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Love is but one-from her you may hear it." The women characters of Meredith are said to be worthy of a chapter by themselves. He holds that in intellectual power woman is the mate of man, and in moral power his superior. He will not tolerate the doctrine that woman is but undeveloped man; he denounces that as a lie, and says that "men who have the woman in them without being womanized are the pick of men, while the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their womanliness for some amount of manlike strength." As for the power of woman in man's life, he says that women may either have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or may shoot us higher than the topmost star. And as for man, Meredith holds that one's relations to woman, how he regards her, how he acts toward her, are the most significant things about him, and decide whether he is worthy of approval or of condemnation. But Dr. Dawson finds the chief thing in Meredith's works to be their robust hopefulness. This novelist "has gone down to the sources of life, and uncovered its worst secrets; he has surprised the unexpected and dragged into light the ignored elements of conduct; he has been utterly true to reality; but he has retained, through all, his geniality, his faith in God and man, his hope for the world." He has told us that the only chance of happiness is the belief that this world is well designed, and this is his own belief; and he adds through the lips of his Diana of the Crossways, "Who can really think and not think hopefully?" Like so many of his aphorisms, this is one that goes to the root of things and expresses a philosophy. It would seem to teach that pessimism is the disease of shallow minds, a surface complaint which attacks mainly the less forceful and efficient natures of the race; the wider and deeper natures have too strong a vitality to be its victims. Go deep enough, he says, and you will find that the sources of hope and vital joy are not dried up. You will find no chaos, but a most Divine Cosmos, to know which is to rejoice in life. Despair is a disease; the sane and sound nature must needs be hopeful. A little thought, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing, and may breed pessimism. A little more thought takes one out of the storm-belt into the far-reaching sunlight. "I think it al’ays the plan in a dielemmer," says the wise Mrs. Berry, "to pray God and walk forward." Nor can any better plan be invented for the guidance of bewildered souls. There is, of course, a thoughtless optimism, as there is a thoughtless pessimism—the optimism of those who recognize no problems or dilemmas in life, and whose gayety is the mere frisking ebullience of the happy animal. But the glory of George Meredith's optimism is that, having seen the worst, he believes in the best. Having touched the lowest depth, he still has eyes to discover the starry height, and has ears to hear the music of the spheres. In this resolute and intelligent optimism he and Robert Browning once more find themselves akin; nor can the spirit of Meredith's work be better expressed than by putting into his lips the wellknown verse of Browning:

I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I spoke;
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my brain
And pronounced on the rest of His handwork-returned Him again
His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw,

I report as a man may on God's work-all's love, yet all's law.

Meredith's pages are sprinkled here and there with aphorisms like these: "Not until he has some deep sorrow does a man find the deep necessity of prayer;” “Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is already measurably answered;" "Many who have attained to God fall from him for this reason-they cling to him with their weakness, not with their strength;" "Expediency is man's wisdom, doing right is God's;" "The compensation for injustice is that in the darkest ordeal we gather the worthiest round us;" and this most perfect prayer for a young lover, "Give me purity to be worthy the good in her, and grant her patience to reach the good in me." In sharp, dark contrast with Meredith's optimism and religiousness is Thomas Hardy's view of life: "His mind is one of the Lucretian order, grave, sad, somber, and dominated by an overwhelming sense of law. His austerity is the Lucretian austerity of a peculiarly solemn genius, brooding over life rather than immersed in it, detached, separate, and viewing men and women with a kind of scornful commiseration. He and joy stand very far apart. He is overweighed with the burden of the world. His lips smile, but in their curve lurks perpetual irony. His eyes have the prophet's severity; he is as one who looks through the dim veil of life to those pitiless forces which control and create it. Let the reader thoroughly acquainted with the writings of Hardy call to mind the groups of people in his books; the bowed peasants, toiling beneath gray skies, the relentless developments of fate that overtake them, the hard, silent heroisms they display, their acquiescence in calamity as a thing inevitable, their rigid, tearless endurance of the blows of circumstance, and he will begin to realize how much the spirit of austerity governs Hardy in all his creations. There is the clang of a pitiless mechanism in all, as there is in the great poem of Lucretius. He is without suavity, he stands apart upon an icy peak, watching with somber eyes the insignificant struggles of a lower world, at once intent, ironically sympathetic, but, like Nature, implacable. . . . His view of life is microscopic rather than astronomic. His eye is fixed upon a brilliantly lit lens, beneath which the contortions of the pitiably futile creature known as man are faithfully exhibited; it does not occur to him that the same creature has authentic relations with infinity. It is difficult to recall any leading figure in Hardy's books who sees life in large perspective, who feels that romance of the infinite which manifests itself in genuine religious emotion. Not one looks beyond the earth, not one is consoled by any thought of future opportunities and vindications. And hence, in spite of the great note of tragedy which is heard ever and again, Hardy makes us feel that life is a little

