pare Mrs. Davis, General Fleming, and Dominick Lynch to wild savages!]' who were pealing theirs like so many potatoes, seemed to me rather amazed." As to the finger-glasses, Mr. Hone adds, with unconscious humor: "We have them in the house, but do not frequently use them." As a general outline by a competent witness of the growth and development of New York from 1828 to 1851, Mr. Hone's Diary is of considerable value. Its interest, however, is chiefly local, and its usefulness is impaired by editorial leniency, and, in a few not very important instances, editorial inaccuracy. There is no apparent reason why Mr. Tuckerman should close the final volume with the hymn "What is Prayer?" (the hymn is certainly not by Mr. Hone), unless he means it as a sort of Te Deum over the conclusion of his labors. EDWARD GILPIN JOHNSON. BOSTON TOWN.* The average American boy knows by heart the story of the "Boston Tea-party" and Paul Revere's ride, but he is not equally familiar with the picture of Samuel Adams, as he stood before Governor Hutchinson demanding the removal of British troops from Boston. Many a tender-hearted girl has wept over the suffering endured by the American soldiers at Valley Forge, but comparatively few are the eyes that have grown moist with sympathy for hardship, equally severe, which came upon the soldiers who followed George Rogers Clark across southern Illinois, in his heroic movement against Vincennes. Names that do not now cling to common memory, and deeds now unmentioned in school histories, or at best told merely in a breath, await patiently their turn to set American pulses bounding. Not only is this true of the immediate period of the struggle for independence, but of periods scores of years before that crisis. Evolution is the magic word of the present generation. Hence, to understand Lexington and Bunker Hill, there is need that we go back further than the Stamp Act and Samuel Adams. The Revolution had been evolved from the past; and Samuel Adams, the father of the Revolution, was himself the offspring of men and measures worthy of their son. The story of Plymouth Rock has been often told, but the evolution of the spirit of independence in Boston is none too familiar to the general reader. "The Story of Boston," in the words of its author," calls us to a study of Independency," and as such the purpose of the book is wholly to be commended. Just so far, also, as the book is such a study it too is to be commended, and will be found helpful. In November, 1620, James I. of England formed the corporate body known as the "Council for New England," which body, in March, 1628, sold the land that now includes Boston to a company called the "Massachewset." This sale gave the buyers no right to govern the land they had bought, and accordingly they sought and obtained a charter, duly signed and sealed by Charles I., March 4, 1629. The territory was then defined as extending from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles River, and from the Atlantic to the South Sea ": not yet had the people of England learned that a sailor could not go to the East Indies by way of the Charles River. The charter provided that there could be a governor, a deputy governor, and eighteen. "assistants," which body of men could make and enforce laws. An annual gathering of all the " Freemen" of the colony, under the name of the Great and General Court, was also authorized. As the quarrels between Charles I. and Parliament became more serious, resulting often in the imprisonment of liberal-minded men, the question arose why the Company, charter and all, might not be carried across the sea and all the functions of government exercised there as well as in England. Indeed, the gentlemen were free to come together for their meetings "on a ship in the Thames, for all that the charter said; and if perchance that ship were to weigh anchor, and they should find themselves sailing away toward America, ought the meeting to be stopped? If the proceedings should of right be stopped, how far might the vessel sail without making them illegal?” These questions were presented to the Company, and after individual deliberation of four weeks, and after a wise discussion of them for two days in a special conference-committee of twelve men, it was decided to transfer the Company and charter to New England. President Quincy, of Harvard College, afterward called this "the first and original declaration of independence." The transfer of the charter and the history of the colony founded under its provisions are described in detail. Preparations for the first voyage, the voyage, the settlement of Boston, its free government for half a century until the coming of a royal governor practically annulled the charter, the perpetual protests of the people against the slightest abridgment of their liberties, the part Boston took in the great struggle of the Revolution, and the material, social, educational, and religious progress of the city down to the celebration in 1880 of the 250th anniversary of its first settlement, all this is given us in "The Story of Boston." Mr. Gilman has gone over the whole ground and has gathered a great deal of material. He has good lumber, so good, we wonder that he has not made a more attractive building. It would seem that the failure were one of the joiner rather than of the architect, for the first half of the book, in which one event naturally suggests its successor, is well worthy to be read for what it claims to be a Study of Independency; while the remainder can hardly be of great interest save for reference and to the local reader. Perhaps the subject itself, as its story grows more and more distinct from that of the nation, compels a certain narrowness and detail in treatment that become