flourished a style more native and Italianate. A characteristic example will be found in the commentaries of Caesar, printed by Giunta, and now in the British Museum. This style is far from Grolieresque; and it is characteristic of a class widespead in Italy at that day. It has beauty, dignity and a charm untiring which are not found so unalloyed in the more gorgeous and flowing triumphs of the great French craftsmen. The Italian of the Renaissance accomplished beauty with few and rigid elements. He worked simply, his tools are obvious, so to speak; and he obtained this dignified and surpassing grace not in his tools themselves, but in his placing of them. The theme is simple-a panel merely but with a fine eye for true proportion and the just measure between decoration and unembellished surface, more sensitive to mass than detail, he achieved triumphs of proportion which have never been surpassed. This was the native Italian genius, proportion-architectonic is the word some critics use and where this quality, call it what you will, is found, will be found also the finest sentiment of form wedded to the finest sense of fitness.

There are two limitations under which every artist works-his tools and the material; and in gold tooling far more than in other graphic arts is the tool a limitation. The tool is the fibre of the design, and, though a seeming paradox, the more elemental the tool, the greater the artistic freedom. The study of style becomes inseparable from a study of the tool-the piccoli ferri. The first tools, Saracenic in character, foliage conventionalized beyond all recognition, were made with solid faces. The result was heaviness, broad surfaces of gold without the contrasts of light and shade which lighter tools make possible; though, in truth, the early Italian craftsmen obtained this gracious relief by fine contrast of tooling gold and blind. It was an advance, however, when tools were "azured"-the face made of horizontal lines as azure is shown in heraldry. Then followed tools in outline merely; and with these three, with tools solid, azured, outlined, the later Italian artists accomplished those marvelous books of Maioli and Grolier.

Thus far the advance was wholly on Italian soil; but with the return of Grolier to his native country the seed was sown in France, which, thenceforward, to our own day perhaps, became the land par excellence of binding. "La relieure est un art tout Francais," says Mr. Thoinan. True, perhaps, but let us not forget that in the art of binding as in other arts, the first vivifying impulse and first joyous cry of the renascent soul of man arose in Italy; then remembering this and studying these earlier Italian bindings it may be that we will come to realize that in the art of binding, as in other arts, the first fruits were the best.

FLETCHER BATTERSHALL in Book Culture.

KEATS.

Nay, not on water, Adonis fair,

Is writ thy name, but on the hearts of all Who wept and weep still o'er thy early fall; Endymion's notes have not dissolved in air, And Lamia's verse an exile makes of care; Like to the song of some proud bird that sings A matchless melody, I list to thee Entranced and mirrored in poetic springs, The full reflection of thy soul I see,

I hear the echoes of thy harp's pure strings, O bard of lofty verse! O prince of melody! Who died in youth beside the summer wave, Thy song awakes the world and homage brings To thee, and plants a flower on thy grave. T. C. HARBAUGH.

KEATS.

We burn to wield thy flower-dipped pen, O Keats,
And catch the music of thy teeming brain!
Albeit thy verse is crimsoned with the stain
Of a fast-ebbing life that sore entreats

A rest from toil, and though each word repeats
A carol in itself to cost thee pain,
For the rare wealth of thy immortal strain,
We would endure thy heartaches and defeats.
Often thy thought is tranquil as a sky

Unflecked, intense, majestic and serene;
Now bathed in color as the clouds that lie
In flocks, rose-tinted, edged with snowy sheen;
Then laden with love's lulling melody,
Or fervent like the twilight's golden scene.
A. T. SCHUMAN.

KEATS.

("I think," wrote Keats, in 1818, “I shall be among the English Poets after my death.")

Dear heart that throbbed, but only throbbed to break
Crushed by the coldness of this frigid clime;
Not thine thy thirst from gushing Fame to slake,
Though tending always to the great sublime;

A hundred years since thou wert lapped by Time,
A hundred years since thou wert cradled, held
As dearest of the dear, ere thought-compelled,
In after hours, to blossom into rhyme!

