frains aim at reflecting a pathos of mere sentiment that is sometimes almost tearful. There is a kind of wail in Tennyson's "Enone," where the burden of

"O Mother Ida, many-fountained Ida, Dear Mother Ida, hearken ere I die." is repeated (to the horror of the magazine critics of '33, who thought it was done to fill up space) not far short of twenty times. The effect here is partly to enhance the poem's wonderful musical sweetness, which leaves so strong a flavor in the memory that many who know Tennyson well will answer to an unlooked-for question that "Enone" is in rhyme; but partly the effect is of a recurring cry that fills the whole poem with the sound of weeping. For when people weep they do repeat themselves; a word or a phrase comes back and back when a sobbing woman tells her woe; and repentant children are ever tautological.

The Latin refrain was a fashion of the fifteenth century. Dunbar had a fondness for it; Dunbar that was trebly a Latinist-Scotsman, Franciscan, courtier-and he seems to use the Latin mostly for its associations with Church singing. The delightful poem that begins:

"Rorate coeli desuper!

Hevins, distil your balmy schouris!" ends each verse with the Latin line:"Et nobis puer natus est."

The Spectator.

One hears the organ there. A new music breaks in with the refrain, as in Tennyson's great ode the choir comes in upon "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust." It is the device that Shelley uses in the "Hymn of Pan," for there, too, a new music returns with the refrain.

"From the forests and highlands

We come, we come; From the river-girt islands Where loud waves are dumb, Listening to my sweet pipings. Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay On Pelion's shadow outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings." Pan is singing aloud to a rippling tune, and suddenly, as the rhythm changes, the pipe seems to break in upon the human voice.

It may be that there is overmuch guess-work in all this. Perhaps there is no such change of music in the "Hymn of Pan," and what one fancy acknowledges another may deny. To one a refrain seems charged with tears which to another rings mechanical; some hear the pipe where others still hear the singer's voice, and to some all such imaginings are foolishness. But they say that no two minds read a musician's thought alike, and yet music, ill or well interpreted, is still a kindly thing in a grim world.

J. F. R.

The "Royal Women" who are the subjects of Mary Ridpath-Mann's volume bearing that title are Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette and the Empress Josephine. She writes of them, not merely as great figures in history, but as women whose lives were touched with romance and tinged with tragedy. Her

chapters retain the directness and picturesqueness of the lecture-form in which they were prepared. They are vivid pictures of the royal women named and of the times in which they lived. A. C. McClurg & Co.

The Montana cowboy, according to Mr. B. M. Bower, the author of "The

Uphill Climb," and Mr. Charles M. Russell, who gives the book four good illustrations, uses the dialect popularly attributed to his species in the United States, and wears clothes even more eccentric; these are his invariable traits, but on the question of whiskey, one cowboy differs as widely from another as if his vocation were of the least adventurous sort, and Mr. Bowers pleases to select a hero with a congenital weakness for whiskey. As he is an uncommonly good fighter, this is a serious matter both for his friends and for his enemies, sometimes for all his neighbors, and always for the pretty girl who loves him, and the chronicle of his self-cure is very lively reading, besides being a good temperance tract, and a truthful study of the inebriate. The equestrian incidents, of the book are very vivid, and the mystery pervading the whole provides a thoroughly good centre of action Little, Brown & Co.

Gentle, harmless eccentricity coupled with penetrating comprehension of all manner of beauty makes a combination which nobody expects often to encounter in fiction, inasmuch as but one Charles Lamb has appeared in all the English-writing nations; and Roy Rolfe Gilson, in attempting to write the history of an Elia of this Century, born and reared in the United States, gives his readers an original creation, and calls it "The Legend of Jerry Ladd." There are but twelve chapters in his little book, but nothing hitherto written by him is as striking, or as 'permanent in its impressive quality. One may forget many heroes, brave, dashing, studious, or pious, but one can hardly forget Jerry. One may call him fool, poet, idealist, or dreamer, but one will remember him. He comes to town to win recognition and bread and butter, and but stinted

measure of either is meted to him; and then just as he discovers that the master power in man's life is loving unselfishness, comes a summons from the King Himself, and Jerry leaves his few friends and goes away to that Kingdom where he will always be understood. The soft vagueness with which the story is told is consistently maintained, and the book is a charming bit of romance. Doubleday Page & Co.

Elsie Singmaster's "Gettysburg" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) is accurately described in the sub-title as "Stories of the Red Harvest and the Aftermath." All of the nine stories in the book relate to the great battle, the fiftieth anniversary of which has just been commemorated, and to its monuments and memories. The first gives a vivid picture of what that fateful first of July meant to the people of the town, upon whom the horrors of war fell unexpectedly; in the last we see Mary Bowman, one of those who, dazed with dread, witnessed the battle, and from whose home her husband went out to bear his share in it, sitting on her porch, after nearly fifty years of widowhood, her memories of that day as vivid as ever. Between are the stories of Parsons the coward, who became a hero; of Haskell, whose quick courage in rallying the wavering Union lines did so much to save the day; of Lincoln's speech on the battlefield in November 1863; of the blind gunner Criswell, who went back to the battlefield, after the monument had been erected, only to find that his own name had been omitted from the bronze plate where it should have been inscribed with the others; of the disappointment and ultimate triumph of Billy Gude the guide; and other pathetic incidents of the battle or its commemorations. There are four illustrations by different artists.