thing, appointed to derision and disaster, the contortions of a mollusc on a leaf, the flight of a gnat in a sunbeam. Some sense of the gravity and splendor of human life is necessary to that self-reverence which is the true source of all cheerful or hopeful views of life. But Hardy sees no element of gravity or splendor in human life; it is sordid, cruel, mean, and therefore he cannot regard it with cheerfulness. He is, to use his own phrase, 'unreconciled to life,' and his disbelief in life-in its vital good, its moral base, its hidden goal, its possibilities of sublimity or indefinite evolutionproduces in him a constant temper of scornful anger deepening into bitterest melancholy." Hardy's Wessex peasants are a rude, ignorant, but interesting lot, and some of them quite religious in their way. One of them bases his loyalty to the Established Church upon the comfortable assurance that "a man can belong to the Church and bide in his cheerful old inn, and never trouble or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in all winds and weathers, and make yerself as frantic as a skit. Not but what chapel-members be clever chaps enough in their way. They can lift up beautiful prayers out of their own heads, all about their families and shipwrecks in the newspapers." To this another worthy of the same class answers with corroborative feeling: "They can, they can, but we Churchmen, you see, must have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it all, we should no more know what to say to a great gaffer like the Lord than babes unborn."

Astronomy in The Old Testament. By G. SCHIAPARELLI, Director of the Brera Observa tory in Milan. Authorized English Translation with many corrections and additions by the author. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. New York; Henry Frowde. Pp. vi and 178. Price, cloth, $1.50.

That an astronomer of high rank and of international reputation should deem it worth while to write a popular book in Italian, for the scientific series of Hoepli, on the astronomy of the Old Testament is an interesting sign of the times. The book first appeared in 1903, was published with changes and corrections in German in 1904, and now appears in English, having passed the correcting eyes of the greatest Old Testament scholar in England, Professor Driver, and also of one of the best Semitic scholars in the person of Mr. A. E. Cowley, the learned, accomplished and amiable sub-librarian of the Bodleian Library. The writer accepts in general the literary conclusions of the Wellhausen school as to the origin and date of the Old Testament books, but he flatly declines to be led astray by the mythological theories of Professor Winckler which have so strangely been embraced by Dr. Alfred Jeremias. The book is sufficiently comprehensive to suit many tastes. It begins with the Firmament, the Earth, the Abysses, and passes on through Stars, Constellations, the Mazzaroth, the Day, the Jewish Month, the Jewish Year to a conclusion in the Septenary Periods. It is well written, has a certain solemn loftiness of manner well befitting its subject, and is in parts as stately as the constellations

