hrift, and unfit for
city life. Yet he believes that there is some hope for the blacks, since
they can get work and buy land and thereby become economically independent.
He calls attention to such injustices as miscegenation, lynching,
unfairness of the courts, and discrimination in traveling.

W. R. WARD

_Samuel Coleridge-Taylor--Musician. His Life and Letters_. By W. C.
Berwick Sayers. Cassell and Company, London, 1915. Pp. 328.

In this work we have the first extensive account of Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor. The author of this volume has succeeded in producing a
sympathetic and interesting narrative of the life of one of the greatest
musicians of his time. Taking up his birth and childhood and then his
college days, ending in the romance which attached him to a young Croydon
girl, the author does not delay in bringing the reader to a consideration
of those fundamentals which made Samuel Coleridge-Taylor famous ...

Much space is devoted to Coleridge-Taylor's achievement of success with his
"Ballade in A Minor." How Sir Edward Elgar extended the promising composer
a welcoming hand and arranged for him to write for a concert a short
orchestral piece which turned out to be the artist's first great success is
well described. The author emphasizes the barbaric strain and orchestral
coloring, the prominently marked features which made the composer great.

The next task of the author is to show how the "essential beauty, naive
simplicity, unaffected expression and unforced idealism," of Longfellow's
"Hiawatha" stirred the artist and set him composing an unambitious cantata
which resulted in "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast," and the "Song of Hiawatha."
The expressions of enthusiasm and the euologies which crowned the musician
as one of the greatest artists that Great Britain has produced justly
constitute a large portion of the work.

His "Visit to America" is an important chapter of the volume. The manner in
which the oppressed of his race received him in their troubled land is
treated in detail, and the names of the persons and organizations that
arose to welcome him are given honorable mention. The author brings out too
that so impressed was Coleridge-Taylor with the frank recognition of pure
music in America that he once "contemplated the desirability of emigrating
to this land."

The book abounds with letters and extracts from publications, which enable
the reader to learn for himself how the artist's work was apprecia