can be found in the well of pure American literature, and whether a complete history of American prose (including fiction) and poetry might not easily be included in a volume at any rate no larger than this one. The question of what is literature should not be complicated with any provincial considerations that call upon the world's charity, or any others than the high and rigid standard by which the literature of other nations has been judged. The author of this volume himself perceives this, when in the course of his introductory chapter, which is a somewhat complacent perspective of his subject, he writes: "If we think of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, the seventeenth century choir of lyrists, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Swift, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, and the eighteenth century novelists, what shall we say of the intrinsic literary work of most of the books written on American soil by writers who inherited and shared the intellectual life of England?" A historian of literature must weigh every book to ascertain its intrinsic worth, and the questions of locality, or environment, or precedent conditions of civilization and enlightenment, should not influence the scales. The curious result of the work of the intellectual babes, who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries essayed to write history, or poetry, or touched dully and autocratically the loftier theme of theology, may be left with other valueless work to reward the search of antiquarians, but they should not waste the hours of critics or students seeking the work of men of matured minds, learning, and genius. Mr. Richardson has himself asked a question which he should not have forgotten in all his work: "What have American writers thus far done, worthy to be mentioned beside Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, George Eliot, and all the great writers of this and previous centuries?" But instead of holding to his own standard, as indicated in the two queries quoted, he lays the groundwork for apology for lack of accomplishment by a chapter upon what he calls the race elements in American literature, and goes back to the Mound-builders and the Indians, and what he calls aboriginal American literature and Indian character, and the infant utterances which are entitled specimens of Indian literature, with much profane history concerning the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England, a treatise upon the Puritan character, and the settlers in the various colonies of the Atlantic Coast. Then he gives under the head of "The New Environment of the Saxon Mind," an estimate of the religious and intellectual spirit and condition early and recent of the whole country North and South.

Scarcely anything in so-called literary work can

be more utterly valueless than the work of the early descriptive and theological writers of the first century and a half of the settlement of this country. The work of the former did not rise to the dignity of history, and the most pious readers look only briefly and with a smiling and pitying curiosity at the theological fulminations of those men of pious prominence, John Cotton, the Mathers, Jonathan Edwards, and their forgotten successors. Of all the books that figure in the history of those days, John Woolman's Journal alone has any right to ask any of our leisure, and then we for a moment give way, not so much for the intellectual treat, as for the right which a man of singular purity, sweetness, and serenity of soul has to our tenderest sympathies and kindest consideration. It was of the author of that Journal that Charles Lamb said: "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Dr. Channing "called the Journal beyond description the purest and sweetest autobiography in the language." There is apology enough for the fact that the first makers of books in this country were not contributors to literature, but we are not looking for excuses, but for litera

ture.

Benjamin Franklin is almost the only American writer of the eighteenth century whose works claim our attention to-day. Not to appear to slight the fathers of the republic, Mr. Richardson makes a chapter upon Political Literature, which title is a trifle incongruous, politics and literature, in the intellectual history of this ambitious world, ordinarily being very wide apart. We do not willingly make room in literary niches for the builders of the nation, the makers of the Constitution. They worked in fields but little literary, and having our admiration for the splendid work they did, claim no place among the makers of literature. So we do not read, save as a part of constitutional history, the writings or speeches of Samuel Adams, or James Otis, or Josiah Quincy, Jr., or Patrick Henry, or Thomas Jefferson, or the writers of the Federalist, or the several orators and statesmen, who, from the beginning to yesterday, have figured in our political history. The rule may have its exceptions in the works of such as Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, and Edward Everett, masters of English, and teachers of eloquence.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the first to claim from Englishmen the right to their attention, and under a critical estimate of his writings, "The Sketch-book" is his card of admission among the Immortals; in which book are his essays, which were his best work, and the stories of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which will never die from our literature. After a

It

chapter upon Irving, Mr. Richardson brings us among the ministers again, and — with that respect which is eminently due to them all, the Unitarians, (who more than any fostered literature,) the Andover theologians, the Beechers, Doctor Hodge, Horace Bushnell, Theodore Parker and the rest-they were makers of books and pamphlets, most of which lovers of literature only will never know, or will speedily forget. And with all proper patriotic pride, it seems to us that we might modestly forbear to claim much, if any consideration, as a nation of philosophers, for we cannot help thinking that rather as orthodox theologians than as pure philosophers will be remembered, if they are long remembered, the names that Mr. Richardson endeavors to cherish, Dr. L. P. Hickok, Mark Hopkins, Noah Porter, and Doctor James McCosh. certainly seems a little hard to the ordinary layman that he must read more than half through this volume, before he can part company with the preachers, who as lovely as many of them are, contribute so little to what is considered literature. But we finally come to the essayists and critics, the historians, and those who, in the classification of this volume, stand on the border lands of American literature. The Essayists - Emerson is there facile princeps. Following him are Longfellow, who was at first a writer of excellent and instructive essays, Edgar A. Poe, H. D. Thoreau, Dr. O. W. Holmes, Geo. W. Curtis, John Burroughs, and (once much known, but to Mr. Richardson apparently wholly unknown) Henry T. Tuckerman, and Henry Giles, who wrote of the characters of Shakespeare and "Illustrations of Genius." First among living American Essayists is James Russell Lowell. E. P. Whipple long held an honorable place, but far above him Edmund Clarence Stedman.

