The Dictionary of English History. Edited by Sidney S. Low, B. A., late Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford, Lecturer on Modern History, King’s College, London; and F. S. Pulling, M. A., late Professor of Modern History, Yorkshire College, Leeds. New York: Cassell & Company, Limited.

The first thought that suggests itself upon taking up Messrs. Cassell & Company’s “Dictionary of English History” is “why was this important work not done long ago?” The want of such a book of reference is not a new one but has been long felt by students and amateurs of history. Indeed there is hardly a man or woman who has not at some time or other felt the need of furbishing up his or her historical knowledge at short notice. One may hunt the pages of a history by the hour and not find the date or incident he wants to know about. The editors of this stout volume, Sidney J. Low, B.A. and F. S. Pulling, M.A., have made the successful attempt to give a convenient handbook on the whole subject of English history and to make it useful rather than exhaustive. The present work is not an encyclopÆdia, and the editors are aware that many things are omitted from it which might have been included, had its limits been wider, and its aim more ambitious. To produce a book which should give, as concisely as possible, just the information, biographical, bibliographical, chronological, and constitutional, that the reader of English history is likely to want is what has been here attempted. The needs of modern readers have been kept in view. Practical convenience has guided them in the somewhat arbitrary selection that they have been compelled to make, and their plan had been chosen with great care and after many experiments. It should be said that though the book is called a Dictionary of English History that the historical events of Scotland, Ireland and Wales are included. The contributors for special articles, have been selected from among the best-known historical writers in England, and no pains have been spared to make this book complete in the field it has aimed to cover.

That high authority, the London AthenÆum, has the following words of praise for this work:—

“This book will really be a great boon to every one who makes a study of English history. Many such students must have desired before now to be able to refer to an alphabetical list of subjects, even with the briefest possible explanations. But in this admirable dictionary the want is more than supplied. For not only is the list of subjects in itself wonderfully complete, but the account given of each subject, though condensed, is wonderfully complete also. The book is printed in double columns royal octavo, and consists of 1119 pages, including a very useful index to subjects on which separate articles are not given. As some indication of the scale of treatment we may mention that the article on Lord Beaconsfield occupies nearly a whole page, that on Bothwell (Mary’s Bothwell) exactly a column, the old kingdom of Deira something more than a column, Henry VIII. three pages, Ireland seven and a half pages, and the Norman Conquest three pages exactly. Under the head of ‘King,’ which occupies in all rather more than seven pages, are included, in small print, tables of the regnal years of all the English sovereigns from the Conquest. There is also a very important article, ‘Authorities on English History,’ by Mr. Bass Bullinger, which covers six and a quarter pages, and which will be an extremely useful guide to any one beginning an historical investigation.

“Many of the longer articles contain all that could be wished to give the reader a concise view of an important epoch or reign. Of this Mrs. Gardiner’s article on Charles I. is a good example. Ireland is in like manner succinctly treated by Mr. Woulfe Flanagan in seven and a half pages, and India by Mr. C. E. Black in six, while the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8 has an article to itself of a page and a half by Mr. Low. Institutions also, like Convocation, customs like borough English, orders of men such as friars, and officers like that of constable, have each a separate heading; and the name of the contributors—including, besides those already mentioned, such men as Mr. Creighton, Profs. Earle, Thorold Rogers, and Rowley, and some others whose qualifications are beyond question—afford the student a guarantee that he is under sure guidance as to facts.”

Personal Traits of British Authors. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Procter. Edited by Edward T. Mason. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Ibid. Byron, Shelley, Moore, Rogers, Keats, Southey, Landor.

Ibid. Scott, Hogg, Campbell, Chalmers, Wilson, De Quincey, Jeffrey.

