a Desert Isle; his journey in the wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Allan Breck Stewart, and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour, of Shaws, falsely so called." It is, in fact, as

gentlemanly and entertaining a book of adventure as could well be written, and is intended, perhaps, particularly for boys. It is worth notice, in passing, that Mr. Stevenson, or his publishers, decline to be led into the unpleasant dictionary spelling, "kidnaped."

THE new president of Yale College, in his recent inaugural address, said that it would be his policy to develop the college into a university, largely by drawing together the different affiliated schools into more organic relations. President Holden, in his inaugural address at Berkeley last June, expressed a like intention. The organic relations between the classical and literary college and the scientific and technical schools at Berkeley, are already as intimate as they could possibly be made-so intimate as even to create confusion between their really quite divergent functions and motives. But the affiliation of the special schools in the city-Law, Medicine, Pharmacy, and Dentistry-has been scarcely more than nominal. Since President Holden's arrival, several quiet steps have been taken, in such ways as the meeting of faculties, to draw the departments closer together; and the way having been thus prepared, a more obvious advance has been made in the establishment of matriculation requirements for the law school. The requirements are by no means severeabout the amount of preparation given by any high school; in fact, we believe they are the same as those asked for matriculation to the literary course at Berkeley-and even from this, concessions are to be made for a year or two in the matter of Latin. It impresses us as a very wise and reasonable arrangement. A college education cannot be exacted-ought not to be exacted-of every law student, wise though the custom is that exerts a moral influence in favor of it. But certainly it is not proper that young lads fresh from the grammar schools, or elder men who have not the enterprise to give themselves a preparation beyond that of a grammar school, should fill up the seats at lectures and examinations that should be adapted to mature and trained minds. An instructor can hardly make his lectures profitable to college-bred men unless he makes them unintelligible to schoolboys.

as high a one as our school now does. But in these older institutions the tradition in favor of college preparation for the study of law is usually so strong that the necessity of a matriculation has not been imperative. Here, however, the tradition was breaking down; only a small minority of the students were collegebred, and a very large number had the merest schoolboy education. The decree that this year cuts off such from the law school will save an enormous waste of time and boys, sending into respectable trades or other work many who were planning a short cut into a feeble attempt at professional life, and inducing others to continue their school days through the high school. The matriculation is to be at Berkeley, which will emphasize the status of the law school as a department of the university It places it, to be sure, somewhat in the position of an undergraduate department, but there will be many influences to remind the public that it is properly a post-graduate one. We hope and believe that we shall see similar reforms extending to the other special schools, removing the now existing danger of their being taken advantage of as refuges for the indolent.

Dr. Royce's "California."

TO THE EDITOR OF THE OVERLAND MONTHLY:

Your August number contains what seems to me an unjust criticism of Dr. Royce's "California," summed up in conclusion, that "both as literature and as history, it is, on the whole, a failure." Will you grant an admirer of that work space for a few lines of dissent ?

It is to the author's treatment of the Frémont episode that your critic chiefly objects, as follows: "He contrives, without any direct charges, to convey the idea that there was something discreditable in Frémont's purposes and doings, and that this character was in consequence of some private letter from Senator Benton to Frémont, which letter is not given, but only presumed. Whatever the character or actions of men, to imagine the contents of a private letter, and then base charges on them, is not the way to make attacks and write history."

multitude, and they cheered. He shook his head, and stroked back his gray locks, and gesticulated for silence; but they would not hear him, and continued to cheer.

Never before had San Francisco's favorite orator been received in that way. People had been accustomed to crowd around him, wherever he was to speak, by night or by day, eager to listen. But now not a word would they hear. He had been associated with others in the defense of Cora, the murderer, before the courts. Cora had been taken from the jail by the Vigilance Committee and hanged. And now the air rang with the continuous cry from many thousands of voices, and from all sides, "Cora!" "Cora!" "Cora!" "Cora!" and not one word would they hear from Colonel Baker.

At this moment a bright thought struck somebody

on the platform. The box was opened, and the large United States flag was brought out. At the sight of it the cheering rose higher. The flag was made fast to its cord, and began to rise. And as it rose, the cheering rose, too. But as it went home to its place at the top of the flag-staff, and the breeze filled out its shining folds, the fastening parted, and the flag came sailing gracefully down to the ground!

