lished Thirty Years in New York Politics, is alluded to elsewhere in the present number of THE BOOKMAN. It is the immensely entertaining record of men and events connected with the administration of the city's affairs since the close of the War of Secession. The New Metropolis, a subscription book brought out early in January, is of interest chiefly on account of the many quaint prints and maps of early New York to be found between its covers.

The story of the older New York differs essentially from the story of the older London and of the older Paris in that a great part of it brings in the personal element. The London of Cromwell's time, the Paris which François Villon knew, are as remote from the London and the Paris of to-day as Babylon or Thebes. To reconstruct them is the work of the archæologian, a labour which involves the poring over of many old maps and musty documents and the reading of many books. On the other hand, the New Yorker of even the younger generation can point with a certain element of personal pride to what was part of the older New York; and the experience of a man like Mr. Dayton, who gave us The Last Days of Knickerbocker Life, or of Mr. Haswell, the author of Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the City of New York, covers what is practically the whole story of the city's development from a large village to a great cosmopolitan metropolis. And besides this, by reason of the rapidity with which New York has swept north

ward, there is added a certain delightful uncertainty as to the future. We read with huge amusement of the New Yorkers of the first decade of the century, who urged that inferior material be used in the construction of the City Hall on the ground that only a few suburbanites would ever look upon the edifice from a point north of Chambers Street. Who will venture to say that the last years of the twentieth century will not find New York's belles displaying their puffed sleeves and crinolines somewhere in the neighbourhood of Fishkill or PoughFishkill or Poughkeepsie?

It is this personal element that brings the history of the city so much nearer to the New Yorker than can ever be the

case with the great cities of the Old World. A brief newspaper paragraph announcing the death of some man who in former days played a part in municipal affairs, the tearing down of an old wall or structure, will spur the reminiscence of every citizen who knew or read of the man or the edifice at a time when they were occupying a prominent place in the city's life. This reminiscent spirit is seen at its best in the old Greenwich villager. He will become garrulous and remain so for hours in talking of the past glory of that quarter of crooked streets and quaint architecture. His face will glow with a light of precious memories as he tells of the "stringing up" of negroes to the Hudson Street lamp-posts during the draft riots; of the great rough-and-tumble fight between John Morrissey and Bill Poole on the dock at the foot of West Tenth Street; of the old wooden pump that used to stand at the corner of Bleecker and Eleventh Streets; or of the famous Bond Street murder case, of which he has forgotten the date and the particulars.

Some time after Mr. James Lane Allen's beautiful work of fiction, The Choir Invisible, was published we announced that he was engaged on a new novel to be entitled The Mettle of the Pasture-a vigorous title of Shakespearean suggestion for a work treating of the yeomen of old England who had planted their sturdy roots in Kentuckian soil. But while engaged on this novel Mr. Allen was attracted to a subject that had long lain in his mind, and which now

returned to him with an insistence that was not to be resisted. The dream of those embued with high intellectual and religious ideals in Kentucky was to plant a university in the State. This dream was at length realised in the Transylvania University, only to be destroyed and to pass away forever through the internecine strife of religious sectarianism. Mr. Allen as a young man himself entered the university and was a participant in its tragic career. These conditions form the background and produce the characters which figure in his new tale to be published shortly by the Macmillan Company. It is entitled The Reign of Law, or a Story of the Kentucky Hempfields. The trend of the book

and the religious crisis through which David, its hero, passes are indicated in the title, but David has a passionate love story as well, which plays an important part in the development of his character. One critic who has read the story declares it to contain by far the finest and noblest work Mr. Allen has yet done, and no whit deficient in that beauty of human passion and interest which characterises his former work, and which has given him an accredited place with the foremost living authors.

