Mrs. Bacon shows a new use for the rejected lover, who neither wastes in despair nor plays upon a church organ, but makes the best of himself. He who sighs for originality should read "Open Market." D. Appleton & Co.

Wit is the invariable characteristic of Mr. Maurice Donnay's plays; to morality, they make no pretence, for the French dramatist resents nothing but the accusation of dullness, and there is little danger that this fault will be attributed to the three plays included in the latest volume of the Modern Drama Series. Its title merely enumerates the three plays, "Lovers," "The Free Woman" and "They," of which it is composed. In the first, the man and woman, after years of complacent sin, separate in amity that both may marry, he professing perfect happiness, she saying, "We've seen enough." In the second, the heroine's infidelities scatter dissension and unhappiness about her, and leave her friendless, and miserable because further opportunity of sinning seems denied to her. The third, a farce, reveals a bride and bridegroom who, on the evening of their marriage effect two divorces by eloping with one another, prophesying as they go, that those whom they desert will do likewise. As they depart, the deserted ones enter, ejaculating "Oooh!" One can almost hear the laughter and applause as the curtain falls, after ten minutes of decision and repartee, not quite so long as would be needed to select the flowers for bouquets and

sors.

buttonholes for the ceremony. That he is named Achilles and she Helen seems to content them and neither takes the trouble to consider that both Helen and Achilles had succesThe translator, Mr. Barrett H. Clark, finds this play "more human" than the others; it is certainly not more celestial. The chronological list of the author's twenty plays shows that "The Free Woman" is the latest, and it leaves the reader as calm as the hero, in spite of the heroine's hysterics. Mitchell Kennerley.

Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray collaborate in "August First," a novel chiefly composed of the letters written by a very rich young girl and a clergyman to whom she goes for counsel when her physician informs her that she is doomed soon to die of general paralysis. She has bought a "shiny little pistol" wherewith to make her quietus, and desires that the clergyman will tell her offhand whether or not she will go to hell if she uses it upon herself. Unfortunately the rector is absent, and his young assistant's experience and reading do not provide him with an answer to the girl's inquiry, but he persuades her to wait until he can do some research work and she goes away, leaving him in perplexity. She gives him a fantastic address in which August First stands for her name; and between his letters describing his laborious life, and the preaching of her uncle's Scottish gardener, her tribulations end happily, and the closing pages bristle with surprising whimsicalities. Both in its humor and in its seriousness the book is an antidote for the sentimentality which plays with eschatology and casuistry as an idle boy might amuse himself with popguns. It has no pictures but

His fellow-countryman who described Mr. Bryan as "the greatest American since Barnum" did the exSecretary of State somewhat less than justice. It was the motto of that distinguished showman that the American people like to be humbugged. Mr. Bryan's simple and fervent mind would repudiate any such notion with horror. "Do you call that funny? I call it devilish," was Mr. Gladstone's reputed comment on some characteristic tale of Disraelian cynicism. Mr. Bryan would stand not less comprehensively aghast at the idea either that his fellow-citizens enjoyed being taken in, imposed upon, and wheedled into the acceptance of conscious shams, or that he was the man to indulge their idiosyncrasy. As a matter of fact, one of the first things to be said about Mr. Bryan is that he is impeccably sincere. It took the American people a long while to recognize this. The mildest and most common term applied to him from his first emergence into national notice in 1896 up to a very few years ago was that he was a charlatan. But in the sense of assuming virtues that he does not possess or of advocating opinions that he does not share, Mr. Bryan is not a charlatan at all and never has been. It is a failing absolutely foreign to his open and ingenuous nature. There can be no real approach to understanding him unless this truth is grasped, but grasping it, I agree, is not altogether easy. One reads over the prescriptions he has written out for the various ailments of the body politic, one wades through speech after speech of sloppy metaphysics in which the orator deifies "the People," rediscovers all the estimable verities that most men are content to take for granted, and thumps the cushions of his pulpit with revivalist

