Life of Madame Roland. From the Boston Traveller.

Wollstonecraft à curiously suggestive sociological interest was involved; but no other woman's life in this biographical series has been associated with the affairs of state. Miss Mathilde Blind, who wrote the George Eliot of the series, has been selected to write the Mine. Roland. Miss Blind is an avowed radical, and has dipped into German and English politics to some extent in her biographical work. She wrote for the Century Magazine a strong sketch of Count von Moltke, and has otherwise identified herself with some commentaries on public life. In her Madame Roland Miss Blind has done the best work that has, perhaps, ever come from her pen. She is thoroughly in sympathy with her subject, and she brings to the work a clear discrimination of character, a power of keen and searching analysis and a swift apprehension of relations between cause and effect in the action and reaction of character and events.

Marie Jeanne Philipon, afterward Mme. Roland, was born in Paris March 17, 1754. She was a year the senior of Marie Antoinette. "In soul she was the heiress of the great men of antiquity," says Miss Blind. From her earliest childhood she was very fond of reading. At the age of nine she was absorbed in Plutarch. There followed "Telemachus" and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered." After that, Voltaire. At the age of seventeen she was engaged in a prolonged correspondence with a girl-friend, in which she analyzed every book she read, and discussed religion and philosophy. Of these Miss Blind says:

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Soyons nous." Here we have the note of the highest originality,-of genius. Instead of a slavish fol. lowing of custom, instead of trying to digest the old dough of superannuated ideas, which has spoiled the digestion of so many generations, let us dare to solve the problems of life in our own way and day; let us try and see for ourselves, not take it for granted that all our thinking has been done for us by our ancestors. If in these thoughts of the young student there is something of the lofty calm of the sage, there is likewise a tone of practical sagacity and daring, indicative of a nature eminently fitted for mixing in and controlling affairs.

Mme. Roland had the heroic nature. She saw clearly the abuses of monarchy; she was unflinching in her devotion to democratic ideals: she was loyal to her highest convictions, and this lofty personality is well portrayed by a writer so intensely in sympathy with her noble character as is Miss Blind. The book is one of the most important of the Famous Women Series. (Roberts. $1.)

Mary Clemmer Ames.

From the Boston Traveller.

"An American Woman's Life and Work," is the title of a memorial of Mary Clemmer. It is a book which reveals the life of a woman who was a strong force in letters, and a stronger force in life; a woman

of a high order of intellectual powers, gifted with the artist's sense of beauty and the poet's expression, and of reverent, uplifted spirit. Mary Clemmer is well characterized in the beautiful dedication as "poet, lover of her country and follower of Christ." The volume is written by her husband, Edmund

"The knowledge of ourselves is no doubt the most useful of the sciences. Everything tends to turn towards that object the desire to know which is born with us, a desire we try to satisfy by acquainting ourselves with the histories of all past nations. This is by no means a useless habit, if we know how to avail ourselves of it. My views on reading are already very different from those I entertained a few years ago: for I am less anxious to know facts than men; in the history of nations and empires I look for the human heart, and I think that I discover it, too. Man is the epitome of the universe; the revolutions in the world without are an image of those which take place in his own soul."

The girl thinker, lost in meditation in her little cell, while outside the din and roar of the mighty city were lulled for awhile, actually hit upon one of those truths which we are wont to consider as the mature fruit and last result of Goethe's philosophy of life. It is not knowledge, or power, or literary fame that this child of the Seine asks for (though they were all within reach of her); no, what she

words:

'She lived a consecrated life; a life full of brave purpose, of high endeavor, of earnest and conscientious work, of patriotic and poetic feeling, of tenderness and self sacrifice, of all womanly virtues and worthiness, so that it remains a permanently useful and helpful life to all who are or may become familiar with it, and because by making known all her qualities of mind and heart, all that she was as well as all

she did, there will be revealed a noble and lovely human character, and a fit representative of American womanhood, this book is added to the volumes

which embody her literary work. No person who did not know her well can fully acquaint himself with the spirit which animated and controlled her, and the circumstances which mainly affected her life. without feeling an increase of respect and of admiration for one who fought her battle in the world so well, and put always into all she did the very best that was in her. Her soul seemed to me spotless,' writes one who knew her long and intimately; and the words will not seem exaggerated to any who came within the charmed circle of her private and personal life."

