tions were but a further instrument in
educating the taste and increasing the knowledge of the working
classes. The costly factories of the Savonnerie and the Gobelins were
practical schools, in which every detail of every branch of all those
industries which contribute to the furnishing and decoration of houses
were brought to perfection; whilst a band of chosen apprentices were
trained in the adjoining schools. To Colbert is due the honour of
having foreseen, not only that the interests of the modern State were
inseparably bound up with those of industry, but also that the
interests of industry could not, without prejudice, be divorced from
art.

Mr. Bret Harte has never written anything finer than Cressy. It is one
of his most brilliant and masterly productions, and will take rank with
the best of his Californian stories. Hawthorne re-created for us the
America of the past with the incomparable grace of a very perfect artist,
but Mr. Bret Harte's emphasised modernity has, in its own sphere, won
equal, or almost equal, triumphs. Wit, pathos, humour, realism,
exaggeration, and romance are in this marvellous story all blended
together, and out of the very clash and chaos of these things comes life
itself. And what a curious life it is, half civilised and half
barbarous, naive and corrupt, chivalrous and commonplace, real and
improbable! Cressy herself is the most tantalising of heroines. She is
always eluding one's grasp. It is difficult to say whether she
sacrifices herself on the altar of romance, or is merely a girl with an
extraordinary sense of humour. She is intangible, and the more we know
of her, the more incomprehensible she becomes. It is pleasant to come
across a heroine who is not identified with any great cause, and
represents no important principle, but is simply a wonderful nymph from
American backwoods, who has in her something of Artemis, and not a little
of Aphrodite.

* * * * *

It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land in which he lives. The Muses care so
little for geography! Mr. Richard Day's Poems have nothing distinctively
American about them. Here and there in his verse one comes across a
flower that does not bloom in our meadows, a bird to which our woodlands
have never listened. But the spirit that animates the verse is simp