subjects, be anything more than a scholarly fancy. It is based, of course, upon a certain analogy between Greek and early English habits of thought, but it is an analogy which never becomes affinity; and to readers who have not followed up such points of resemblance, old English words are associated with a totally different set of ideas and carry the mind away from the Greek scenes. On the other hand, an author who should keep strictly to classical forms would only hamper himself with all the diffi culties and limitations of translation, with the danger of an equal bareness as the result. The charm of Mr. Lang's poem lies in the utter absence of stiffness, in the melodious flow of the verse, the various modern beauties, and, still oftener, prettinesses of expression, joined to a scene and action in which classical models are kept always in view. The ethical idea of the poem, on the other hand, is wholly a product of modern fancy,-a contradiction rather than a reflection of ancient thought. It is a new and dainty version of the too numerous experiences of Helen to represent her as borne by Venus from one happy, innocent life to another, the breach between being healed by sleep and forgetfulness. The whole effect of the poem, with its scholarly tone, its delicate, finished beauty, is that of a classical subject finely executed by a modern hand on French porcelain. There is the recollection of the antique mythology, together with a hint or suggestion of modern nymphs and naiads. A dash of coquetry is infused into the beauty of Venus, and piquancy and grace take the place of her divinity. In "Helen of Troy" we have an admirable imitation of Homeric detail and Homeric epithet, an exquisite understanding of English verse, in fact, a very excellent imitation of poetry. "The Hill of Stones" is not so bare of beauty as its title, being a pleasantlyversified fairy-tale of the Tennysonian order. Nothing, however, in Dr. Mitchell's little volume of verse pleases us so much as his "Camp-Fire Lyrics," which are reprinted from LIPPINCOTT's, where they originally appeared under a nom-deguerre. In these briefly-worded, fantastic little poems, Dr. Mitchell has given some vivid glimpses of forest-scenery, accompanied by a vein of clever, intellectual, rather Heinesque sentiment. His verse has the true forest ring to our perception, although it does not pretend to be the work of a rustic or professed bard of nature, but is written from the point of view, which will probably be that of his readers, of a summer visitant glad of a holiday in the wildest nook attainable. "Elk County" and "The Marsh" appear to be stragglers from the camp-fire, and show the same characteristics. The free, swinging measure of Dr. Mitchell's metre is admirably in keeping with his subjects; but we question whether a poem composed in a sort of nine-syllable blank verse can be properly called a lyric. Mr. Nichols's poem on "Monte Rosa" is at once epic, scientific, and philosophic, but it is above all figurative. In this respect the author has outstripped the Orientals. At whatever page we open, we find his mountain studded with more epithets than the Arab imagination ever devised to bestow upon the lion. "Cloud-capped Wetterhorn's cathedral pile" is a "source of perennial streams," -a use to which a cathedral pile could only be put by a miraculous supply of holy water. Mr. Nichols's verse moves entirely by means of figures gathered from all sources, ancient mythology and modern science having contributed equally with all trades and objects of nature. "Gravitation, like a guardian nurse," lets down the "lengthened steps" of the hunters descending the mountain at sunset, and a moment later the soft-footed Hours Bring home the doughty mountaineers, unslain. If they were uninjured as well as alive, they could, one would think, have walked home; though no doubt it would be grateful to the fatigued frames of doughty mountaineers if they could all be carried to their firesides and suppers. On the whole, we must regard this production as one of many proofs that science and poetry do not mix well. Personification of the forces of nature makes a very odd accompaniment to the latest theories in geology and physics. One who has learned to regard a glacier as "a flowing solid of translucent ice" should leave it to people not so well informed to describe it as a monster vast and vague," "a Protean changeling," an "unwilling Python," a maniac rout of grave-yard ghosts," and "an eerie throng of goblins, phantoms, weirds [?].” 66 66 Mr. Armstrong's "Garland" is culled from stories of ancient and modern Greece, and is intended to show the possibilities which lie in the latter, as well as to protest against its being regarded as a hopelessly degenerate offspring of His enthusiasm is the great Hellas. duly tempered by restraint; he tells a story in rhyme with a good deal of vividness, and his verse is always cultivated and thoughtful. We have read his poems with the interest with which we would peruse the prose of an intelligent and well-informed traveller,-that is to say, we have read them with pleasure, but hardly with the sort of pleasure which poetry is expected to call forth. fault may lie in our own lack of imagination, or it may be that, with all its The |