tiresome to the general reader. The book contains some thirty illustrations, among which are portraits of John Winthrop, James Otis, John Hancock and Samuel Adams; also several valuable maps, which show the changes in the city from 1722—the date of the earliest accurate map known down to 1889. The work has a complete index. H. W. THURSTON. BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. MR. W. M. ROSSETTI's recent tribute to the memory of his brother Dante Gabriel (Cassell) is in no sense a biography of the great poet and painter. It may rather be defined as a collection of materials for a biography, consisting, as it does, of random notes, gleaned from Rossetti's correspondence, and mainly valuable as a means of accurately fixing the dates of most of his works. The writer has arranged his notes chronologically, and in two distinct sections, the former relating to the work of the painter and designer, and the latter to the work of the poet. He has very properly refrained from the expression of any pronounced critical opinions upon that work, although the account is naturally given in sympathetic language. The following passage, which is as interesting as any to the general reader, relates to the intercourse between Rossetti and Rus kin: "Gradually the intimacy between the two friends relaxed. Rossetti, as he advanced in years, in reputation, and in art, became less and less disposed to conform his works to the likings of any mentor even of one for whom he had so genuine an esteem as he entertained for Mr. Ruskin; while the latter, serenely conscious of being always in the right, laid down the law, and pronounced judgment tempered by mercy, with undeviating exactness. At last the relations between the painter and the critic became strained- -one was so earnest to enlighten the other, and that other so difficult to be enlightened out of his own perceptions and predilections; and it may have been in 1865 or 1866 that Ruskin and Rossetti saw the last of one another that it should be the last." One portion of the -mutually regretful, and perhaps mutually relieved present volume seems to us entirely useless-the eighty or more pages devoted to a prose paraphrase of "The House of Life." Those who need a paraphrase to be able to understand that marvellous "sonnet-sequence are persons to whom the highest order of poetry cannot appeal, and to such the paraphrase will prove hardly more intelligible than the poems themselves. One has no business to be reading poetry that he cannot understand without such aids. IN the third edition of Charles Darwin's "Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs" (Appleton) we have a reprint of the second edition (1874), with an appendix by Professor T. G. Bonney embracing a summary of the most important researches in the same field since that date. the history of geology, it is unnecessary to give a A recognized classic in resumé of the contents of this book, still less to discuss either pro or con the grand yet simple nature of the theory which it offers concerning the origin and history of the principal kinds of coral-reefs. But we cannot refrain from recalling the importance of the original work (1842), as a contribution to geological knowledge, nor the wonder and admiration which it aroused in the geologists of half a century ago. Previous to that time, the circular shape of an atoll or ring of coral was held to mark the outline of a submerged volcanic crater. Darwin showed the insufficiency of this explanation, and pointed out how easily the rings of coral might have arisen from the upward growth of the reefbuilding corals round an island slowly sinking into the sea. Regarding the vast regions of ocean dotted with coral islands as areas of gradual subsidence, he found examples of every stage of the process of growth, from the shore-reef just beginning, as it were, to form round the islands, to the completed atoll, where the last vestige of the encircled land had disappeared under the central lagoon. "If he had written nothing else," says Geikie, "this treatise would alone have placed him in the very front rank of investigators of nature"; nor is this preeminence lessened by the fact that some more re cent researches by other observers seem to indicate that the wide-spread submergence demanded by Darwin's theory is not required to account for the present form and distribution of coral islands. Darwin himself lived long enough to hear, but not to answer at length, the widely-different theory advanced by Mr. John Murray, one of the naturalists of the "Challenger" expedition. The researches of Alexander Agassiz, H. B. Guppy, G. C. Bourne, Bayley Balfour, W. O. Crosby, and J. D. Dana seem to indicate that the history of coral reefs may be more varied and complicated than was at first supposed, but nevertheless the careful reader will be apt to agree with Professor Bonney that "as the evidence at present stands, it is insufficient to justify a decision adverse to the theory as a general explanation." etc. and inadequate title, "Physiological Notes on Prim- MR. W. J. HENDERSON tells "The Story of Music" (Longmans) in an agreeable way. Beginning with Ambrosian and Gregorian chants, he follows the history of the great modern art, through its various stages, down to " Parsifal" and "Otello." He is concerned with the development of music itself, and not with the lives of its composers; and consequently biographical and anecdotal material finds little place in his volume. In pursuance of his plan he has flitted from Rome to Venice, and from Paris to Vienna, whenever it was necessary to show what was going on in all these places at the same time." He is capable of taking broad views, as appears in many passages, one of which is so well put that we quote from