LITERATURE.

This section has been entrusted to Dr. Ernest A. Baker, Profs. Phillimore and Murray, and Messrs. T. Seccombe, J. Minto, and J. K. Hudson as editors and annotators, and these gentlemen are probably responsible for the most useful and authoritative department of a particularly reliable work, both ample in its information, and catholic in what it includes; while its omissions are so unimportant, that we may fairly omit any reference to them.

The classification is on a semi-alphabetical principle, and as it affords a comparison with Dewey, it may be well to give it here :

General.
American.

Celtic (Scottish, Irish, and Welsh).

English (including Anglo-Saxon).

French.

German.

Greek and Latin.

Italian.

Russian.

Scandinavian.

Spanish and Portuguese.
Minor European.

Literature of the East.

:

One thing at least can be said for this arrangement-it saves us from many a logical and philological pit-fall. But it is when one pauses to consider the annotations that the merit of the work is revealed. The notes are so manifestly wholly honest, so excellent in every way, scholarly, luminous, bibliographically informed, and so true in critical appraisement, that it is difficult to avoid the language of exaggeration in speaking of them. Yet it must also be said that aphoristic and epigrammatic as they are, their value would have been enhanced, if reinforced occasionally by dates. Take a haphazard choice under American literature--that of Richard Henry Dana's "Two years before the mast". This is the comment :

"The classical account of seafaring in a merchant sailing ship of the old days. Dana, after leaving college, served his two years in a Boston vessel for the sake of his health, and this is a faithful record of his experiences-a realistic unexaggerated picture of life on shipboard in all its details."

It is true in description, and our own schoolboy delight in its perusal acclaims the classicality awarded it; but how it would have gained in precision, how truly it would have been a welcome tool of the tired cataloguer had but (1834-36) appeared after the first sentence of the note! This American division abounds in labels, some of them well-known almost truisms, yet few librarians will object to have them thus permanently enshrined. We have Nathaniel Hawthorne's "spiritual suggestiveness" combined with "the real glamour of romance"; Washington Irving compared with Goldsmith for "fanciful humour and urbanity"; Poe's command of the "music of words "; Bret Harte as the pioneer of the short story in American literature; Oliver Wendell Holmes "the most genial humanist of American letters"; "the subtle and spontaneous humour" of Mark Twain; Whittier's "sincerity and love of nature"; Bliss Carman as "the most considerable living American poet"; the "minuteness of detail" of Howells; the two periods in the literary career of Henry James; the literary resemblance of Kate Douglas Wiggin to William Black; the "acute

insight" of Edith Wharton, and many others, labels so true in most instances that they will live.

66

The English sub-section is also evaluative, and the criticism rings equally true, while in many instances contents are set out. Who will cavil at the description of Dr. Courthope's "History of English poetry' as "probably the largest history of English literature ever undertaken single handed"? or of Sir Walter Raleigh's "The English Novel" as being learned and of clear historical method? Taine's "History" is described as vivid and suggestive, and Ward's English dramatic literature" as deeply learned and the standard history of the subject. In criticism we are treated to an estimation of Bagehot, Bradley, Stopford Brooke, Churton Collins, Edmund Gosse, R. H. Hutton, Andrew Lang, the two Stephens, Swinburne, and others, and the anthologies are as representative a collection as it is possible to compile. The pre-Elizabethan literature is annotated in most scholarly manner-no false pride deters the editors from quoting Ten Brink, A. W. Ward, and the Cambridge History of English Literature; the references to the expert literature of criticism are also full and adequate. When we get to nineteenth-century literature, again is apparent the happy phrase, and fortuitous, or rather fortunate combination of terseness and intelligence in criticism which characterizes the whole of this section. De Quincey's "Command of imaginative prose and inspired fancy"; Hazlitt's "keen gusto and Catholic enthusiasm respecting classical writers"; Blackmore "owes his fame to one great book"; courage, originality, optimism, and humanity are the qualities ascribed to Browning; Disraeli the younger is dubbed as "brilliant of intellect and imagination"; "the delicate and precise observation" of Richard Jefferies; "the muscular Christianity "of Tom Hughes; and "the brisk style" of Marryat are but a small selection from the obiter dicta pronounced. The studies of Byron, Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Meredith, Ruskin, and Stevenson are worthy of their subjects. In this section many a worthy book is rescued from oblivion, and now and then a note stirs up strange memories of a book, which has almost been a part of one's life and education.