Mr. Mason, the compiler of these volumes, has a keen sense of that taste which exists in all people (and certainly it is a kind of curiosity not without its redeeming side) which prompts a hearty appetite for personal gossip about appearance, habits, social traits, methods of work and thought concerning distinguished men. Yet there is another side to the question, however interesting such information may be. This is specially in gossip about authors. The literary worker puts the best part of himself in his writings. Here all the noble impulses of his nature find an outlet, and in many cases he thinks it sufficient to give this field for his higher traits, and puts his lower ones alone into action. No man is a hero to his valet. A too near acquaintance, and that is just what the editor of these volumes seeks to give us, is always disillusioning. The conception which the author gives of himself in his books is often sadly sullied and belittled, when we come to know the solid body within the photosphere of glory, which his genius radiates. Yet it is as well that we should know the real man as well as what is commonly known as the ideal man. It enables us to guard against those specious enthusiasms, which may be dangerously aroused by the brilliant sophistries of poetry or rhetoric. Knowing the actual lives and habits of great men is like an Ithuriel spear, often, when we study teachings by its test. But putting aside the desirability of knowing intimately the lives of great authors on the score of literature or morals, it cannot be denied that such information is of a fascinating sort. Mr. Mason has gathered these personal descriptions and criticisms from all sorts of sources. Literary contemporaries, accounts of friends and enemies, the confessions of authors themselves, family records, biographies, magazine articles, books of reminiscence—in a word every kind of material has been freely used. Authors are shown in a kaleidoscopic light from a great variety of stand-points, and we have the slurs and sneers of enemies as well as the loving admiration of friends. Descriptions are pointed with racy and pungent anecdotes, and it is but just to say that we have not found a dull line in these volumes. Mr. Mason has performed his work with excellent editorial taste. There is a brief and well-written notice appended to the chapter on each author, and a literary chronology, the latter of which will be found very useful for handy reference. These racy volumes ought to find a wide public, and we think, aside from their charm for the general reader, the literary man will find here a well-filled treasury of convenient anecdote and illustration, which, in many cases, will save him the toil of weary search. In these days of many books, such works have a special use which should not be ignored.

Italy from the Fall of Napoleon I. in 1815, to the Death of Victor Emmanuel in 1878. By John Webb Probyn. New York: Cassell & Company, Limited.

“Italy from the Fall of Napoleon I., in 1815, to the Death of Victor Emanuel, in 1878,” by John Webb Probyn, is just ready from the press of Cassell & Company. In noticing this important work we can do no better than to quote from the author’s preface. “The purpose of this volume,” writes Mr. Probyn, “is to give a concise account of the chief causes and events which have transformed Italy from a divided into a united country. A detailed history of this important epoch would fill volumes, and will not be written for some time to come. Yet it is desirable that all who are interested in the important events of our time should be able to obtain some connected account of so striking a transformation as that which was effected in Italy between the years 1815 and 1878. It has been with the object of giving such an account that this volume has been written.” Mr. Probyn lived in Italy among the Italians while this struggle was going on, and he writes from a close knowledge of his subject.

Harriet Martineau (Famous Women Series). By Mrs. F. Fenwick Miller. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The distinguished woman who forms the subject of this biography is less known and read in America than she should be, and it is to be hoped that this concise, lucid and well-written account of her life and work will awaken interest in one whose literary labors will merit perusal and study. Miss Martineau was one of the precursors of that movement for the larger life and mental liberty of her sex, which to-day has assumed formidable proportions, and indulged, we need hardly say, many strange vagaries. Miss Martineau began to write at an early age and soon began to impress herself on the public mind, though it was for a long time suspected that she was a man. The whole tone of her mind and intellectual sympathies was eminently masculine, though on the emotional and moral side of her nature she was intensely feminine. An early love disappointment, as has been the case with not a few literary women, shut her out from that circle of wifehood and motherhood in which she would have been far more happy than she was ordained to be by fate. Yet the world would have been a loser, so true is it that it is often by virtue of those conditions which sacrifice happiness that the most precious fruits of life are bestowed on the world. It would be interesting to follow the literary career of Miss Martineau, if space permitted, as her life was not only rich in its own results but interwoven with the most aggressive, keen and significant literary life of her age. To the world at large Miss Martineau, who had a philosophical mind of the highest order, is best known as the translator of Comte, of whose system she was an enthusiastic advocate. Her translation of Comte’s ponderous “Positive Philosophy,” published in French in six volumes, which she condensed into three volumes of lucid and forcible English, is not merely a masterpiece of translation, but a monument of acumen. So well was her work done, that Comte himself adapted it for his students’ use, discarding his own edition. So it came to pass that Comte’s own work fell out of use, and that his complete teachings became accessible only to his countrymen through a retranslation of Miss Martineau’s original translation and adaptation. Remarkable as were her philosophical powers, her work in the domain of imagination, though always hinging on a serious purpose, was of a superior sort. A keen and successful student of political economy, she wrote a series of remarkable tales, based on various perplexing problems in this line of thought and research. In addition to these, her pathetic and humorous tales are full of charm, and distinguished by a style equally charming and forcible. She might have been a great novelist had not her fondness for philosophical studies become the passion of her life. She was an indefatigable contributor to newspapers and magazines on a great variety of subjects, though she generally wrote anonymously. It was for this reason that her literary labors, which were arduous in the extreme, were comparatively ill-paid, and that life, even in her old age, was no easy struggle for her. The work, among her voluminous writings, on which her fame will probably rest as on a corner-stone, is “A History of the Thirty Years Peace.” This is a history of her own time, pungent, full of powerful color, though often sombre, impartial yet searching, characterized by the sternest love of truth, and couched in a literary style of great force and clearness. She showed the rare power of discussing events which were almost contemporary, as calmly as if she were surveying a remote period of antiquity. The AthenÆum said of this book on its publication: “The principles which she enunciates are based on eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused.” Another remarkable work was “Eastern Life,” the fruit of research in the East. In this she made a bold and masterly attack on the dogmatic beliefs of Christianity. The end and object of her reasoning in this work is: That men have ever constructed the Image of a Ruler of the Universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the Supreme Being have originated from within and been modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination and have no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see to be the true and right. The publication of this book raised a storm of opprobrium, for England was then far more illiberal than now. Yet it is a singular fact that, in spite of her free-thinking, Harriet Martineau had as her intimate friends and warm admirers some of the most pious and sincere clergymen of the age. She died in 1876 at the age of seventy-four, after a life of exemplary goodness and brilliant intellectual activity, honored and loved by all who knew her, even by those who dissented most widely from her beliefs. She was among those who ploughed up the mental soil of her time most successfully, and few, either men or women, have written with more force, sincerity and suggestiveness on the great serious questions of life.