Then the cheering rose to a perfect roar, continuing without cessation, and Colonel Baker gave it up. The meeting dispersed. And the outside people went away, saying, "The United States flag refused to wave over such a crowd as that of the Law and Order party." From that time the back-bone of the opposition to the Vigilance Committee was broken. S. H. Willey.

BENICIA, August, 1886.

Studies in Shakspere.1

Here are thirteen "Studies." One, divided into three, is “On Reading Shakespeare"; four are entitled "Narrative Analysis"; four, "Miscellanies"; two, “Expositors." Like most Shakspereans (pray, what's the reason?) Grant White was always dogmatic, often intolerant, sometimes grievously unfair; but he is always incisive, always sincere, and sometimes eloquent. His great learning and his deep insight light up whatever dramatic subject he discusses, and often a profound or bright observation starts the reader on a train of fruitful thought. But he is too fond of paradox and of superlatives, too careless of the moral or immoral tendency of his exaggerations; as when he says, "Women thoroughly unchaste are often enchantingly modest; women chaste as shedragons are often ungraciously immodest.”

He assumes that a large part of one's leisure should be given to Shakspere. Doubtless the average reader might do worse. A few great works, thoroughly chewed and digested,” would be better food than that with which the omnivorous million gorge and stupefy themselves. But how to read Shakspere? White, without appearing aware of the fact, gives exactly the same advice that Sam Johnson gave in 1765, viz: to read rapidly at first, no matter in what order, the bare text for the story alone, skipping all difficulties, ignoring all comments and criticisms. "Don't read mine," he says of notes. After one, or better, two or three such hasty readings, he would have the reader begin a study of the plays in the order of 1 Studies in Shakspere. By Richard Grant White. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach.

Hamlet's Note-Book. By Wm. D. O'Connor, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach.

their production, making three periods, early, middle, and later; and he minutely marks out the course, with good reasons and suggestions interspersed-attending to the language, construction, thought, and feeling--a critical study, but "not wasting much time in beating one's head against difficulties." He advises to steer clear of Shakspere clubs, and shun editions that point out beauties in Shakspere. Especially must one avoid all German commentators. "Like the western diver," says White, "they go down deeper, and stay down longer than other critics, but like him too, come up muddier."

The four "Narrative Analyses" follow, and never have we seen the stories of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and As You Like It, more exquisitely told. Some of his running comments will startle. Of Lady Macbeth he says, "A woman without tenderness, and without the capacity of devotion, and withal, able, crafty, and ambitious, is the most unscrupulous and remorseless creature under the canopy of heaven"; of Macbeth, “He was weighted in the race of ambition with scruples, the heaviest of all clogs on those who make success the end and goal of all living"; of the witches, "It is possible that they were the disguised agents of a faction inimical to Duncan"; of Cassio, "Around him, the most admirable, the most lovable, and the most beautiful figure in the story, all its events revolve"; of Rosalind, “She had not only wit, which not a few women have, but humor, which is the possession of very few women indeed.” We note an occasional carelessness of construction; as, "He sought to win the affections of his brother's wife, she [sic] who was," etc.; or of fact, as in stating that the ghost in Hamlet on its appearance to Horatio, "neither spoke nor made a sign," whereas, "It lifted up its head," etc.

66

The four "Miscellanies "are all marked by White's dogmatism and his hyperboles, but also by his insight and his pungency; as "Rosalind, the most charming, the most captivating of all Shakespeare's women, one only, the peerless Imogene, excepted "; 'Cordelia, with all her gentle loveliness . . . had one great fault. . . pride"; "To give Lear's seamonster a name and a form, is to drag him down from the higher regions of poetry into the plain prose of natural history"; "Have we not the famous showman's assurance that hippopotamus is derived from hippo, a river, and potamus, a horse?" "Distrust the man whose peculiar faculty or chief desire is to make friends"; "Shakespeare meant Iago for a most attractive, popular, good-natured, charming, selfish, cold-blooded, and utterly unscrupulous scoundrel."

