artly for the very
reason that they are so elaborately explained. Printer's ink, when
used as a pigment or pencil, should be used sparingly, with a few,
sharp, clear, bold touches, and without painful finish or niggling.
What amplification would not weaken instead of heightening the effect
of "the copse-wood gray that waved and wept on Loch Achray"? Breadth,
distance and atmosphere are obscured by H. H.'s carefully itemized
foregrounds. But the itemizing is done admirably and con amore by one
who is a botanist, a poet and an observer. The Great Desert is no
desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has
a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both
being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt
River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of
moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have plenty
of meaning to her.

A traveller between Omaha and San Francisco might well carry this
pocket volume as a lorgnette. It will show him what he might otherwise
miss, and make more visible to him what he sees. It belongs to a high
class of railroad literature, and is in style and matter so full of
movement as to suggest the railway to readers by the fireside.

Putnam's Art Handbooks. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

This series of manuals for beginners with pencil and palette will
include five small books. The two before us treat of "Landscape
Painting" and "Sketching from Nature." Both are old acquaintances,
reprinted respectively from the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth London
editions. When they first came under our eye, more years ago than we
need state, they bore the imprint of a London firm of color-dealers,
and were loaded down with advertisements and less direct
recommendations of their wares to an extent that rather obscured the
valuable and interesting part of the publications. This rubbish has
been swept away in the American edition, so that the tyro can get at
what he needs to know more readily, and use it with more confidence,
than when he was puzzled to distinguish between solid instruction and
hollow puffery. The notes added by the American editor are very scant,
and yet so sensible as to enhance one's regret at their paucity and
meagreness. Directions for the use of pigments and vehicles well
enough adapted for the English climate may require modification for
ours. Moreover, British artists have not unfrequent