Weird Tales by E. T. W. Hoffman. New Translation from the German, with a Biographical Memoir, by J. T. Beally, B.A. In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hoffman, the German romancer, to most English readers who know of him, is a nomen et preteria nihil, yet in his own land he is a classic. His stories are mostly short tales or novelettes, for he appears to have lacked the sustained vigor and concentration for the longer novel, like our own Poe, to whom he has been sometimes likened in the character of his genius. Yet how marvellously unlike Poe’s are the stories in the volumes before us! The intense imaginativeness, logical coherence and lofty style which mark Poe are absent in Hoffman. Yet, on the other hand, the latter, who like his American analogue revels in topics weird and fantastic, if not horrible, relieves the sombre color of his pictures with flashes of homely tenderness and charming humor, of which Poe is totally vacant.

Hoffman, who was well born, though not of noble family, received an excellent education. He studied at KÖnigsburg University, where he matriculated as a student of jurisprudence, and seems to have made enough proficiency in this branch of knowledge to have justified the various civil appointments which he from time to time received during his strange and stormy life, only to forfeit them by acts of mad folly or neglect. He was by turns actor, musician, painter, litterateur, civil magistrate and tramp. Gifted with brilliant and versatile talents, there was probably never a man more totally unbalanced and at the mercy of every wind of passion and caprice that blew. Had he possessed a self-directing purpose, a steady ideal to which he devoted himself, it is not improbable that his genius might have raised him to a leading place in German literature. Yet perhaps his talents and tastes were too versatile for any very great achievement, even under more favorable conditions. As matters stand he is known to the world by his short tales, in which he uses freely the machinery of fantasy and horror, though he never revolts the taste, even in his wildest moods. Yet some of his best stories are entirely free from this element of the strained and unnatural, and show that it was through no lack of native strength and robustness of mind, that he selected at other times the most abnormal and perverse developments of action and character as the warp of his literary textures. Hoffman’s stories are interesting from their ingenuity, a certain naÏve simplicity combined with an audacious handling of impossible or improbable circumstances, and a charming under-current of pathos and humor, which bubbles up through the crust at the most unexpected turns. We should hardly regard these stories as a model for the modern writer, yet there is a quality about them which far more artistic stories might lack. It is singular to narrate that some of his most agreeable and objective stories, where he completely escapes from morbid imaginings, are those he wrote when dying by inches in great agony, for he, too, like Heine—a much greater and subtler genius—lay on a mattrass grave, though for months and not for years. The stories collected in the volumes under notice contain those which are recognized by critics as his best, and will repay perusal as being excellent representations of a school of fiction which is now at its ebb-tide, though how soon it will come again to the fore it is impossible to prophecy, as mode and vogue in literary taste go through the same eternal cycle, as do almost all other mundane things.