ction of "pagan" art, no matter how
beautiful; but in these enlightened days for ecclesiastical fury to take
up the barbarous _role_ of destruction, which even savage war discards,
is pitiable indeed.

* * * * *

Comeliness becomes every day more and more an affair of chemistry.
Science has now found what bids fair to be a very "glass of
fashion"--not a metaphorical, but a literal glass, at least for lean
people. The chemical properties of each color in the solar spectrum have
long been known, and of late years it has also been discovered that
plants may be made to thrive wonderfully in green-houses constructed of
blue or violet panes, the production of such nurseries being sometimes
doubled or trebled by this device. But the experiment has been pushed
further, for some English chemists maintain that rooms provided with
violet windows, or even with hangings of that color, will fatten the
occupants! Shakespeare's "glass wherein the noble youth did dress
themselves" was not so practical a possession as this. Surely, hereafter
those who would divest themselves of their lean and hungry look may grow
obese at will, and turn the scale at the very pound required; and this,
too, by no such regimen as the Oriental one of rice and indolence, but
merely by passing a season under a violet dome or a blue crystal
green-house. Such a remedy is good tidings for all the wan, the haggard
and the wizened of society, and for those "whom sharp misery has worn to
the bone." Henceforth there need be no "starvelings," "elf-skins" or
"dried neat's tongues" of leanness for the Falstaffs to mock. And the
fat men, too, the "huge hills of flesh," shall they not have their
complementary color in their windows to make them thin? Let the
compassionate Bantings look to it.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

A Simpleton: A Story of the Day. By Charles Reade. New York: Harper &
Brothers.

In a preface to the English edition of this book Mr. Reade grapples with
the charge of plagiarism so often urged against his stories, and,
justifying his habitual course by precedents, forestalls the search of
the detectives in the present case by proclaiming the sources from which
incidents and descriptions have been gathered. Having treated of many
matters beyond the range of his personal knowledge and experience, he
has necessarily had recourse to the writings of other men, and by citing
his authorities he not only clears himself of