Relations, and Historic and National Peculiarities" (Macmillan & Co.). It is largely a mosaic of quotations,—showing wide reading, retentive memory, and excellent taste,—but the quotations are held in place and given a philosophical continuity by a strain of original and brilliant reasoning, the aim of the whole being to show that Romantic Love, the prematrimonial affection which a modern lover feels for his mistress, is in its universality a recent development in the race, although great men as far back as Dante and Petrarch (great men being necessarily in advance of their time) experienced and described it. The love which Mr. Finck celebrates is that which Emerson describes in "Each and All:"
The lover watched his chosen maid
As through the virgin choir she strayed,
Nor know her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage:
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
It is this gay enchantment, this temporary exaltation of a woman into a goddess, so that the touch of her finger-tips is a mystery and a delight, and even a veil blown from her head against the lover's person is an intoxication of the senses,—it is this sublimation of the sexual instinct which Mr. Finck claims to be of modern growth. In a general way he is undoubtedly right, though he may err in assuming that the expression of the feeling would be coeval with its birth. Men are shy of speaking of emotions that are too sacredly individual; they need an audience, no matter of how few, so that it be fit. Further, does the birth of Romantic Love in literature itself date no further back than Dante's "Vita Nuova," and is Mr. Finck right in denying that there is any infusion of the sentiment he celebrates in the amatory poems of Catullus, and, above all, in the Song of Songs?
"Thraldom," by Julian Sturgis (Appleton), is not the sort of work we have learned to expect from that very clever writer, and the departure from his usual manner is hardly a successful one. The author of "An Accomplished Gentleman" and "Dick's Wanderings" is delightfully at home in the real life of modern English society and politics, but this excursus into the fields of romance, with uncanny negresses and mesmerists and mysterious artists as the centres of interest, is disappointing.
"Brief Institutes of General History," by Prof. E. Benjamin Andrews (Silver, Rogers & Co.), is a book meant for teachers or advanced scholars, for people who wish to synthesize what knowledge they possess, rather than for beginners. It aims to give not merely an outline history of the world, but also "the rationale of historical movement," and succeeds in being a painstaking compilation of the latest views, discoveries, and theories, put into a somewhat crabbed and obscure style. Perhaps the book would have had a less bewildering appearance if the substance of the notes had been worked into the text (as it is, there are more notes than text), but there is no doubt that the select bibliography at the end of each chapter is of great value as a syllabus and register of the best literature for side-readings.
On the other hand, the three volumes of " Universal History" published by