The story of Mrs. Clemmer's life in its outward

events has before appeared in the columns of the Traveller, and is told, in some measure, in the book entitled "Our Famous Women" (A. D. Worthington, $3.50), published some three years ago. Mr. Hudson has shown wise and delicate judgment in giving, principally, the presentation of her character and achievements, "not," as he says, "that there is any obligation of reticence or of silence concerning her career. To avoid giving needless pain or offence, but never to avoid the truth if the truth need be spoken, was with her an all-important rule of conduct. All the main conditions of her life were determined by circumstances and considerations over which she had practically no control. Surrounded from her earliest years by many obstacles to systematic study and to the highest mental development, she overcame them all, and attained to powers which she might never have shown if her life had been an easy one, and her experience more superficial. Not the difficulties in themselves that environed her, nor the hardships that bore down upon her, but how she surmounted them, should be the main object of regard in any just estimate of her character."

The greatest defect in Mr. Hudson's memorial volume, and one, perhaps, that from the nature of the case could hardly be avoided, is the lack of record during her eighteen years of important political correspondence from the Capital. Here was a period which presented an impressive and dramatic pano. rama. Her relations with characters who have now passed into history were varied and far-reaching. Charles Sumner was her strong friend. From him and other noted men at the time she gained many a clue to the inner forces that determine a nation's destiny. They were years during which a splendid intellectual pageantry passed before her, and of it she could have said with the classic historian that "all of it I saw and part of it I was." Very largely such a period in a life eludes the biographer, unless he be possessed of the vivid and reconstructive imagination. That this dramatic panorama, which was an wholly unique experience, and which has never been in the life of any other American woman, should receive no perpetuation, must be a lasting regret not alone to the personal friends of Mary Clemmer, but to all who prize the possible greatness of womanhood. It is this period in Mrs. Clemmer's life that formed the essential and concentrated force of her work, and that determines her intellectual rank. Perhaps the biographer may yet arise whose sympathetic insight and reconstructive imagination may be able to materialize in permanent form the splendid and dramatic pageantry of Mary Clemmer's eighteen years of political correspondence. nor. $1.50.)

Cyclopedia of Painters.

From the Boston Beacon.

(Tick

Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons have published the first volume of a great and notable work-a "Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings"-edited by John D. Champlin, Jr., and Charles C. Perkins.

Mr. Champlin has done good work in editing other encyclopedias, and Mr. Perkins has no superior in England or the United States as an honored authority on painters and paintings. Accordingly, something very excellent may be expected in every possible respect, particularly as the publishers support the great undertaking with their usual liberality and with all the resources of a great house accustomed to deal in sumptuous publications. The present work will be the fullest dictionary of its kind, and will include contemporary artists. The most important works will be treated in separate articles giving full information, also, of the best copies and replicas. The authorities relied upon will be original research, monographs, catalogues, the art journals, and especially autobiographies; and the bibliographical mate rial will be given in full. The articles will be brought down to January 1, 1886. The illustrations will number more than two thousand in all, and will include outline engravings, portraits, fac similes of monograms and forty-eight full-page reproductions of modern works, mostly in photogravure. The first volume contains copies after Millet, Gérôme, Corot, Gabriel Max, Zamacois, Regnault, Fromentin, Neuville, Bonnat, Poynter, Bouguereau and William M. Hunt, a hundred and five outlines, a hundred and eighty-two portraits and two hundred and twelve signatures. The second volume will be ready by auThe edition has been limited to five hundred copies, at $25 per volume-a very moderate price, considering the enormous cost of the undertaking and the fact that the larger part of the work will be original. There is no good dictionary of painters. Bryan's does not include the living artists, and Julius Meyer's justly famous work, begun in 1870, is incomplete. It may have suggested the present "Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings," which is planned on a more sumptuous plan than either. (Scribner. 4 vols., $100.)

tumn.

Actors and Actresses.
From the N. Y. Mail and Express.

Messrs. Brander Matthews and Lawrence Hutton have edited, and Messrs. Cassell & Co. have just published, the first of a series of five volumes upon the lights of the English and American stage. It is entitled "Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, from the Days of David Garrick to the Present Time," and contains fourteen different studies of kings and queens of tragedy and comedy by seven different writers, Mr. William Archer furnishing two on Charles Macklin and Tate Wilkinson; Mr. Robert W. Lowe, two on James Quin and Henry Mossop; Mr. Austin Dobson, three on Katharine Clive, Margaret Woffington and David Garrick; Mr. Walter Herries Pollock, two on Spranger Barry and his wife, and John Henderson; Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, two on Frances Abington and George Anne Bellamy. Mr. Edward Eggleston, one on Lewis Hallam, and Mr. Brander Matthews two on Samual Foote and Thomas Sheridan. The plan which the editors have followed here differs from all the plans that have

