fflin & Co.

"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." A Romaunt. By Lord Byron. Boston: Ticknor
& Co.

"The Last Leaf." Poem. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Illustrated by George
Wharton Edwards and F. Hopkinson Smith. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

"Pepper and Salt; or, Seasoning for Young Folks." Prepared by Howard
Pyle. New York: Harper & Brothers.

"Davy the Goblin; or, What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland,'" By Charles E. Carryl. Boston; Ticknor & Co.

"Bric-a-Brac Stories." By Mrs. Burton Harrison. Illustrated by Walter
Crane. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

"Rudder Grange." By Frank R. Stockton. Illustrated by A.B. Frost. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

In turning over the pictorial books of the season one experiences a
genuine pleasure in coming upon this illustrated edition of "The Sermon
on the Mount," which belongs to a high order of merit from its
satisfactory interpretation of the subject and the beauty of its general
design and careful detail. It is, of course, a modern performance, and
nothing is more characteristic of most modern art than that it does
consciously, from reminiscence and with a reaching after certain
effects, what was once done simply, intuitively, and from the urgency of
poetic feeling. A great difference must naturally exist not only in the
outward mode but in the spirit of a group of modern artists who set to
work to illuminate a sacred text, and that in which the task was
undertaken by cloistered monks in whose gray lives a longing for beauty,
for color, found expression only here. Thus one realizes that the
decorative borders--which one looks at over and over again in this
volume, and which actually satisfy the eye--do not represent the
artist's own actual dreams, but are founded instead upon the ecstatic
visions of Fra Angelico and others as they bent over their work in their
silent cells; but they are beautiful nevertheless, far transcend what is
merely decorative, and are full of imagination and feeling. In fact,
into this frame-work, which might have contained nothing beyond
conventional imitation, Mr. Smith has put vivid touches which show that
he has the faculty to conceive and the skill to handle which belong to
the true artist. It would be easy to instance several of these borders
as remarkably good in their way: that which surrounds the "Lord's
Prayer" suggests dazzling effects in jewelled glass. The book is made up
in a delightful way, with full-page p