rallying cry. It is the symbol of indistable authority, of ruling power for good, of ng years of passionate devotion to the art and he literature of France and to the Society of French authors.

In a biographical article in the Monde Ilastré an anonymous writer tells us:

Born in Paris in 1831, Victorien Sardou proced his first play at the age of twenty-three. is production, entitled "Maison des Etud" fell flat. Sardou, however, was a born paywright, and his failure did not dishearten He was an artist who sketched close to ature, a musician who harmonized everything he touched, a dramatic author of versatile and powerful imagination. "Madame Sans-Géne" was written in answer to those sarcastic critics who taunted Sardou with being a "jobber of the drama." After "Madame Sans-Géne" the ritics were silent. Sardou was the inarnation of dramatic work: vaudeville, legitiTate drama, histories, sketches of current man

ners and habits, everything dramatizable. With all, he was an expert stager of plays, kind, and indulgent, but determined and tenacious. Sardou was a walking encyclopedia. His memory was unfailing and to the last every one consulted him and depended on him.

In a long appreciation appearing in the Annales M. Emile Faguet says:

The bases of his nature were, first, anxiety to know all things and to acquire just judgment and sagacity; and, second, a many-sided mind incessantly in action. He had by birth the art of combining the activity of his mind with a thousand different tastes and literary impulses. That perhaps was his only secret. He lived his life, a well balanced one, constantly solicited from all sides, constantly interrupted, incessantly renouncing himself, and taking for discipline and moral exercise what other men deplored as interruptions. As a whole, his life was useful, beautiful, supremely intense, and wonderfully fruitful for good.

IT

T was a happy idea, that of duplicating in New York the celebration in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, London, of the threehundredth anniversary of the birth of John Milton. The simple fact that the poet should be thus honored simultaneously in the Old World and in the New is a sufficient answer to those who are wont to complain that Milton is not appreciated to-day to the extent that he ought to be. The appropriateress of the New York celebration was happily set forth in the letter written on the occasion by Ambassador Bryce:

It is well the occasion of John Milton's birth should be celebrated in America, not only because he was a friend to some of those who anted the institutions of England on these Western shores, but also because he was the man who best expressed in verse of unsurpassed auty and the inspiration of incomparable Strength those ideas of the Puritans of the seventeenth century which so profoundly affected the American spirit.

Of the numerous articles in the magazines and in the daily press to which the anniversary gave rise, one of the most interesting that by Prof. Harry Thurston Peck in the current issue of the Cosmopolitan, enitled "The Many-Sided Milton." Speakng of the remarkable contradictions in the character of the author of "Paradise Lost," he says:

According as we view him from one angle or another, he seems quite inconsistent with himself Indeed, there are several Miltons, each of them almost unrelated to the others. What has

the young Milton, expanding under the blue skies of Italy, writing sonnets to pretty girls or singing in blithesome mood of "spicy nut-brown ale and tipsy dance and jollity,-what has he to do with the dour Latin secretary to the Commonwealth, inditing grave despatches of state, or hurling foul names at the Lord Protector's enemies? And still another Milton is the Milton who wrote Paradise Lost," dignified, austere, and yet benignant. We are apt to think of Milton as the strictest of religionists, and it is hard to reconcile this aspect of the man with his neghis later years he had no prayers at home. And lect of public worship and with the fact that in then there is the harsh, stern, tyrannical Milton who made even his children hate him,-the schoolmaster and writer on education, who, nevertheless, would not have his eldest daughter even learn to write.

When Milton's blindness came upon him, "his daughters were his slaves, and, like all slaves, they united against their master."

Thus, if Milton made them read to him for long hours, and rated them for their mistakes, they took their revenge in petty pilfering, and they sold for their private gain many of the books he loved.

Professor Peck thinks "it is pleasanter to draw a veil over this chapter of a great man's life," and we agree with him.

The Poet's Deep Scholarship. Alluding to Milton's erudition, Mr. J. E. G. de Montmorency, in the Contemporary Review, characterizes him as a scholar in the fullest sense.

His scholarship was the fruit of untiring labor. When the slight, beautiful boy went to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1624, and was there nick

named The Lady," from his singular physical charm, he was already learned beyond the wont of a learned age. Already a complete master of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and a student of Hebrew, he remained at Cambridge eight years, and enriched his scholarship with all that the university could offer.

forged meanwhile to a higher temper the slow rising power within him, purging it of all later elements of weakness. The Puritan revolutio gave him, in a sense, the ideal subject for h great poem, and it gave him, too, in the har discipline which his work as Latin Secretar and pamphleteer imposed upon him, the powe to treat this subject not as he might have treate it in his young manhood, with an unripene exuberance of extraneous ornament, but wit all the spare muscular energy of a mind inte lectually athletic.