What

ardor, and the conclusion seems irresistible that here is our old friend the political quack. Not at all, or not, that is, if quackery carries with it any inplication of deliberate deception. Mr. Bryan believes in his panaceas. would be a platitude in the mouth of another man of another order of mind is in his case the fruit of a sustained intellectual effort. Mr. Bryan after hard thinking arrives at an opinion or a point of view which strikes, and not unreasonably, a detached critic as being the quintessence of all that is callow and commonplace. But the detached critic is apt to forget that millions of men are treading Mr. Bryan's path, and by the unaided exertion of faculties identical with his are reaching the same conclusions. Their minds march with his, but he has the gift of expression and they have not. And another thing the detached critic is liable to forget is that the value of a given view is no index to the quantity of brain-power expended on forming it. It is presented to him, he takes one glance at it, and he recognizes on the spot either one of those incontrovertible axioms that lead nowhere and are beyond discussion or else some egregious fallacy as old as the hills. What he overlooks is that the propounder of these axioms and these fallacies may have evolved them only after intense meditation, is deeply convinced of their truth and originality, and has probably devoted to them an amount of mental toil proportionately as great as was ever lavished on the production of a genuine masterpiece. It is not charity but the merest justice to bear this well in mind when considering Mr. Bryan. People in general are much more ready to suspect a public man's character than to make allowance for a limited environment, a defective edu

cation, and a natural insufficiency of intellect. When he puts forward a policy opposed to all human experience or contradicted by the most elementary facts of economics, they say to themselves that he cannot possibly believe in it and that he is trading on popular ignorance and gullibility. It is only later, and as a rule much later, that they come to see that it really represented his idea of statesmanship, and that wrong-headed views may coexist with an entire honesty of purpose and disposition. The American people have for some time since reached this stage in their judgment of Mr. Bryan. They no longer impugn his sincerity, but they do question his common

sense.

Mr. Bryan's career has been so far typical of the United States as to be unimaginable outside of it. A man of six-and-thirty, whose active life had been divided between an Illinois farm, a law office in Lincoln, Nebraska, and four years in Congress, he was suddenly raised by an opportune speech delivered with incomparable art before an overwrought Convention to the leadership of the Democratic party. An American political Convention is at no time a scene of quiet reasoning and placid discussion. Α thousand-odd delegates who have never worked together in their lives, few of whom are personally acquainted with a dozen of their colleagues outside their own State, meet ostensibly to perform the two most momentous and delicate duties that can fall to a political partythe selection of its candidates and the enunciation of its policy. That in itself is a situation with infinite possibilities. But their deliberations are not even made easier by being held in camera. On the contrary, for every delegate in the Convention building, which as a rule is especially erected for the occasion, there are always from ten to twenty spectators. The mag

netic excitability of mere numbers closes the last hope of calm debate. In a hall crammed to the ceiling with from 20,000 to 30,000 people debate of any kind becomes, indeed, a farce. Every device, moreover, that can stimulate and intensify emotion is unsparingly utilized. The rival candidates for the nomination have each his own body of adherents who jump to their feet and yell when his name is presented to the Convention, and bear his picture round the hall in a screeching, half-delirious procession. When the balloting begins and the issue is close a sort of intoxication fills the air and fires the brain, and the final choice of the delegates is ratified by an excruciating pandemonium that makes the very plaster on the walls quiver. Such an assembly is as formidable an instru ment to master and play upon as any orator could wish to face. And at that Convention in Chicago in 1896 the normal passion of all such gatherings was raised to fever-heat by profound political differences and an utter uncertainty as to what would be their outTime and again it looked as though the meeting would break up in ungovernable riot. It would listen to no one, it would pay respect to no one; famous leaders of the party were as impotent to control it as though they were addressing a tornado. Suddenly there appeared on the platform Mr. William Jennings Bryan, of Nebraska. Nobody knew him by sight, very few had even heard of him by name; he just stood there, smiling, handsome and serene, with a splendid consciousness of power.

come.

As he confronted the twenty thousand yelling, cursing, shouting men before him they felt at once that indescribable, magnetic thrill which beasts and men alike experience in the presence of a master. Before a single word had been uttered by him the pandemonium sank to an inarticulate murmur, and when he began to speak