themselves. We do not know any single book in which such a mass of information, on the whole reliable, is to be found concerning the astronomical references in the Old Testament. But we are not in all respects satisfied with it. Professor Schiaparelli gives generous recognition to the religious supremacy of the Old Testament writers over all others in antiquity, and this is well. But he does not seem able to divest himself wholly of the modern fallacy that the whole ancient Orient was helplessly deficient in powers of observation. He thus clings to the idea that the Old Testament writers generally did not know that watery vapors rise from the sea into the clouds, and are thence cast upon the earth in the form of rain, which in turn pours into the sea through the rivers. He thinks indeed that the "learned and gifted thinker who wrote the book of Job" does know this, but hardly ventures to ascribe so much to the prophets and psalmist, though some of the very passages which he cites in support of his view of their ignorance really show that they did know. He does not seem to have understood what Amos meant when he said of God: "It is he that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth" (9. 6) for he does not quote the passage, though it shows plainly enough that the prophet knew well where the rain had its origin. Professor Schiaparelli knows Hebrew well enough for his purposes, and the revisions in Italian, German, and English to which the book has been subjected have made its Hebrew allusions safe, but his Assyrian is not in such good condition, and here and there needs a pruning. He has exhausted the Hebrew sources; we shall look forward to much fresh illumination on some of the Hebrew cruces interpretum, such for example as Arish and Mazzaroth, when the Assyrian astronomical tests have been equally well sifted. Meantime this entertaining book will serve an extremely useful purpose as the best in its field.

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TOPOGRAPHY

A History of Egypt. From the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. By JAMES HENRY BREASTED, Ph.D., Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History in the University of Chicago; Director of Haskell Oriental Museum; Director of the Egyptian Expedition of the University of Chicago. With two hundred illustrations and maps. New York; Charles Scribner's Sons. 8 vo., pp. xxix and 634. Price, cloth, $5.00 net. Ancient Records of Egypt. Historical Documents, collected, edited and translated with Commentary by JAMES HENRY BREASTED, Ph.D., Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History in the University of Chicago. Volume I. The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties. Chicago; The University of Chicago Press. pp. xli and 344. Price, buckram, $3.00 net, if purchased prior to July 1, 1906, after that date sold only with the remaining three volumes at $16.00 net for the entire set.

These are two books of high importance, belonging together, yet each complete in itself, and, whether considered separately or in union, forming a monument of learning, industry and native capacity difficult to parallel 33

in all the history of American research. Without the heaven-given ability, without the colossal and painstaking industry, without the learning laboriously secured in Europe, especially in Berlin, these volumes would have been impossible. They would also have been impossible but for the opportunities for long residence abroad and extended travel in Egypt which the University of Chicago and its late lamented President Harper afforded Professor Breasted. The result ought to give every American a pardonable flush of pride and every university and its president a new hint of the true way of combining teaching and research. The book which we have named first at the head of this notice meets the long-felt need for a history of Egypt which should be scientific yet readable. It does not supersede the elaborate volumes of Petrie or of Budge, neither of which is readable, but both of which contain immensely valuable collections of ordered inscription material-the clay out of which history is made and needing only the inspiring breath of life. Breasted has amply supplied the breath of life and made a story, clear, convincing and sufficiently detailed for all ordinary purposes, of the most wonderful national history that the world has yet known. The pages have very few footnotes, save the simple references to page and volume of Breasted's Ancient Records of Egypt, the first volume of which we have set at the head of this notice. The absence of references to the literature of the subject has the great advantage of leaving the pages unencumbered and less formidable to the eyes of laymen, but it may be seriously doubted whether this advantage is not more than counterbalanced by the loss to the serious student of the guidance to his further study which ample references to the literature would afford. The footnotes in Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, for example, are of surpassing interest and full of instruction. Breasted indeed gives the opportunity of control over the inscription material by the references to the Ancient Records, but his history utilizes an immense mass of material from other sources, classical, biblical and modern, to which the references are scant, and much of which nobody but the specialist would be able to identify. But this is a small matter to give pause, and largely, after all, a matter of taste concerning which the gods of Egypt were not wont to dispute. In respect of almost everything else the books deserve unstinted praise. The history begins with a survey of the land, the chronology and documentary sources, and then proceeds from earliest Egypt in broad sweeping lines to the Persian conquest in 525 B. C. The concluding words are eloquent in themselves and full of an appeal to students of the Bible, and we need make no apology for quoting them here: "With the fall of Psamtik III, Egypt belonged to a new world, toward the development of which she had contributed much, but in which she could no longer play an active part. Her great work was done, and unable, like Nineveh and Babylon, to disappear from the scene, she lived on her artificial life for a time under the Persians and the Ptolemies, ever sinking,

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