aningless husk.

I have gone back to my shop-window image. She never disappoints me. She
is as beautiful, as magnificently endowed, as full of fascinating life
and spirit, as ever. I sometimes think, unless I find her actual
prototype, of buying that Gainsborough hat, that cloth mantle and velvet
dress, and hanging them up in my room.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

History of the English People. By John Richard Green. New York:
Harper & Brothers.

Most readers interested in English history have long felt the need of
such a work as this, in which the results of recent research among
original sources and of the critical examination of earlier labors are
gathered up and summarized in a narrative at once clear and concise,
free from disquisition, minuteness of detail and elaborate descriptions,
without being meagre or superficial, devoid of suggestiveness or of
animation. In calling his work a _History of the English People_, Mr.
Green has not undertaken to deviate from the beaten track, devoting his
attention to social development and leaving political affairs in the
background. What he has evidently had in view is the fact that English
history is in a special sense that of the rise and growth of free
institutions, exhibiting at every stage the mutual influence or combined
action of different classes, permeated even when the Crown or the
aristocracy was most powerful by a popular spirit, and contrasting in
this respect with that of France and Spain, in which during many
centuries the mass of the people lost instead of gaining ground,
representative bodies analogous to the English Parliament were deprived
of their rights or swept out of existence, and liberty was sacrificed to
national consolidation and unity. Whence this difference came need
hardly be pointed out. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were neither freer
nor more enterprising than the Franks and other Teutonic families; but
the fortune which carried them to Britain saved them from inheriting any
onerous share of the great legacy of the Roman Empire--with the task of
absorbing and transmitting its language and civilization--secured them
against the risk of being either merged in a more numerous race or
submerged by a new influx, and thus preserved an identity and continuity
which link their latest achievements with their earliest exploits, and
stamp their whole career with the same character.

With such a subject, Mr. Green has had no difficulty in s