O! Keats! thou sensitive, most high-strung soul,
As finely fibered as the frailest leaf,
Seeing, prophetically, the distant goal,

And yet debarred-debarred by pain and grief,
And keen neglect from plucking rose-wreaths whole-
Tiller and sower, yet denied the sheaf.

But now the curtain lifts-behold! the play,
The tragic play, inwoven with thy life,

Is drawing to its close; the dawning Day
Dispels the Night, the thunder and the strife;
And Fame's bright sunbeams burn, and Hate's cold knife
Is sheathed, nay, broken, trampled on with scorn-
And yet, dear blighted blossom, genius born,
Where wert thou midst the clash of woe-clouds rife?
Ay! where wert thou? and whither didst thou hie?
Away from England, and from England's chill;
'Twas thine to dream of Fame, but fameless die,
The canker-worm within thee that could kill!
But now a hundred years-and men ask why-
Why is not Keats alive to charm them still?
E. L. T. HARRIS-BICKFORD.

The Lost Book.

There was once a man who lost a Book, and thereupon all his importance in the world was at an end. The volume had been compiled by his ancestors, and it was full of rare and strange wisdom; the result of all the varied experience of his race, the perfect lesson learned from all their woes and joys and labors on the face of the earth.

When the man knew that his Book was lost, he realized that he himself might as well have vanished. from sight, for all the use he would thereafter be in his day and generation. None of his blood were men of creative, but rather of receptive minds. All their power of knowledge whereby they were enabled to accomplish great results was the outcome of patient gleaning and interweaving of small ends of experience. This book of the garnered wisdom of his ancestors had been a veritable lamp unto his feet; without it he must evermore grope in the dark.

When the man first knew that his Book was gone from the sacred hiding place in which he had always kept it, he exhausted himself with vain searchings. He knew not how it could have been lost, for no mortal except himself had known where it was concealed. The man searched day and night in vain, and at last settled himself patiently into his estate of foolishness and error. His neighbors expected nothing more of him, and he expected nothing of himself. Continually he met the wall with painful shocks by reason of wrong turnings, continually his very soul was jolted by sudden lacks and heights of steps.

So the man lived and died, and all his road of life was a network of missteps and stumbles, and he gained no esteem from his neighbors or himself. Every one said: "If the Book had not been lost, he might have made something of his life." And he said, when he came to die: "If only I had not lost the Book, I might have known how to live."

THE BOOK I'VE READ BEFORE.
I hear of many a "latest book";
I note what zealous readers say,
Through columns critical I look,
With their decisive "yea" and "nay."
At times I own I'm half inclined
O'er some new "masterpiece" to pore;
But in the end I'm apt to find

I choose the book I've read before!

Its well-known contents suit my taste:
I know what it is all about;
And so I never am in haste

To find "how it is coming out."
But quietly I wend my way:

O'er each familiar scene I pour-
The bright, the dark, the grave, the gay,
Of that old book I've read before.
Then worry not, my puzzled friend:
I'm odd, I own, and so while you
Your way through countless volumes wend,
Entranced with each, so "late" and "new";
Be not surprised that I meanwhile,

Avoiding new ones by the score,
Full many a passing hour beguile
With some old book I've read before.
And if, perchance, the hint you take
To shun the new and read the old,
And find, surprised, the change you make
Reveals new beauties, all untold;
"Twill surely duplicate my joy,

While o'er the old I fondly pore,
When you, with me, find sweet employ
In some old book we've read be.ore.
CHAS. R. BALLARD in Literary World, 1890.

False hair and an alcoholic drink.... Wiggiu The way we shall look after this mental

strain....

Haggard

But after the man was dead, and laid away in his tomb, the door thereof closed, and the willow branches sprung back over it, and the violets blooming on the sods of the roof, some one passing late at night by the house where he had dwelt, saw a bright light in a window, and wondered because nobody was living therein. Then he called another neighbor, and together they entered, and behold, the lost Book lay on the dead man's table, and upon the open page was painted, as with colors. of flame and light, the passing and the stumbling and the faltering of the dead man along his road of life, and the shining of the picture was greater than all the written wisdom of the Book.