Mr. Bradley brings out clearly anothe point, Milton's treatment of nature. H

says:

In a sense Milton is the pioneer in the intro duction of nature as a major theme in Englis poetry, so greatly did he enlarge the scope o the old pastoral form by introducing into it ele ments of direct nature. But it is nature unin terpreted, nature without mystery or life of it own, nature seen always objectively and a landscape, that he depicts it.

"Our Supreme Literary Man."

Mr. Wilfred Whitten has an article in Putnam's for December. He repeats therein a question asked by him in the Academy eight years ago, whether writers of to-day sufficiently remember and attend on Milton as our supreme literary man."

For Milton is the greatest workman in words whom writers of English can watch and understand. Every young writer should learn from Milton what our language can do, and every young critic what our language has done.

It will be remembered that Macauley,

acter.

They had everything in common except charEach wore the mantle of song from childhood, each was steeped in classical tradition, each looked with burning heart on the political and social discontents of his own age. Their respective visits to Italy illustrate this fact.... Milton returned to England, untarnished in morals and with a European reputation for culture and learning. Shelley found his grave in Italy, the grave of almost infinite powI would deliberately compare "Prometheus Unbound" with "Paradise Lost as a further instance of a kinship hardly paralleled in the annals of literature.

ers.

Milton's Public Services.

Referring to Milton's labors for the commonwealth, Mr. William Aspenwall Bradley, in the New York Times Book Review for December 5, says, that,

though they claimed twenty of his best years, they probably did not seriously interfere with his artistic development, or greatly lessen his productivity as a poet. They merely satisfied that fierce need for personal participation in political affairs which was part of his nature, and which

should be so little read. He considered that, viewed merely as compositions, they deserved

the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. Not even in the earlier books of the "Paradise Lost" has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture.

His Intellectual Vastness.

A reverent analytical appreciation of Milton appears in the current Atlantic Monthly from the pen of the Rev. George A. Gordon. This analysis of the poet's distinctive gifts is worth noting:

In Milton there are no concealments, no pretensions, no sudden surprises, but one continuAs he ous amazement over sustained power. writes with pathetic fidelity to his own character, in his blind eyes alone, which appeared as if their vision was perfect, was he a dissembler, and that against his will. What we find in Mil

are vast knowledge vitalized by an imaginaor unsurpassed for compass and originality in an history, pathos deep as life, an ear for my faultless and sure, strength in every rgy of mind, and grandeur in every instinct is being. There is in Milton no humor, persuasive sympathy with light-heartedand laughter, no happy setting of our an pilgrimage in the sweet heart of nature Chaucer, no union of legend and dreamy, stic spirituality as in Spenser, no divine ety such as we find in Shakespeare, no palpiring, irrepressible lyric humanity as in Burns.

In Milton we meet, as in no other poet in our tongue, the stately march of vast powers, the noble vision of the ideal side of existence, rapt regard for moral and eternal issues, prophetic insight and prophetic fire, oracles of splendor in music like that of the spheres, an organ voice, as Tennyson says, with an anthem sublime, moving in its mighty monotone, a monotone admitting every variety of color and shade, weaving into its majestic fabric the weariness, the sorrow, the despair, and the victory of great spirits, its warp and woof the light and darkness of the world.

AGRAPHIC and informing editorial re

view of the coffee situation,-producion and consumption, appears in the Noember number of the Bulletin of the Intersational Bureau of the American Republics. According to the writer, during the year 1908 Brazil, the producer for the world, zave us 11,500,000 bags; Central America ported 1,500,000 bags, and Venezuela ame third with 950,000 bags. The East Indies, including Java, produced 697,000 bags, and Haiti sent abroad 50,000. The article referred to has the following to say f the introduction of coffee into Europe:

Romantic stories are attached to the introduction of coffee into the New World.

Norman gentleman and naval lieutenant, sailed It is, for example, asserted that De Clieux, a in 1723 from France for Martinique, in the West Indies, and took with him a coffee-tree intrusted to his care by a physician. The voyage was long and tempestuous, but De Clieux shared his scanty portion of drinking-water with the plant, which, though weak upon its arrival in Martinique, recovered under De Clieux's watchful care. From this tree, it is said, came all the coffee-shrubs in the island, which more than supplied all the coffee required for the consumption of the whole of France. According to

COFFEE

963.540 000 758.018 602

825.300.000 797 640.653

1900

828. 900.000 251 284 214

1901

ad in 1690 the first

904 500.000 760.848.004