In this instance-as people used to say of Mr. Godkin when he flayed somebody in the Evening Post and hurt many a reader's feelings-the sharpest sting of the whole matter seems to be that Mr. Kipling is right. Right in the main, right in his clear sight of the onward. march of other peoples beside the English, and of the shifting of those responsibilities which are the ballast of England's keel. He is right in his text:

66

Life so long untroubled that ye who inherit forget

It was not made with the mountains; it is not one with the deep.

Men. not God, devised it. Men, not God, must keep."

Of course, the relentless sequence which the preacher makes:

"Men, not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from afar,

But each man born in the island broke to the matter of war

As it were almost cricket-as it were even your play

Weighed and pondered and worshipped and practised day on day'

AZARIAH SMITH.

-this is the bitter drop, that an Englishman needs to do more than look at a man of another race, in the intervals of his own sport, to command his submission. To have such an idea broken over their heads in Mr. Kipling's verses is enough to raise piteous outcry among Englishmen, and Mr. Kipling has raised it. But for all his dithyrambic manner and rough address he has made his countrymen hear the truth which they need to heed, and again we see that it is the poet, and not the general or the politician, who has sounded the charge before it is too late for the ranks to respond.

Horace Elisha Scudder, who died in Cambridge a few weeks ago, was a notable example of the type of literary man who is master of his art and is content to know much more than he ever tells. His "Life of Lowell" is undoubtedly his crowning work; as a literary performance it is dignified and polished, and as biography complementary to the volumes of Lowell's "Letters" published some years ago, it leaves nothing to be

desired. Mr. Scudder was born in Boston in 1838, and began his life-work as a literary adviser to the old firm of Hurd & Houghton in 1861. The forty years since that time made a long period of literary activity, diversified by editorial work on the Atlantic. He wrote some thirty books, ranging from biographies of Noah Webster and Bayard Taylor to the famous Bodley books. His charm as a writer for the young was no less than his scholarship as an essayist and his faithfulness as a biographer. For so many years the literary conscience of the firm of publishers with whom he was identified, his loss will be most deeply felt, and his death will add another to the array of literary memories which fill the pleasant rooms on Park Street, in which all the great writers of Lowell's period were at home.

Another missing figure, familiar through many years in the same house, is that of Azariah Smith, who died on January 15th after an association of more than thirty-five years with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and with that firm's predecessors. Mr. Smith was born. in 1833, and graduated from New York Central College in 1855, afterward becoming Professor of Greek in that institution. During the Civil War he served in the Department of Military Telegraph. In 1866 Mr. Smith went to Boston, where he died "in harness " on the way to his desk. Mr. Smith had more friends than most people because he made many new ones and never, we think, lost an old one.

Mr. Elbridge S. Brooks, author and editor, died on January 7th at his home. in Somerville, Mass. More than forty books came from his busy pen, most of them historical and patriotic in character. He was exceptionally successful as a writer for young people. Mr. Brooks

ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS.

was born in Lowell in 1846, and in 1859 came to New York and received his academic education at the old Free Academy, now the College of the City of New York. After leaving college he was connected with several publishing houses in this city, and had some journalistic experience on the staff of the Brooklyn Times, of the Publishers' Weekly, and of St. Nicholas. In 1887 Mr. Brooks moved to Somerville, and since that time had been associated with the Lothrop Publishing Company as editor and literary adviser.

The late Cosmo Monkhouse prepared a book on "Chinese Porcelain," of which a limited edition is to be issued shortly by Messrs. Cassell & Co. in England and by the A. Wessels Company in this country. The matter is classified under two heads -Historical and Descriptive-and Dr. W. S. Bushnell, the author of "Oriental Ceramic Art," contributes a preface and notes. The book is illustrated with twenty-four colored plates and many photographs, and a glossary and bibliography are appended.

Stingy Uncle (to Impecunious Nephew): "Pay as you go, my Boy! Pay as you go!"

Nephew (suggestively): "But suppose I haven't any money to pay with, Uncle?"

Uncle: "Eh?-Well, then, don't go, you know-don't go!" (Exit hastily.)

Sir Walter Besant's "Autobiography," soon to be issued in America by Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., is said (by the Author) to be a book singularly free from personal references. It does not contain long extracts from Sir Walter's diary; it says nothing of the pecuniary side of his career, and is silent about his domestic life. It tells of the circumstances which led him to be a novelist and an antiquarian, and of the circumstances which conduced to his success. Dr. S. Squire Sprigge, of the London Lancet (one of Sir Walter's oldest friends), has written a prefatory note and revised the proof. The same publishers announce a new volume of essays by Maurice Maeterlinck, and two short plays from the same hand.

An interesting exhibition of drawings by Leech, Charles Keene, Du Maurier, Phil May, W. S. Gilbert, H. K. Browne, and A. B. Frost has been prepared by

Messrs. F. Keppel & Co., to whom we are indebted for permission to reproduce several of the sketches. It may be well to remember, as Mr. Keppel suggests in the note prefixed to his catalogue of the drawings, that at the time when most of these sketches were made the artist drew his picture directly on the wood-block, upon which the "wood-cutter"- to use Mr. Whistler's phrase-wreaked his will, almost always to the detriment of the artist's idea. Thus all that remains now of those men's work are the preliminary studies which the artist sketched on paper as a guide for his definitive picture to be drawn on the engraver's block of boxwood. Specially interesting in a way are the drawings made for one of Lewis Carroll's books by Mr. A. B. Frost, of which we reproduce an example. The two drawings by Keene are highly characteristic, and the Leech shows his favorite square-nosed Lord Brougham.