Other divisions of literature are variable in quality. Always the entries are clear and lucid; but the sparing of annotation is most marked in Greek and Latin literature. Here where one most needs the guiding hand of the scholar and expert, the annotation is absent, or it is most formal. Nevertheless, this anthology of literature is in itself sufficient to justify the sending forth of "Standard Books" and we are indebted to the publisher of such enterprise and discretion, for enabling us, by the aid of such stimulating notes, to recognize, or learn what is good, and to understand the why and wherefore of the choice.

C. W. F. G.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Guide to the law and legal literature of Germany, by Edwin M. Borchard, Law Librarian. 4to, 226 pp. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1912.

The Library of Congress has acquired and made available to the investigator a library of comparative law in which the important legal literature of the civilized states of the world can be studied. The present is one of a series of guides to foreign law prepared to aid the student in the use of this material. It aims to furnish the American lawyer with an introduction to the literature of German legal institutions and juristic thought.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

HUMAN AND OTHER REMAINS found in the neighourhood of Newport, Mon. I. Report on Human Remains from the Ifton Limestone Quarries, by Mr. F. H. S. Knowles, B.A., B.Sc.; II. Report on Human and other remains from the Alexandra Dock Extension, Newport, by Prof. Arthur Keith. 4to, 24 pp. (illustrated). Published by order of the Newport Free Library and Museum Committee. 1911.

INDEX TO ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS published in 1908, completing the index for the period 1891-1908; compiled by Allan

Gomme. 86 pp. IS. Congress of Archæological Societies in

1912.

union with the Society of Antiquaries of London. This annual index of authors' names and subject matter has hitherto been published by Messrs. Constable, but is now published by the Council of the Congress, who will however suspend it if satisfactory support is not given by the Societies in the Union. An index is needed of the transactions of archæological societies down to 1890. BOOK PRICES CURRENT. Vol. XXVI, Pt. iii. 1912.

OBITUARY.

RICHARDSON (R. T.).-Mr. R. T. Richardson, whose quietly sudden death at the age of seventy-five will be lamented by many friends, librarians, and readers in the North of England, had worked for years in the Newcastle Reference Library. Engaged, even before 1890, for special cataloguing purposes (more particularly in connexion with the Thomlinson Library), he was appointed in 1893, when a vacancy on the staff occurred, to take the responsibilities of Senior Assistant in the Reference Library. Here, amidst the books in which he took so much delight, and in which he felt so personal a pride, he spent the closing nineteen years of his life.

So far as the public is concerned, he will be remembered partly for the infinite trouble he would take to help any reader whose inquiries seemed to him at all worth consideration; partly because, being himself keenly interested in topical matters, he was so often ready, out of his own knowledge, to guide readers straight to the authoritative books. Of what he thought frivolous, he was impatient. But in other cases he was unwearied, and his long practical experience had made him an adept in routing out the answers to recondite" conundrums" from the least obvious and the least used corners of the library. One of the collections in the library that he most affected was the local section, and he was busily occupied with preparing a catalogue of local pamphlets at the time of his decease. He had also a capital grasp of the large collection of Blue Books and Parliamentary Papers; and the MS. catalogue of them which it had been his part to make forms a valuable clue to their intricacies. Some years ago when the whole Reference Library was being re-classified and re-arranged, he did yeoman's service in getting the tens of thousands of books into appropriate positions on the shelves—a task which (as those know who have tried it) demands endless patience and ingenuity where shelf room is limited, and where the work must be done without interfering with the convenience of readers.

In private life he was a keen politician, and he had done his share of fighting in the Liberal and Radical interests. To the last he kept a watchful eye on the newspapers, and read a good deal in the more solid magazines. He had been at one time a keen reader in theology, and had formed his religious opinions with deliberation. In former days, too, he was a skilful chess-player. For fiction-reading he cared nothing; some forms of poetry however appealed strongly to him. It was found that, not very long before his death, he had written the following lines and had slipped them into a book containing daily readings in the life of Christ. By one of those coincidences that do at times occur, the verse lay there opposite the 23rd of May-the date on which he passed quietly away in his sleep :

O God! O grant us each Thy grace
That when we've run our mortal race,
We shall not fear to see Thy face;
But find in Heaven our resting place.

Mr. Richardson's energy and perseverance, his kindly courtesy, and his advocacy of worthy aims and vigorous enterprise, will long be remembered by his colleagues past and present, on several of whom he has had an excellent and an enduring influence. The last letter he wrote officially is characteristic of the untiring pains he took even over apparently small matters. An inquiry had come from London concerning certain residents in Newcastle about a hundred years ago. The letter was handed over to him to deal with, and he spent hours examining directory after directory in order to supply to the best of his ability the information sought.

BASIL ANDERTON.