writer saw much of this life in his youth; "Mark Rutherford's" chronicles, astounding as they must appear to the uninitiated, seem to him photographic in their truth.

There is one difference between Trollope's and "Mark Rutherford's" account of religious forms in mid-century England; one is a picture of life, the other of a kind of death-in-life. Trollope's clerics are all, or nearly all, gentlemen. They are rarely even poor, and it would be excessive to call them sinners. Only a lighter or heavier touch of reserve, snobbery, refinement, ambition, honor, hypocrisy high-mindedness, self-seeking, differentiates them. "Mark Rutherford's" are set in a much grosser frame of things-the frame of the shop parlor, the ill-lit, half-deserted country chapel, the "Dorcas meeting," the heavy mid-day dinner, and the ceremonial tea. They serve little circles of gossip and spite and fussy domination and average stolid human nature, here and there visited by a strain of pure aspiring thought and sentiment, or of defiance and revolt. They are either gross vulgarians, like Mr. Broad, or sly sensualists like his son, or stern, self-disciplined souls like the Calvinist minister The Nation.

in "Tanner's Lane," or heroic figures, struggling to the light amid incredibly mean surroundings, casting off one form of creed after another, beset by passion, weakness, sentimentalism, the craving for sympathy and self-revelation, all the slight creatures and vain longings and sweet perversities of earth-like "Mark" himself. It is impossible to give an idea of how this great and little known writer contrives to fling on to this tiny stage the deepest shadows and the transfiguring lights of human existence, and to mix them with its common experiences; it is enough to say that to him, as to the singer's grave in Wordsworth's poem, those who think and feel will increasingly resort. Essentially his books are histories of English Puritanism, as modern Noncomformity has carried it on; and yet their tone and setting are much more than Puritan. They tell of the waste of rich temperaments and passionate energies which Puritan repression has involved; they tell also of the strength of mind which has survived the struggle, equipped with the moral force it provided, and prepared to meet the phases of spiritual and social change of which they are the most suggestive and convincing harbingers.

The curious doctrine of Signatures may be gleaned in part from the English herbalists, but more particularly from William Coles, who made it the keynote of a book, published in 1659, called "Adam in Eden; or, Nature's Paradise." In the seventeenth century men had begun to scoff at the belief of their forefathers that herbs, stones, and minerals were stamped in sympathetic characters to show their application in the cure of disease, and Coles through his book made a bid to

recover the early doctrine from the limbo of outworn creeds. One Oswald Crol, a chemist of repute and a devout follower of Paracelsus, had lately published in Germany a discourse entitled "De Signaturis Rerum," and the subject had so captured the fancy of our herbalist that he began to reinterpret Nature by the light of far-off days, when the earth expressed in all her substance a language of signs and images amongst which empirics moved as in a kindergarten of medicine.

So late, even, as 1812 there is in Sir John Hill's "Family Herbal" the praise of red herbs for the healing of red wounds of hemorrhages, and the writer has found to-day, in a village in Buckinghamshire, some survival of belief in the yellow flowers of the dandelion to cure bilious affections; but although a cottage dame of her acquaintance applies in orthodox fashion yellow to yellow, like to like, she is yet unconscious' of the doctrine of healing by Signature. It is, in fact, doubtful whether the doctrine ever obtained in this country among the unlearned. No mention of its theory is found in the "Saxon Leechdoms," though there is a hint of some practice in the recommendation of adder's tongue for snake-wounds, and in the description of "gromel" as a cure for stone.

William Coles, following his German contemporary, "the most renowned, ... most learned, . . . most exquisite,

most profound Crollius," presented in his herbal three hundred and forty-three medicinal herbs, one hundred and forty of which show Signatures of healing. He leads with the wall-nut tree, than which no more interesting example could quoted.

be

"Wall-nuts," wrote Coles, "have the perfect Signature of the Head: the outer husk or green Covering represent the Pericranium or outward skin of the skull, whereon the hair groweth, and therefore salt made of those husks and barks are exceeding good for wounds in the head. The inner wooddy shell hath the Signature of the Skull, and the little yellow skin, or Peel, that covereth the Kernell of the hard Meninga & Pia Mater, which are the thin Scarfes that envelope the brain. The kernel hath the very figure of the Brain, and therefore it is very The Saturday Review.

profitable for the Brain, and resists poysons."

