and soon the rotund face of the rising moon flouts above the trees, and the silvery tinkle of the bells is followed by a chorus of jackals paying their noisy compliment to its loveliness." In China the author was exposed to the greatest perils indeed, narrowly escaped with his life. Of this unknown and primitive land he says: 'The villagers in the upper districts of Quangtung are peculiarly wanting in facial attractiveness. In some of the villages on the upper Pi-Kiang the entire population, from puling infants to decrepit old stagers, whose hoary cues are real pigtails in respect to size, are hideously ugly. They seem to be simple, primitive people, bent on satisfying their curiosity, but in the pursuit of this, they are, if anything, somewhat more considerate than the Persians. Mothers hurry home and fetch their babies to see the Faukwae, pointing me out to their notice, very like pointing out a chimpanzee in the zoological gardens. In these village inns, the spirit of democracy embraces all living things."

In speaking of the building of the Taj Mahal in Agra in India, he appears to have made a slight mistake in the time occupied in building "this sublimest object in the world of architecture." But despite a few slips of the pen, Mr. Stevens has certainly produced a volume above the average of ordinary books of travel, and one which, whether read for pleasure or for information, will well repay perusal.

THE PURITAN AGE AND RULE In the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685. By GEORGE E. ELLIS. 8vo., pp. 576. Boston, 1888: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The aim of the author of this volume, the learned president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has been to show with more fullness and method than has been done heretofore, the motives of estrangement and grievance which prompted the exile of the Puritans to Massachusetts, and the grounds on which they proceeded to exercise their severe and arbitrary rule in this country. He has written from the historic standpoint, without criticism or apology for the acts of the Puritan rulers, although one cannot well read his terse and graphic paragraphs without a painful sense of their mistaken notions in regard to civil authority, and intense sympathy for them as they groped their way in the darkness and were themselves governed by the peculiar delusions of the age. We are told with much force in the preface: It may be affirmed that proportionally more pages have been written and put in print concerning the early history of Massachusetts-including the commonwealth, the municipalities which constitute it, the incidents and events, the men and the institutions identified with it-than those concerning any other like portion of the earth's territory."

At

the same time one writer has followed another with such surprising fidelity, that fresh studies are always welcome. Dr. Ellis has been an earnest student of the local history of Massachusetts for a long series of years, and in reading backward through many books he has traced and discovered many of the original and primary sources of information concerning the founders and early legislators of the commonwealth-such as their own autograph letters, private journals, and public records-and no eminent scholar of the present generation is better able to discuss the theme. These Puritans attempted a wholly novel scheme and experiment in civil government. They were loftily sincere of purpose, and exhibited some of the highest qualities of character-self-consecration, fortitude, constancy-and various forms of sacrifice. Dr. Ellis observes that "the experiment was in a continuous line with others which preceded and have followed it-alike ideal and practical, in the development of social, civil, and industrial schemes for human progress. It was entitled in that series of experiments to have had its trial. Begun by one generation it was continued into another. It was clung to tenaciously -we may even say defiantly.'

Four episodes under the administration of these Puritan rulers are ably rehearsed in these pages. The stern and tragic period under special review covers half a century. The points emphasized are the relations of the Puritans as nonconformists to the Church of England at the period of its reformation and reconstruction in the transition from Papacy to Protestantism; the peculiar estimate of and way of using the Bible, characteristic of the Puritans under the critical circumstances of the time which had substituted the Book for the authority of the Papal and the Prelatical church; their finding in that Book the pattern and basis for a wholly novel form of government in civil and religious affairs, with an equally novel condition of citizenship; their attempt at legislation and administration on theocratic principles; and the discomfiture of their scheme as involving injustice. oppression and intolerance. Civil government on Massachusetts soil began indeed with the very utmost stretch of restraint upon every exercise of personal liberty. Dr. Ellis says: "There was no incident, circumstance, or experience of the life of an individual, personal, domestic, social, or civil, still less in anything that concerned religion, in which he was free from direct or indirect interposition of public authority. The missionary Quakers were regarded by the rulers as tramps or vagabonds. This class the Puritans argued, had no right to complain of the laws, because they were free to find release from them by going elsewhere." But the Puritan scheme, or experiment, proved impracticable, and finally came to an end.