Under "Expositors," he takes up Dyce's (2d) edition of Shakspere, the Cambridge edition by Clarke & Wright, and Walker's "Critical Examination of the Text," but gives his chief attention, sixtythree pages, to Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon— spicy readings and sound criticism for the most part, but far too sweeping and savage. He points out many mistakes, but we know by experience that the Lexicon is nevertheless useful, and we are sure it needs but such a revision as Mr. Joseph Crosby or Mr. Wm. J. Rolfe might give, to make it, as Dr. Edward Dowden has already characterized it, "invaluable." We have reserved comment on White's "BaconShakespeare Craze," the first of the "Miscellanies," in order that we might consider it in connection with Mr. O'Connor's "Hamlet's Note-Book." The latter is a clever work of seventy-eight pages. It begins with a manly and eloquent condemnation of the injustice and cruelty sometimes wrought by critics in intercepting a book of signal merit, giving it a bad name in advance, hindering and perhaps absolutely preventing its recognition by the public. We sympathize with his angry disgust, and his disposition to have the whole reviewing system "blown into limbo," if such outrages are an essential feature of it. He shows that White's treatment of Mrs. Pott's "Promus of... Bacon " in the "Atlantic Monthly," now reprinted as "The Bacon-Shakespeare Craze," certain ly transcends the limits of courtesy, and probably did the lady a great wrong. Mr. O'Connor himself, we regret to say, loses his temper in his chivalrous championship of Mrs. Potts, and mars his interesting pages with violent vituperation of the dead reviewer. But he had great provocation, and on the question whether Bacon wrote the plays, he shows conclusively that many of the "Promus" jottings at which White jeers are not entirely irrelevant, and that oth

of Bacon and the work of any other writer." But does the conclusion follow? A scrap book may be many years a-making; the memoranda-parallels, resemblances, identities, peculiarities common to the Promus and the plays-might all have been noted down by Bacon, year after year, as he lighted on them. He had "taken all knowledge to be his province"; of course he would read the brightest dramas of the age, and might naturally jot down what seemed strikingly suggestive. Again, the Earl of Essex was the ardent friend of Bacon and of the Earl of Southampton, the latter being Shakspere's great friend and patron. What more probable than that Bacon and Shakspere should meet, and conversations ensue between them, like the supposed one charmingly given in Blackwood's Magazine some fifty years ago? Such interviews and mutual admiration might account for "the relations between the Promus and the plays."

Mr. O'Connor does not attempt to refute the argument drawn from the resemblances between the sonnets and the plays. Ignoring that argument, and attaching no importance to the inscription, Shakespeare's Sonnets, on the title-page, he propounds and ingeniously supports a new theory as to the authorship of the sonnets, viz: that W. H., "the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets," was Walter Raleigh! But the inference from resemblances is strong that the pen which wrote the one wrote the other. So Bacon wrote Shakspere's plays, and Raleigh wrote Shakspere's sonnets ! Pray, who wrote Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and his Rape of Lucrece"? Henry Wriothesley? Would Mr. O'Connor have Shakspere say to Bacon as to the plays, and to Raleigh as to the sonnets, what he says to Wriothesley as to the two too youthful poems, "What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted, yours"? Let us, since it is the fashion, propound a more reasonable theory-one which will reconcile all differAs Mæcenas, by his encouragement and patronage, was the begetter of certain brilliant odes of Horace; and as Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lord Grey were similarly begetters of some of Spenser's poems; and as the Quaker Elwood was the begetter of "Paradise Regained," "For you put it into my head while at Chalfont," says Milton to him; so Raleigh, perchance at the Mermaid Club of his own founding, might, by encouragement and patronage, have started Shakspere in his work of writing sonnets, and so been rightfully called the "begetter" of them. Other sonnets, some, perhaps, written for Southampton, some for the Earl of Pembroke, some for "William Himself," might naturally enough be grouped with them for publication in 1609. Mr. O'Connor asserts that Raleigh was capable of writing the sonnets, for he wrote the "Soul's Errand.' But the sonnets are vastly superior, and there is no certainty as to the authorship of the "Soul's Errand."

ences.