The late Mr. Richard Hovey, the most pretentious of whose works is reviewed. in another part of our magazine, was, on the whole, the most serious of recent American poets. His personality and his verse harmonised quite perfectly. Of powerful frame, a striking and interesting figure, one who radiated energy and who was unconventional to a degree that led him to be regarded, perhaps not quite unjustly, as something of a poseur, his

To horse. my

AND FATE

poetry was written first of all with strength, with a persuasive masculinity of phrase and thought, and at times with a certain lawlessness and freedom from convention that often gave to it an added charm. His early death is a distinct misfortune to American literature; for, dying as he did at the early age of thirty-five, he may be said to have ended his lifework just as he had reached the threshold of serious achievement. He was the one member of the so-called "Canadian school" of poets who possessed something more than cleverness and sentiment, and who suggested at least in some of the things he wrote the glow and fire of real genius.

In an editorial entitled "Mr. Choate Becomes Fantastic" the New York Evening Sun of March the fifth had considerable to say concerning an_address which our Ambassador at the Court of St. James delivered at the dinner of the Authors' Club. The editorial character

Suto the wilderness

The

gallop

Things

come to meset no

Ho,

or

that ur dan!

ised as interesting and surprising many of Mr. Choate's remarks about authors and the reading public, but, above all, it found curious his selection of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, De Foe's Robinson Crusoe, Cervantes's Don Quixote and Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler as being "the most famous books" handed down to the present generation. What did Mr. Choate mean by "the most famous books"? queried the Evening Sun; and then supplied its own definition, that a famous book is one which everybody is supposed to have read, which most persons have not read and which few have read twice.

Now with much that is said in this editorial we very emphatically agree. It is quite true that "to hear some people talk you would imagine that all selfrespecting 'Anglo-Saxons' began the day by reading a scene out of one of Shakespeare's plays and wound up the day with

Milton," while, as a matter of fact, the acquaintance of the average well-educated man and woman with these glories of our literature is something which fades more and more into the distance as the days go by. But, on the other hand, we do not for one moment believe that the general ignorance and apathy concerning the four books mentioned by Mr. Choate is anything like so dense as the Evening Sun would have us think. In the first place, we disagree absolutely with the editorial's remark that it is the religious public which knows about Pilgrim's Progress. We think, on the contrary, that at the present day the place of the Bedford tinker is with the good Dumas and Eugène Sue as a great amuser, and that to readers of a certain age the narrative of the Pilgrim's Progress has all the contrivances of stirring fiction, while Great Heart is a sort of spiritualised Count of Monte Cristo, possessing all of that worthy's omnipotence and omniscience. As to Don Quixote, we believe

brain is wrought,

Suddenly I am

Chelsea Square

8 Feb. 1898.

is said,

me

In connection with Walton, our attention is called to a very quaint little edition of The Compleat Angler which has recently come from the Oxford University Press. This book is two inches in height by one and three-quarter inches in breadth, and with a thickness of three-eighths of an inch contains over six hundred pages. There have been, of course, a great many smaller books, but we recollect none of similar size which can so conveniently and comfortably be read with the naked eye. We herewith reproduce a fac-simile of the fly-leaf in Walton's prayer-book, which contains the epitaph which he wrote for his second wife. This fac-simile was recently issued by the trustees of the British Museum.

The epitaph should be read as follows:

Here lyeth buried soe much as could dye of Ann, the wife of Izaak Walton, who was

A woman of remarkable prudence, and

of the primitive pietie,

Her greate and generall knowledg being adorn'd with such trew humillitie, and blest with soe much Christian meckeness, as made her worthy of

a more memorable monument.
She dyed

(Alas! Alas! that she is ded)
April 17: 1662.

In view of the admirable Life of John Donne, which was recently published from the pen of Edmund Gosse, Izaak Walton's admirable eulogy of the Dean of St. Paul's must not be forgotten. In the introduction of his book Mr. Gosse conceded that this eulogy must be the basis of any literature dealing with Donne; and further said that if it is lacking as a "compendium of dry consecutive facts," it is, as a general impression, as faithful as it is beautiful, in the words of an unpublished poem by Andrew Lang, which Mr. Gosse quotes. Old Izaak's phrase

That glows with energy of praise
Old Izaak's ambling un-pretence
That flames with untaught eloquence.

JOHN DONNE.