reputation for acquaintance with their own country, they confessed that there was such a place, but it was 'Ayn Qasay meh, not 'Ayn Qadees; the latter was elsewhere. Having thus surprised their secret, by great efforts he and the dragoman, who had the influence of a Mohammedan preacher and was overcome by his desire to be put in a book, persuaded the guide and the sheik's sons to take them to the spot, which lay outside the tract that, by desert law, they were allowed to roam over, and within the territory of a rival tribe, who, they said, would rob and might murder them, if found on their land. This fear is probably one reason why the guides on this route, always of the same tribe, have at all times refused to take travelers to 'Ayn Qadees. It required much management and persistence to carry through the undertaking, even after the start was made; but at last Dr. Trumbull saw with his own eyes the beautiful oasis described by Rowland, as well as 'Ayn Qasaymeh, by which Bartlett was deceived, and 'Ayn el-Qadayrât, which has also been mistaken for the true 'Ayn Qadees. There was the plain where an army might encamp, and beyond it the springs under the rock, surrounded by fig-trees, grass, and flowers, and alive with quail and bees, - a spot beautiful, he says, as a summer nook in New England; there was the Way of the Spies northward: and so he goes

on to enumerate once more the reasons for believing this the actual Holy Camp of the old host. After concluding this brief account of the locality, he sums up the literary evidence carefully, and has clearly made out his case. In fact, all that was lacking to his argument was the verification of Rowland's discovery, and this he happily accomplished.

Dr. Trumbull concludes with an extensive special study of the route of the Children of Israel from their start until they passed the Red Sea. In this essay he opposes the theory of Brugsch very vig

He

orously, and even accuses that scholar of having "rearranged sites, changed direc tions, and misstated distances as if for the purpose of conforming the facts to a preconceived theory of the exodus." This is a grave charge to prefer against so eminent an authority, but not extraordinary in the annals of such discussion. Dr. Trumbull himself finds the key to the Egyptian route of the chosen people in the identification of Shur with the fortified wall which then extended across the isthmus as the barrier of Egypt. gives a very clear and intelligible account of the journey northward, and there are even gleams of rationalizing in his remarks, as at the outset in the very curious statement that "the primary barrier to the exodus was not the Red Sea, but the Great Wall; and the Red Sea was opened because the Great Wall was closed." Briefly, he supposes that the Israelites were ready to leave Egypt whenever, on receiving Pharaoh's permission, Moses should give the signal, and therefore, after taking what he calls "bakhsheesh" for their masters, easily gathered from all quarters of Goshen at the rendezvous, Succoth, a tenting ground to the north of their province, whence they moved upward and encamped just inside the Great Wall, intending to pass through by the westernmost desert route, by which they would arrive at Canaan in three days, as they innocently thought, and take possession. The Lord, however (we follow the narrative here given), unwilling to risk this untrained and servile multitude in a battle with the Philistines, "lest, peradventure, the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt," ordered Moses to lead them. southward the whole length of the Wall, and at the lower end of it, when Pharaoh came up in pursuit, brought them through the Red Sea, thus flanking the Wall, and conducted them on by the easternmost way, the Red Sea road, to Kadesh-Barnea around by Sinai. Between Kadesh and Shur (the Great Wall) they were

doomed to wander for forty years, until a new generation grew up, hardened by desert life and freedom into a nation strong enough to conquer the land of promise. The argument by which this theory is supported is exhaustive, and in the present state of our knowledge must be regarded as conclusive. Taken in its entire range, the volume is the most important contribution to biblical geography made for many a day, and is an honor to the country. It is well furnished with maps, indexes, and copious notes, and its material is very lucidly and conveniently arranged.

Dr. Field's small book1 takes us at once into Palestine. In the last issue of the series in which he is narrating his travels around the world he described the desert of the wanderings, and now begins at once with Jerusalem, where he made his headquarters in a hotel on Mount Zion. The tedium of a decayed Oriental town, destitute of clubs, theatres, resorts, or a newspaper in any living language, was enlivened by the exercises of Holy Week, which gave him an unfavorable impression of Greek Christianity, even in comparison with the Moslem faith; and indeed it must have been pitiful to hear the people celebrate the victory of their hopes in the Resurrection by singing, "We are happy, but the Jews are miserable," and by shouting, in their wild foot-race about the Holy Sepulchre, "O Jews! Jews! your feast is a feast of devils or of murderers, but our feast is the feast of Christ!" Miserable, too, it was to watch the observance of the Jewish Passover, frugal in food but abundant in potations, which leads the author to quote the saying of the devout Irishman: "Blessin's on the Council o' Trint, that it put the fastin' on the mate, an' not on the dhrink!" At Jerusalem there are many religious sects, but among them

1 Among the Holy Hills. By HENRY M. FIELD, D. D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1884.

all the faith of Mahomet seemed to Dr. Field the most worthy of men.