Mr. O'Connor easily refutes White's denial of humor and poetic imagination to Bacon. What Bacon

lacked was sentiment and fire. Mr. O'Connor believes all the wretched traditions. He ridicules the Stratford bust as that of "a fat fellow, sturdy, comely, fresh-colored, blobber-cheeked, no neck, a mouth full of tongue, a ten-per-center's forehead, the funniest perky little nose, a length of upper lip which is a deformity," etc. Alas for Beecher and Ingersoll, whom the first half-dozen items describe ! The tongue could, at least, speak for itself, if we may believe old Fuller; the forehead was better than Goldsmith's, the nose than that of Socrates, the upper lip not longer than Scott's. "He brought his children up in complete ignorance," says Mr. O'Connor. But the epitaph on his daughter Susanna, whom he made joint-executor of his will, reads " "Witty above her sex. . . . Something of Shakespeare was in that " ! "He had no books," says Mr. O'Connor; "because he mentions none in his will!" For a like reason, some future essayist will deny that Goldwin Smith ever owned a volume, the professor having given his whole library to Cornell University. "All the rest of my goods, chattels," etc., may cover a library. So reads Shakspere's will. "He died of a fever, the result of a drunken orgy at Stratford with some congenial toss-pots," says Mr. O'Connor. It is Vicar Ward that told this story scores of years after Shakspere's death, and the precise words are, “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry-meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever then contracted." So the "toss-pots" were two: one, the learned and gifted Drayton, afterwards poet-laureate; and the other, Bacon's warm friend Jonson, to whom, says Mr. O'Connor, Bacon entrusted all his secrets! Mr. O'Connor quotes Jonson as saying that Bacon "hath filled all numbers"; but the context shows that he is speaking of eloquence rather than poetry. Mr. O'Connor stoutly affirms that Jonson knew all about Bacon, and was in all his secrets. Well, nobody doubts Jonson's intimacy with Shakspere, and here is a little of what he says of Shakspere, not Bacon, in his "Discoveries ": "I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any." Stout Ben would not, as others did, idolize any man. Again, Ben says of

him:

"While I confess thy writings to be such,

As neither man nor muse can praise too much." Of Shakspere's wit, Ben writes under one of the portraits:

"Oh, could he [the engraver] but have drawn his wit, As well in brass as he hath hit

His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass."

From the encomium written by Jonson and prefixed to the first folio edition of the plays, every reader will recall the following among kindred lines addressed to Shakspere :

'He was not of an age, but for all time!"

Now will Mr. O'Connor tell us which writer, Bacon or Shakspere, Ben Jonson was writing about so enthusiastically in all these and many similar verses? If Bacon, how dared Ben tell him he had "small Latin and less Greek"? If Shakspere, how dared he and why should he, in 1623, exaggerate so outrageously the wit, the art, and the genius of Mr. O'Connor's "fat fellow," the 66 blobberchecked," bookless, drunken "toss-pot," seven years dead?

Madame Roland.1

THE commendation of this little volume is, that it is written in a pleasant, readable style, by a person who had acquired a good knowledge of the leading causes and circumstances of the French Revolution, who had imbibed the spirit of its advocates and promoters, and admires the subject of her writing, whom she designates as the Inspirer and "Heroine of the Revolution-the Gironde." The fault of it seems to be, that she takes for granted in the reader an almost equal familiarity with the details which would appear to be the very things to be set down in a biography. The impression upon the reader is that the chief object of the writer is to make a readable book, as if the style of the presentation was of greater importance than the accumulation of all the facts obtainable about the subject of the volume. We conceive, however, that the biography of Madame Roland will be that which will present more fully and particularly a narration of facts in a plain and simple form of narrative, rather than in that of this volume which too frequently attempts to copy the French style of narration, with its abrupt antitheses and startling conclusions.

Madame Roland was born in 1754, the year of the birth of Louis XVI. "She was never taught to read, but had mastered that accomplishment at the mature age of four." So states the author, and the phrasing A little after she was seven years appears French. old she was "deeply versed in the Bible, as well as in the Psalter." At nine, "Plutarch became a landmark in the life of Manon Phlipon (the maiden name of Madame Roland). She carried the volume about with her everywhere; she absorbed its contents; she took it to church with her. This was in Lent, 1763, when she was barely nine. Without knowing it, she became a Republican, and would often weep at not being a native of Sparta or of Rome. Henceforth Manon was ripe for the Revolution." Ripe at nine! But pretty soon she took

1 Madame Roland. By Mathilde Blind. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Strickland & Pierson.