where it will have to be abandoned for a march of some 300 miles across an entirely unknown country. If, as is believed, this prove to be a forest-covered region, Mr. Stanley expects to traverse it in thirty days, but ten miles a day seems a high average for African travel. The most important outstanding geographical problem in Africa, the relative positions of the Nile and Congo basins, is here waiting for solution, together with the social task of striking at the roots of the slave-trade, which draws its principal supplies from the same country. It is well known that this was Gordon's purpose, postponed to the claim of his own country on his services, in accepting the command of the Upper Congo, and we may now hope to see the same result achieved by the man who was to have been his colleague. The expedition is accompanied by several African boys, educated in this country, and expected to be of use in communicating with their countrymen, and among them is the little son of the chief of the Aruwimi country, who made such a strenuous resistance to Stanley's passage of the mouth of that river, on his first adventurous voyage down the Congo.

Notes on Novels.

She. By H. RIDER HAGGARD. London: Longmans,
Green & Co. 1887.

THOSE
THOSE who were fascinated by the weird extravagance of "King
Solomon's Mines" will find a worthy successor to it in the author's
new tale of diablerie and adventure. The scene is again laid in Africa,
and another quest is the subject, the ancient record which forms
the motive spring of the travellers being in this case a family relic,
transmitted to the hero through an ancestry traced back to the
Pharaohs. A shard, or fragment of pottery, covered with inscrip-
tions of various dates and in many languages, including uncial
Greek and black-letter English, is the memorial of this strange
pedigree, and of the attempts made in many generations to fulfil an
early mandate of vengeance against a mysterious sorceress dwelling
in Eastern Africa. This long-bequeathed behest is obeyed by the
hero, with results which we will not mar the reader's pleasure by
anticipating. The Ama-hagger, or People of the Rocks, among
whom he encounters his strange experiences, have their prototypes
in a tribe in Madagascar bearing a like name, Antankarana, in
their own language. The natural fortress in which they dwell is
exactly similar to the one described, since it is formed of an extinct
crater, whose cliff-like walls enclose an area of about eight square
miles. This plain is accessible from without only by a chasm or

tunnel piercing the rock-barrier, with deep water on either side of the narrow path leading through it. It is to be regretted that, despite the great merits of the book, it contains some passages which render it unsuitable to be put into the hands of young people.

In the Clouds. By CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1887.

THE

HE author of "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains," with that subtle magic of words which can call up visions, transports us into a new and unknown region, and makes it familiar as a part of our own experience. The mountains of Tennessee, with their illimitable breadths of sun and shadow, are, in this as in her former work, the background of her picture, and the wild and lawless population of their slopes furnishes the figures that lend it human interest. Without over-idealization she contrives to cast a halo of poetic charm over the lives of these rude semi-outlaws, while their very dialect, uncouth and almost unintelligible as it is, has a strange fascination for the reader. From their ranks too she has drawn two of the most pathetic female types in the pages of fiction, since Dorinda Cayce and Alethea Sayles are worthy to stand beside Jeanie Deans in their simple peasant dignity and unflinching rectitude of judgment. The plot of the author's present work turns on the adventures of Mink Lorey, a wild and wayward young mountaineer, little deserving of the heroine's exalted devotion and fidelity. His troubles, indeed, despite their disastrous ending, are due rather to reckless freakishness of nature than deliberate malice, though it must be confessed that an occasional dose of "breshwhiskey," as the product of the illicit stills is called, has its full share in producing them. The author gives a lofty and tragic nobility to the fate of this seemingly worthless creature by allotting to him the crowning redemption of death in an act of self-sacrifice. Moved by an illogical but not unnatural impulse of humanity, he goes at the peril of his newly regained liberty to seek aid for a halfdrowned man, a moment before the object of his jealous hate and fury, whom indeed he had come out with the deliberate purpose of slaying. Though an accidental death overtakes him on the way, he lives to achieve his errand of mercy, and save the life of his former enemy. Thus Alethea's love is justified, and a life that gave little promise is ennobled by an heroic end. The interest of the narrative culminates in the trial of Mink for a death unconsciously caused by him in a mischievous frolic. The scene in the court-house of Shaftesville is a masterpiece of imaginative realism, relieved by keen touches of humorous description, and touched with tenderest poetic grace by the exquisite picture of the baby-girl brought in to draw the names of the jury. In her child studies indeed the author recails Victor Hugo, but while his are rather idealized abstractions of infancy, those of the American novelist are individual types as strongly marked as the grown-up personages of her story. We use

the pronoun advisedly, for on the title-page of her present work she allows her alias to be penetrated by adding her real name of Mary Murfree to the assumed one of Egbert Craddock. Among female novelists she may take rank with the very highest, while her youth gives promise of still further development of her powers.

A Son of Hagar. By HALL CAINE. London:

Chatto & Windus. 1887.

HE reputation gained by the author of "The Shadow of a Crime" will not be enhanced by his present work. In this he has scarcely attempted to give the semblance of coherence to a wildly improbable plot, starting from a tangle of doubtful genealogies, in which the complications of Irish and Scotch marriages and semimarriages end by leaving the reader uncertain as to the real parentage of any of the personages. Owing to these obscure relationships, one half-brother is enabled to personate another so as to take possession of his property, and even claim that of his wife, while the real owner is expiating, as a convict at Portland, the crime committed by his double. The repentance and confession of a third brother, who had brought about this ingenious substitution from motives of revenge and jealousy, finally restore matters to an equitable footing and enable virtue to triumph duly in the third volume to the acclamations of feasting rustics and the chimes of village joy-bells.