The ground of Palestine has been so often described that the author need not be followed in his excursion to Carmel and Lebanon and about Galilee. He found the country, as all do, a desert, except where the water makes it blossom into a beauty the more attractive by contrast. As a whole, the region did not please him. It is a miniature Colorado, he says; but he adds as his last word, "In riding over its rugged hills, I have asked myself again and again, Can this be the Promised Land? and inwardly thanked God that it was not the land promised to our fathers." For the Jews he has an almost unadulterated contempt, which he expresses most naively in the remark that the divinity of Christ is less of a miracle than his being a Jew. Much of his text is naturally occupied with what he himself styles moods of sentimental devotion, interrupted somewhat by the unromantic reality of the scenes. He was especially disappointed at find ing the Mount of the Beatitudes only a little hill, and he wished the Transfiguration had taken place on Mount Tabor instead of Mount Hermon, as offering a more beautiful background of woods and grass to the scene. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the touch meant for light humor is unseasonable; but otherwise the book may be welcomed to its undistinguished place in the library already written on the same outworn subject.

Unlike Dr. Field, Mr. Warner seems to be a lover of the Orient. In the present narrative he does not trespass on the ground already covered by his delightful sketches of the Levant, but not the least interesting portion of the new work is the description of Tangier, best known in English literature through Pepys, and the chapter humorously entitled Across Africa. As was the case with

2 A Roundabout Journey. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1884.

all the travelers noticed above, he had to submit to be lied to by the Arabs, but the necessity did not greatly disturb him. The picturesqueness, the bright atmosphere, and the repose of the Arab scene, the wise inborn philosophy of the people,

:

"To take things easily, and let them go," evidently attract him as an American, with a quick eye for color and freshness and novelty, and with a humorist's distrust of so boring a bête-noir as work. Even on the borders of that realm of indolence which has suffered the strange change of the Arabian touch, in Malta and Sicily, and on the French coast where the half-Saracenic myths of the Middle Ages still linger, he puts more poetic charm in his pages than he can accomplish in the description of other scenes. The quality of his work is too well known to require definition now it has the vividness, the detail, the artistic keeping, that make condensation impossible, the fragrance of a garden is not in any one flower. It is unfortunate that he had bad luck in his Spanish journey, for the narrative itself has thereby caught something of the disagreeableness that he experienced. We stay at home in order to avoid all that. In Spain scarcely anything was to his taste that did not date from the Moors. As for bull-fights, of course he was horrified at their barbarity; but how long is it since his ancestors and ours kept bulls for "baiting"? Nay, it is not a long age ago that an English village would sell the parish Bible to replace the dead bull. The country itself is finely described, but the people are certainly painted with a realism not flattering to themselves, and, we cannot but think, of limited application. The romance of Spain, like its courtesy, has always been characterized by a certain externality that might well prepare the traveler for unwelcome revelations of the nature of the inner man. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the volume is the most entertaining book of travels. VOL. LIII. — - NO. 318. 37

1

Mr. James, as he very well knows, and is not slow to state, is a cosmopolite; but, as old Professor Sophocles would have said, he is a cosmopolite only of the West. He has gathered in this volume scattered travel sketches, really correspondent's letters, of the last fourteen years of his peregrinations; but although he has ranged over many countries he has never passed beyond the circle of European civilization. Niagara is his Pillars of Hercules on the west, and Venice is the easternmost spot whence his sun rises; the unexplored wilderness, the fine Arabian glow, are equally beyond his horizon. The only Oriental suggestion in his book is that it is written backwards, like Hebrew: he begins with Venice in 1882, and ends with Niagara in 1870. All this, in his own phrase, implies a limitation, but one with a distinct charm in an American; for if he has, like Mr. James, quick perceptions, it makes him almost involuntarily a dilettante in Western civilization. He learns to distinguish the highest bred sort, at least; and our author gives himself to the enjoyment of it with the abandon of an epicure at Greenwich, whether he finds it in the oak-studded parks and warm winter interiors of English countryseats and at the private dinners of college Fellows nested in privilege, or discovers it in the educated palate of the French nation and the conversibility of French laundresses, or comes upon it in the felicity with which the Italian poor make the best of small pleasures. On the other hand, defects of civilization — it may be in the Derby day, or bedroom furniture in France, or the rigid and exclusive insistence on one point of view,