America seems richer in historians than in students of almost any other field, and has a right to be proud of such names as Bancroft, Hildreth, Prescott, Motley, Palfrey, Parkman, and Ticknor. The specialists, scientists, philologists, grammarians, and humorists claim a chapter in Mr. Richardson's book, and considering the otherwise bulkiness of the volumes, it seems very generous in the author to give it up to them. Instructive and useful as they are, they are not makers of literature in any fair sense of the term. He places them in the border lands of literature, but if he was generous in letting them fill his space because they had a right to mention, he was not half generous enough, for there are many who, by the same token, have a right to battle against him for his failure to name them. Mr. Richardson has, apparently, a clear idea of what literature is, when he calls it " the written record of valuable thought, having other than merely practical purpose," and, says plainly enough,

that all books do not belong to literature. In the task of writing a history of American literature, however, he has found it impossible to subject himself to his own theory, and has made a gigantic undertaking of what, by an absolute rule of criticism, is one of by no means large measurement. He would have been helped in his labor if he had kept in mind Doctor Johnsor's test, uttered in his preface to Shakespeare: "He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit," or that plainer limitation conveyed in the common understanding of literature, as that which is read by intelligent people, and is worth reading, outside of the curriculum of instruction. Mindful that he has reserved the novelists and poets for the second volume, the remaining harvest of literature is gathered from the Essayists, Philosophers, Critics, and Historians. Are there more than half a dozen of either class that have a certain place in American literature? That allowance would be over-generous to most of them. The writer's critical sense does at times stimulate his independence of judgment to protesting against the need of discussing works that in earlier days tickled our provincial pride. A keener sense of literary worth would have excluded the other large multitude, whose works, he well enough knows,are not now read by intelligent people with pleasure, and never will be read again. From this we may conjecture the charities of his second volume, which he promises for another year. A conscientious answer to his own query quoted above will lessen his labors as a historian and critic, and later will abridge his two volumes into a single volume of lesser bulk than this

Talks about Law' is a plain and interesting statement of so much of the law as every man and woman ought to know. It touches almost every topic of interest to people who have property, or who are engaged in any occupation that makes their rights a matter of interest to themselves. It will not make a lawyer of any one, but it will clear every one's mind of those endless and various vague ideas that cling to most persons, who run from a law book as from a Chinese puzzle. The style is agreeable. It is not so weighty with learning as to be burdensome to read, nor forbidding by reason of citations. It has no page without some facts worth knowing, and if the principles are a little dry, they are made agreeable by some illustration or application. It is divided into forty-three chapters upon different topics, giving not too much upon any topic to weary the reade It is good to win the attention of the student, and pleasant to refresh the mind of the lawyer.

'Talks about Law: a popular statement of what our law is and how it is administered. By Edmund P. Dole. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1881.

TORII OR ENTRANCE TO SHINTO TEMPLE AT NIKKO, JAPAN

Though Japan is on the whole as yet partly secluded, enough can be seen by foreigners visiting it to gain a good idea of the interior, as a peculiar feature is that one town or hamlet, is so much like every other, that if you have seen a few you know the main features of all. The seven treaty ports open to foreigners are Yokohama, Tôkyo, Kobe, Osaka, Nagasiki, Niigata, and Hakodate. In all but the last two of these Western civilization has crowded upon Orientalism and destroyed much of the native charm of Japanese life. A Japanese who looks dignified in his loose national costume loses much of that dignity in the unbecoming European garb. Japan transformed by its whole population's adopting the conventional dress of the West would be Japan stripped of all its poesy, all its picturesqueness. It would, however, take centuries to bring about such a change and it is to be hoped that it will never occur.

One of the most striking traits of the

Japanese, especially away from treaty ports, is their simple heartedness and childlike manner. Wherever you go, you meet with kindliest courtesy. The essential spirit of the Japanese is gentleness. I never in all my travels in Japan heard a voice raised in scolding, never saw a quarrel or fight; little children and young boys and girls at play are always smiling, romping, and shouting, evidently amusing themselves royally-but angry words or gestures I have never met with.

The children are a great feature of Japanese life. They swarm everywhere; the houses are full of them, the streets overflow with them. They seem a blessing vouchsafed in a peculiar degree to the Japanese. Little tots hardly able to walk themselves carry, fastened to their backs, tiny infants, for whose heads I often trembled, as they are allowed to hang down in such a fashion as to seem on the point of breaking off any minute. The rising generation of Japan seems