THIS

Jess. By H. RIDER HAGGARD. London:
Smith, Elder & Co. 1887.

THIS is a stirring tale of romance and adventure in the Transvaal, the incidents of which are furnished by the successful rising of the Boers against their English rulers. The sufferings and humiliations of the loyalists are described in harrowing detail, and on them the plot is mainly made to hinge. In the drawing of character there is a tendency to exaggerate the darker traits, and the unredeemed blackness of the Boer villain wants some finer gradations of light and shade to make it seem true to nature. The end of the hapless heroine, too, is a climax of horror, constituting a violation of taste and even of morality, and leaving, in its suggestion of ghastly ferocity, a painful and inartistic impression on the reader's mind.

THE

Springhaven. By R. D. BLACKMORE. London:

Sampson Low & Co.

1887.

HE author of "Lorna Doone" gives us in these volumes one of his quaint old-world tales of rustic life in remote districts.. Its scene is laid in Springhaven, a port in Sussex, during the stirring times of expectancy and preparation, when Napoleon from his camp

at Boulogne held the menace of invasion suspended over the opposite shores of England. With this national crisis the fortunes of the characters are all bound up, and the stir and thrill of the impending danger working among the various classes of coast dwellers are vividly realized. There is, however, little coherence or probability in the series of incidents grafted on this heroic theme, and the characters fail to impress us with a sense of individuality. The heroine is little worthy of her position, for she is a frivolous coquette, who betrays the official secrets of her father, the admiral in command of the coast defences, to a French spy, and eventually causes his death by introducing this traitor into his house. We have incidental sketches both of Nelson and Napoleon, and the semi-seafaring story closes appropriately with the naval Waterloo, the battle of Trafalgar.

Lazarus in London. By F. W. ROBINSON. London:

R. ROBINSON has laid the scene of his original and interesting novel among the struggling population of London, as is implied in its title. The centre of action is a poor and disreputable street in the purlieus of Soho, where three girls, fallen from better fortunes, try to earn a pittance by needlework combined with the profits of an obscure haberdasher's shop. Lydia, the elder, has sacrificed her own prospects of happiness to the duty bequeathed to her by her dying mother, of tending and caring for her two young step-sisters, Ella and Maud, who, with the ingratitude of youth, have little sympathy or affection for the staid monitress, so loyally devoted to them. Her story and character are full of that pathos which the poetical faculty can show underlying the most homely existence. The father of the heroines, by name William Prothero, a broken-down City merchant, now living as a pensioner in an almshouse, throws a dark shadow over their lives by his mysterious conduct in connection with the murder of his former partner, against whom he entertained a bitter grudge. His semi-craziness is vividly portrayed, and gives a lurid interest to the development of his character in the events of the narrative. The latter turns on the tracking out of the murder, the secret of which, involving the imprisonment and accusation of the hero, is ingeniously kept until the close. Sal Garboush, the drunken street-vagrant, with occasionally touches of womanly feeling redeeming her coarse and brutalized exterior, is a vigorous portrait of the realistic school, and the squalid misery of her father's death-bed could doubtless be matched in many actual scenes of London life.

The Story of an African Farm. By RALPH IRON (Olive Schreiner). New Edition. London: Chapman & Hall. 1887.

N its appearance in a second edition this novel has received the

what morbid and gruesome character. There is a large admixture of

The

introspective philosophy, which seems to be Agnostic or semiAgnostic as far as it is intelligible, and its pages are coloured with the dreary pessimism characteristic of modern thought. heroine's conversation and conduct imply a negation of all morality, and the lingering tortures of her end are unredeemed by a ray of hope for the future. The story nevertheless, despite these faults, is interesting, even where unnatural, and the incongruous setting of South African settler-life rather heightens the effect of the strange, highly-pitched intellectual aspirations of the principal personages. The secondary sketches of Dutch manners are full of quaint humour, and we feel that the Boer courtship and wedding with their prosaic homeliness are drawn from life.

Dawn. By H. RIDER HAGGARD. London: John & Robert
Maxwell.

THE title-page of this novel bears no date, and though advertised

66

among new works, it would seem on internal evidence to be of earlier composition than the recent writings of the author. In regard of probability or motive of the action, it belongs indeed rather to the penny dreadful" school of fiction, and resembles the tales published in the cheaper serials of this class, in its jumble of sensational incidents, without adequate leverage of force in the characters portrayed to set the machinery of the plot in motion. Some of the incidents and situations ought also on moral grounds to have been omitted, and, as it is scarcely likely to appear in an expurgated edition, it had better be avoided altogether.

Notices of Catholic Continental Periodicals.

FRENCH PERIODICALS.

Revue des Questions Historiques. Janvier, 1887. Paris.

The Empire and the Church in the Reign of Gallienus.Under this title M. Paul Allard writes an article which will prove as interesting to the secular as to the Church historian. The reign of Gallienus, he says, marks one of the most important moments in the political as well as the religious history of the third century. Gallienus began to exercise real power in the West A.D. 258; it was the moment of great invasions menacing the existence of the Empire. He repaired, indeed, the most serious fault of his father, and suppressed the persecution of the Christians, but showed himself less of a sound polítician on another point: instead of encouraging