AVERNUS.

So do we, torn from the world of our knowing,

Dazed and forlorn with the wrench of our going,

Eddy and whirl like water flowing.

Flitting and passing, but ever returning

Back to the hearts where our homefires were burning,

Read we the lesson that's writ for our learning.

Now that the night and the silence enfold us,

Now that the bonds of eternity hold us,

All that we did ere the darkness enrolled us,

All that we did when the red blood was running,

When our hands held their grip and our brains kept their cunning, When evil or good were for taking or shunning,

We must watch blossoming hour by hour,

From the seed to the bud, from the bud to the flower

Wisdom is ours now, but nevermore power!

Dim. ineffectual, vague, unavailing, Emptily grasping and voicelessly wailing,

Bound, in a rudderless ship we are sailing,

Watching the souls that we loved-and around them

A MAN'S PRAYER.

If plunging winds and beating rain
Call me to battle, but in vain,
Or if I am afraid to rise

And bear a burden of grey skies,—
Then to my sick heart requiem give,
I am too poor a thing to live.

If hands of mine forget to pray
And torn feet fear a stony way,
My heart grow weary of the quest
And long for an untimely rest,-
Then cross my hands and let me be,
Life is too fierce and sweet for me.
If open lands and windy skies
Wake not new wonders in mine eyes,
Or through the goodly world I go
And love no friend and hate no foe.-
Then, though my destined days
abound,

Let me be lying underground.

If, while I draw exulting breath,

I seek to run away from Death,
And do not welcome him, nor strive
With him to keep my soul alive,—
Then, in that hour, may Death strike
deep,

For I am only fit for sleep.

But while I love the wind that
blows,

And scent a mystery in a rose,
Or while my torn feet do not tire,
And heart of mine seeks high desire,—
Then, though a spectre, gaunt and

wan,

God, give me strength to struggle on. T. Wemyss Reid.

The Westminster Gazette.

"The crime of the poor is their poverty." To this dogma there has always been a large measure of subscription. We are now called upon to subscribe to a complimentary dogma: "The crime of the wealthy is their wealth." For years past the platforms of Hyde Park have re-echoed the cry that the first step towards the amelioration of the lot of the poor must be the impoverishment of the rich. The superior person may deem the commonplaces of Socialist oratory unworthy of serious attention. For my own part I have always questioned the wisdom of this attitude, and few, I think, will be prepared to maintain it when one of those commonplaces is adopted as the text of a discussion in this Review; least of all, when the preacher is the Rev. S. A Barnett, Canon of Westminster. Canon Barnett has earned the right to discuss such problems by many years of devoted labor in the service of the poor of East London. His mere word carries the weight of long experience. No proposition endorsed by him can be carelessly regarded or lightly dismissed. If, therefore, I venture to subject to criticism the main thesis of his contribution to the February number of this Review,' it will, I trust, be understood that such criticism is offered with unfeigned diffidence, and mainly out of regard for the high authority of the writer and for the deference naturally conceded to his opinions.

"If," says Canon Barnett, "the poor are to become richer the rich must become poorer." This notion is, as we have seen, by no means peculiar to Canon Barnett; but the point which I am anxious to emphasize is that it has captured the imagination of certain

1 "Our Present Discontents." The Living Age. Mar. 29, 1913.

sections of society to an extent which may hardly be credited by those who have not shared the opportunities of the present writer. At the root of much of the prevailing discontent is to be found the idea, sometimes only half formulated and not always articulate, that the wealth of the relatively few is responsible for the poverty of the many.

Has the proposition thus bluntly enunciated any basis of justification either in economic theory or in historical fact? The question is one of admitted significance. In the following pages I attempt an answer.

I.

Is it true that, as a matter of historical fact, the wealth of the wealthy is the root-cause of the poverty of the poor?

The existing "capitalistic" system, against which so many hard things are said, is not much more than one hundred years old, and it is during that same period that "modern England," with its peculiar problems-social and economic has come into being. Who has not been captivated by the idyllic pictures of the pre-capitalistic era which Socialistic writers are wont to draw: the picture of the stout English yeoman, hopelessly conservative in his agricultural methods, possessing neither enterprise, nor capital, nor scientific knowledge, but giving to the smiling countryside an aspect of contentment, if not of opulence; of manufacturing industry carried on mainly on the selfsufficing system-for use rather than for profit and exchange: master, journeyman, and apprentice working happily, side by side, at the loom or in the forge, united by bonds of genuine human affection, living the same life, absorbed in the same interests? The