d. Count Gobineau's failure is of a different
kind. His story is not only grotesque in construction, but inartistic in
all its parts. In every group of incidents there is the same lack of
harmony and completeness as in the adaptation and subordination of each
to the whole. Nor, with all the author's knowledge of life and of men,
has he succeeded in creating characters recognizable as life-like and as
veritable originals. Single features are well drawn, certain
temperaments are keenly analyzed, but the whole conception is never
firm, consistent and complete. The simplest, like old Lanze and his
daughter Lina, are intrinsically commonplace; the most elaborated, like
Madame Tonska and the duke Jean-Theodore, waver between familiar types
and questionable shadows; and those that, like Laudon and the
Gennevilliers, promise better results, are imperfectly developed. Such
defects would be fatal in a novel of the ordinary kind. But this is not
a novel of the ordinary kind. The real staple of the book consists not
of the incidents and the characters, but of discussions and reflections
which sparkle with wit, with shrewd observation, and with ingenious if
not absolutely profound speculation. There are a hundred little essays
in it, compact with thought and bristling with epigram, that have an
eighteenth-century flavor, and suffuse with a _sauce piquante_ what
would otherwise have been a flavorless dish. Whether the theory from
which the title of the book is derived, and which is expounded at length
in the opening chapters, would bear a rigid examination, or was even
meant to be taken seriously, may be doubted. It is, at all events, very
poorly illustrated by the characters and events selected to exemplify
it.

_Books Received._

Africa: The History of Exploration and Adventure from Herodotus to
Livingstone. By Charles H. Jones. With illustrations. New York: Henry
Holt & Co.

The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance. By Henry
Edward, Archbishop of Westminister. New York: Catholic Publication
Society.

Six Months under the Red Cross with the French Army. By George H.
Boyland. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.

The Tower of Babel: A Poetical Drama. By Alfred Austin. Edinburgh and
London: Wm. Blackwood & Sons.

Young Folks' History of the United States. By T. W. Higginson.
Illustrated. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

Baby Died To-day, and Other Poems. By the late William Leighton. London:
Longmans, Green & Co.