It was apparent, however, that no effort on the part of its "modern" advocates could make the old doctrine to live again. By the seventeenth century it had become outworn. If in its origin it had represented a dispensation to meet the earliest needs of humanity, it was now no longer needed as a primer of instruction. There is something almost humorous in the manner in which Crol and Coles worked at discovering Signatures. In their self-appointed task, which they "prosequited with extraordinary dilligence," they dragged forth images of an astonishing subtilty. Not content to read off "Nature's Book" as it was read by eyes of old, they must, as it were, wring fresh meanings from the grudging dame: say that "Misselto of the Oak" is in question as a cure for "falling sickness" or epilepsy:

"The viscosity," wrote Coles, quoting Crol, "and tenacious quality of the Bird-lime representing those melancholy and phlegmatick humors . . . by which it is caused, or else as Bird-lime doth detain whatsoever it fastens to, so this Disease ceasing (? seizing) upon the Body as the Ramora doth upon a Ship, will suffer it to go no further but maketh it to fall down." Yet two hundred and two herbs lack signature!

Our author makes nevertheless a delightful medium through which to view the ancient doctrine. He may be sympathized with in his abandonment to the fascination of his subject, for it shines in all the glamor of the faery past. In the larger view it is a story of the Great Mother when youth and joy were in her veins, a story that is worthy of remembrance, since every tradition of the earth is a part of our inheritance of herself.

There is always a tinge of vulgarity about present "display," and almost always an atmosphere of romance about the "display" of the past. It is of course no new theory that vulgarity and display should be allied. When under the guidance of Professor Dill we go back across the centuries and look on at a Roman dinner-party taking place about the beginning of our era, we realize for how long they have been connected, and how they dwelt together in Cæsar's household. A divorce, however, would appear to have taken place between them during the Middle Ages. Or is it merely that amid the twilight of that age of terror and delight the gauds and pageants flash past us and are gone, and the eyes of the historian, accustomed to the darkness and dazzled by the glitter, cannot distinguish the sordid details? The stress laid by scholastic moralists upon the sin of pride suggests that they recognized some social ugliness behind the spectacular splendor which is to us invisible. We do not remember that Shakespeare in any scene makes clear the vulgar side of display; but in times of sudden mental revival material ostentation is seldom very aggressive. In the eighteenth century the satirists began to busy themselves with the question of display, and soon the bloodstained hands of the French revolutionaries tore down its tawdry signs. To-day the word is in every discontented man's mouth.

But if the romantic display of the past was touched with vulgarity, is not the vulgar display of the present touched with romance? The rich try, no doubt, to impress their neighbors with the look of their luxury, their fine houses and horses and stuffs and food and pictures and lands. So did their prototypes hundreds of years ago; and so well did they succeed that the im

pression they made upon the world has never been effaced, and we still rummage in imagination among the ruins of their "display," and poets and painters still struggle to reproduce its effect. But the picturesque is fading out of life. Modern display is not pictorially beautiful. Will it ever inspire the poets of the future? We hardly think so. Yet in what a wonderful way it attracts men and women in the present. Society swarms like bees about the rich. Why? Because the world of to-day is greedy, luxurious, and indolent, and anxious for what it can get, says the bitter and superficial moralist. But if one looks at the matter a little closer, will that explanation do? Half the people who crowd upon the rich have nothing to gain. We all know people who are well born and well disposed, well educated and wellto-do, for whom exceptionally fine food and exceptionally fast motor-cars have no special attractions, who in a material way have always had substantially all they wanted, yet who are always to be found in the houses of the rich, and for whom something which we can only call display has an irresistible fascination. They forgive willingly to rich men defects which would in their eyes render the less opulent "impossible,"-dullness, for instance, or social ignorance, a deficient sense of honor, or what not. Not that we would suggest for one moment that rich men are more dull or ignorant than others. They are for the most part very ordinary people, and they have what the ruck of very ordinary people wish for. The rich vulgar man is only the poorer vulgar man materially magnified, and the rich cultivated man is only the poorer cultivated man made conspicuous by money, yet he does in some sense stand for romance. He represents a goal. The game of life would