it: "From the days of Vincenzo Galilei, Jacopo Peri, and Guilio Caccini.. to the time when Gluck felt called upon to take measures of reform in order to renew the dramatic significance of the opera, almost lost through the folly and extravagances of the Italian composers, there was a long and discouraging de-tempted to reply that it was evidently not so in her scent in operatic art. But it was less depressing, taking into consideration the valuable lessons which Gluck taught and the wisdom which lovers of music ought to have gained through experience, than the fall from Orpheus' to Lucia' and 'La Sonnambula." These are words to be weighed. Mr. Henderson is a good but discriminating Wagnerian. He says with equal truth that Wagner was the greatest master of score that ever lived, and that he is often a musical Carlyle, rough and uncouth in style, but powerful in matter." That he "possessed the greatest genius that ever sought expression through music," appears to be less unquestionable. It savors of lise-majesté to the great memory of Beethoven. The music of Fidelio" still holds its own by the side of the music of Siegfried" and "Die Meistersinger." Mr. Henderson has supplied his book with a very useful chronological table of birth-days, first productions, and other important matters. In a little volume of 120 pages, large print, Mrs. Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D., has gathered up (with no hint that they have been published before) three magazine articles under the somewhat cumbrous case, else she would not use such sentences as the following: The visual impression should be amplified up to the point at which it is able to fix itself on the mind by its own momentum; therefore, without conscious effort." The person who can write such sentences as that probably fails to understand what literary expression means. use. WE cannot speak too highly of President Myers's text-books in history (Ginn). Three of them have appeared—“ Outlines of Ancient History," "Outlines of Medieval and Modern History," and a "General History." They are written by a teacher, who has borne in mind what so many makers of text-books forget, that the books are for class-room He has succeeded in doing that most difficult thing to a text-book writer, especially in historyhe has made his books interesting; and it is the testimony of students as well as of teachers who are using them that they are not only admirably adapted to interest and instruct, but that they stimulate to wider historical reading. We congratulate teachers of history on the appearance of these much-needed helps in their instruction, even while we note some slight inaccuracies, and do not always endorse the principle of selection adopted. But let him who asks perfection first try to write a general history, and his judgments will be more tolerant thereafter. THE "Recollections of the Court of the Tuilleries" (Appleton) by Madame Carette, Lady-of-Honor to the Empress Eugénie, is not without a certain value for its interior views of the life of Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugénie during their last ten years of reign. Even anything so permissibly informal "Recollections" ought, however, to be somewhat consecutive, and convey the sense of satisfaction arising from a recognition of a beginning and an end,—which these have not. Threads are dropped as and picked up again in such fashion that it is sometimes difficult to know just what the writer is talking about. The chapter on Mexico, with the sad story of Maximilian and Carlotta, is the least open to objection on this account, and forms the most valuable part of the book. THE new volumes of the "English Men of Action" (Macmillan) sustain the high excellence of the series. H. D. Traill's life of Strafford is a wellwritten sketch of "the historical representative of the Absolutist cause." Mr. Traill maintains successfully the theory of Wentworth's apostacy from the parliamentary party, which assumes that "he placed himself at the head of that party in 1628 with the deliberate intent of making himself troublesome to the king and his advisers, and wringing from their fears the preferment which he had failed to obtain from their good-will." The book is a just portraiture of a great master of government who fell, partly because the day of arbitrary personal government—even with good intent-was passing, partly because he served a master whom no man could trust. JULIAN CORBETT's life of Monk, in the same series, vindicates one of the heroes who has been only partially known. Monk has been unfortunate in the most notable event of his career- -the bringing of the Stuarts to curse again the land which had rejected them; but Mr. Corbett truly says: "His greatest work was undoubtedly the disbanding of the great revolutionary army." "He wound up the English Revolution. It was what Cromwell strove to do, and failed, for the hour was not yet ripe. With an exactness which it is impossible to account for or ignore, Monk marked the hour when it came, gripped it with confident decision, and the fate of the sovereign who tried to set at naught the English Revolution the dull soldier was proves right." MR. CLARK RUSSELL is not up to his usual attainment in his volume on Dampier, in the same series. But the fault is in the nature of his subject, not in his pen. Monk had a great opportunity, and used it. Strafford had his, and abused it. Both rank high among men of action in the large sense. But Dampier, while in truth "the finest sailor of his day," led a life to which great opportunity or great purpose never came, and the narrative of it must be a mere chronicle of petty adventures, with no other unity than the person to whom they occur. 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