hitherto guided the editors of similar books, which of course have been useful to them in this one. They thought (as they tell us in their Introduction) that there yet remained to be written a series of histrionic biographies on a new plan. "Each of the earlier collections of the Lives of the Players,' whatever its title, was the work of but one writer, who saw the succession of tragedians and comedians from his own point of view, personal and necessarily narrow. The editors felt that it was possible by the aid of the more modern methods of literary co-operation to prepare a broader book than any before published. They believed also that the article of the expert might be supplemented by abundant extracts from sources not generally drawn upon, especially from the periodical publications which are daily increasing in number and importance. With the aid of all earlier works and with assistance of contem. porary newspapers and magazines, they resolved to give a threefold view of the actor to commingle biography, criticism and anecdote." That their plan was an excellent one-the best on the whole that could have been devised-will be apparent to the readers of this volume before they have finished the first study, and their verdict when they have gone through the volume itself will be that it is vastly entertaining. So great a variety of histrionic material was never before gathered in a single work. It fairly sparkles with good things. (Cassell. $1.50.)

An Art Almost Lost. From the N. Y. Star.

The elocutionist, as he or she is, has for some time been a social thing of horror. Who has not suffered the pang of hearing 'Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night" with appropriate gestures worthy of the simple village maiden in "Adonis?" Who has not heard the "Bells" at times so complacently uttered that he cursed Poe's experiment in verbal melody? And Owen Meredith's "At the Opera," when the infatuated speaker suddenly bursts into song from "Trovatore." And-it is cruel to recall it-the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius. To all who have suffered Mr. Ayres' comprehensive and sensible little book will be a treasure. Sarcasm has never softened the methods of the confirmed elocutionist yet, for he has always been taught that he must draw a circle when he utters the word "world," point to the ceiling when he speaks the word "heaven," and clutch with effusion at his left side when he breathes any sentiment about a heart. But, though sarcasm and ridicule have failed to pierce the self-conceit of the average elocutionist, sound reasoning may bring him to a regard for better things. And Mr. Ayres' reasoning is very sound, and it has nature and experience to back it. He insists that the letter kills-that is, that all the phrasing, the vocal gymnastics, the giving of arbitrary meanings to certain tones and gestures, are vain if the speaker does not thoroughly understand his author, for the elocutionist is generally an interpreter rather

than a creator.

The knowledge of this would save the unsympathetic mouthings against which Mr. Ayres protests.

Mr. Ayres' book fills a vacuum. We have nothing like it. There are plenty cut-and-dried rules printed, with diagrams representing figures with arms or legs extended, supposed to be in positions of despair, of hope, of defiance; but nothing that so keenly touches the essentials of an art which bids fair to be lost in a mist of useless and pretentious traditions. Mr. Ayres' book contains, among many others, one especial evidence of his fitness for the delicate task he has undertaken. This is his appreciation of Edwin Forrest-certainly one of the most perfect interpreters of delicate shades of meaning the English stage has known.

"I would walk farther and give more to hear any one read Hamlet's soliloquy on death as Mr. Forrest read it than I would to see any living American actor play his whole repertory; and I would walk farther," writes Mr. Ayres, "and give more to hear any one read the part of Queen Catherine in Henry VIII. as Miss Cushman read it than I would to see in her best part an actress that should embody all the excellences of all the American actresses of today. Mr. Forrest and Miss Cushman were great players, and what made them great was their wonderful powers as readers, as elocutionists."

Mr. Ayres' manual is an explanation of the causes that made Edwin Forrest a good reader. It is the most terse analysis of the art of good reading, and the results are so deftly presented that any student of ordinary common sense can make for himself a synthesis of more value to him than the rules that elocution masters lay down as infallible. It must not be supposed that Mr. Ayres is an advocate for the commonplace style brought into fashion in the teacup-and-saucer comedies, which the undiscriminating take for naturalness. He declares for sincerity in elocution, which means an appreciation of the author's meaning and an honest purpose to produce legitimate effects by rendering, not by vocal pyrothechnics that are to the sense of the author what variations on a musician's masterpiece are to his composition. Mr. Ayres will shock some of us by his assertion that he has heard only three readers that he would be willing to put into the first rank. These were Charlotte Cushman, Fanny Kemble and Edwin Forrest; but, after all is said, it will be hard to prove by examples on the modern stage that he is wrong. He does not leave his readers without illustrations of his sayings by which they can profit. He points to the German actors-the best of whom we have frequent opportunities of hearing in New York. When they are serious, avoid imitating them, he says, for they are artificial; but when they are comic, they are entirely natural. We have given a false impression of Mr. Ayres' book if we have represented that he deals mostly in theories. In truth, it is direct and practical. It is the best antidote possible to the false and vulgar methods that debase a lovely art. (Funk & W. 60 c.)