1 Portraits of Places. By HENRY JAMES. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1884.

as in Ruskin's tracts on Florence- bore Mr. James; indeed, in the last instance, if the Tartar within himself is not penetrated, his cuticle is certainly much irritated. In reading these sketches, consequently, one is sure to find the agreeable in life described with the warmth of a richly sensuous temperament. We use the highly colored phrase advisedly. He is, it is true, an exceptionally keen observer: in the milieu of society this makes him a novelist, in that of nature it makes him a tourist; for he travels principally to see things. But as these papers abundantly indicate, he is an observer with an artistic sense; or, to use a bad word, he is an impressionist. The perusal of this book is more like turning over a portfolio of water-colors than reading pages of black print. Those elements which do not compose well, as painters say, are left out; landscapes which cannot be described by tones and effects hardly attract the author's pen; if his eye sees them, it does not dwell on them. Perhaps this selection of the components, or it may be the happy memory which records only the finely combined impressions of sense, gives his brief sketches their grace, which does not proceed only from felicities of language and mere literary point. Grace, definiteness, full light, are the artistic qualities here shown, just as amiableness and a high regard for the agreeable are the social traits. Any volume so characterized has, independent of its contents, a distinct charm, and one, as has been said, peculiarly delightful in an American, because it supplements in our literature the lambent humor, the light wit, the romantic suggestiveness, which especially distinguish our better work. The borderland which is abolished in Mr. James' geography, both physical and mental, is not far to seek with us; on the other hand, within the liberties (not to say the walls) of modern civilization

1 John Bull and his Island. By MAX O'RELL. Translated from the French under the supervision

he is a delightful dispenser of the laws of good living, and, as a traveled man, full of the pleasantest reminiscences.

Max O'Rell's observations1 on English character are meant to be piquant; in fact, they are more distinguished by point than by truthfulness. As in all such caricatures of English manners, the Sabbath-going, philanthropy, seriousness, etc., of the upper and middle classes are set off by the glaring contrasts of the drunkenness, wife-beating, and obscene or brutal amusements of the lower class. It is, the author remarks, “Bible or beer, gospel or gin; . . . as M. Taine says, 'Paradise or Hell; no Purgatory in England.'" By this easy method of searching for violent contrasts, and seeking out striking if not illustrative facts, a book has been made that must affect any reader strongly; for, although it is a monstrous parody of the truth, it exhibits certain phases and incidents of English life that make the flesh creep, particularly in its portraiture of low life. A vein of humor runs through it, and occasionally there is a good story from literary sources; some will find it readable, in consequence; but its main interest lies only in its eccentricity. Evidently, the author has seen English life almost wholly in the city, and there generally ab extra. Being unsympathetic by nature, he is thus able to set forth the coarsenesses of the metropolis with revolting realism, and is incapacitated from doing justice to the finer aspects of the national life, which he can treat only in a vulgarly satirical way. These very limitations, however, serve to enforce impression of the brutalized poor and hypocritic rich, the demoniac and the lying elements in modern society. Without believing England to be either a theatre for the Saturnalia of vice, a shop for universal duping, or the parade-ground of the Salvation Army, one can find much innocent food for reflection in this prejudiced, narrow, and uncandid work.

of the Author. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1884.

cate and sensitive, as he was, his selfdistrust made him a listener to Theocritus; refined and proud, his self-consciousness made him the laureate of a splendid court. Though he dwelt alone, a true lover of nature, like Saadi he could not "dispense with Persia for his audience;" and he knew well that for the fastidious ears of Pollio and Mæcenas the utmost of art must be achieved, as well as the secret spirit be rendered. His work is consequently the supreme result of the most thorough poetic culture, as well as the genuine expression of the most charming of poetic natures. No scholar needs to be told this. With Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, he is recognized by all who have any gift of sensibility to poetic form as the master, the duce verace, who has led these children of his song to the heavenly paradise on whose verge he closed his mortal eyes, although not without a vision of that promised land,—

"Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo." The advance of poetry in that new age has been in the christianization of its spirit, and of this Virgil was the forerunner. What Shelley wrote of all poets is preeminently true of him: he was "the bierophant of an unapprehended inspiration." He had a prescience of the modern age; by sharing and partly expressing its feeling, he has drawn toward him a more sympathetic reverence than any of his peers in the old era, and consequently has exercised

a more active and continuous influence. Thus in Virgil's verse is found the earliest prophecy of the new, the romantic spirit, as also the last perfection of the old, the classical form: this latter, the gift of the elder civilization to the modern poet, has been transmitted mainly through him who at the dawn of our literature was the master of Dante. The crystalline purity of style in the first Italian, the perfect phrase and fall of the young Milton's numbers, the composite sweetness of Tennyson's idyllic verse, find their model and fixed eternal type in him, still unsurpassed, who is the mediator between the two great epochs, the pagan poet, whose divine inspiration has been asserted in the tomes of the fathers and from the pulpit of the Popes, and whose heavenly aid has been invoked by kneeling Christians in the liturgies of the universal church. It is not our purpose to add a line to his panegyric, Tennyson's votive wreath is honor enough for one decade; but by such opening remarks we would indicate how large a survey, how embracing a compass, that mind must have which would rewrite his verses in an alien tongue; and especially we would emphasize the essential need in such a mind of the finer qualities of subtle appreciation. The first requisite in the translator of a poem of highly wrought art is cultivation of taste. Yet he may be thus characterized and fail, because he lacks technical skill to make his culture tell; but he will know that he has failed. Any translation of Virgil must be done with good taste, and with something of literary finish; the lowest intelligent standard must demand this.

There is, it must be confessed, a touch of ceremony in Mr. Wilstach's bow to the public, as he proffers these two at