for the bondage of sickness-cannot but moderate the effect of suffering upon the spirit of the place. The cheerfulness of the nurses, and of the students too, must count for much, must be a component part in a hospital aura. The gaiety of youth enlivens everything. True, the strange petrifaction which is the effect of watched suffering upon originally unsympathetic natures pours in a cold spiritual draught as from the tomb; but this again is tempered by the unquenchable fire of love which helplessness calls forth in a few inspired men and women. All these confused currents, however, are drawn into the strong stream of discipline. The man who enters a hospital enters a regiment, and it is the sense of discipline which first strikes the visitor.

Everyone's courage is heightened, everyone's responsibility decreased, everyone's personality weighs, for good or evil, a little less. The sick man realizes that he is one among many, and that what happens to him matters a shade less than he thought. All the strange effects of comparison alter the ordinary colors of life. Everyone within those doors is a part of a whole, a sick whole, which lives on though sections die and sections regain complete health in two unending streams. The odor of discipline is antiseptic and slightly anæsthetic, and it is nowhere so all-pervading as in a hospital.

If the Church of England were disestablished, would the aura of her buildings come to resemble the aura of places of worship belonging to the Free Churches? Already Anglican churches differ greatly among themselves, but they all have something in commonfrom the Cathedral to the corrugatediron shelter which keeps the congregation together till money can be raised to build four good walls. The aura of the Church is created by the Prayer Book. That wonderful anthology offers

an expression to sentiments which cover a very wide field, and the aura it creates is recognizable by the elements which it is without. Neither cant nor sentimentality can find expression in it. Have not most of those brought up upon it been greatly amused from time to time as they have listened to a clergyman who has done his best to make it express both those bad things? They have seen him chafing miserably under the law which forbids him to insert sentences at his pleasure, and almost bursting with the desire to make the prescribed service express the unction which is running down to the hem of his garment. It is impossible. It cannot be done. Some spiritual chemical destructive of all grease was put into the service when first it was cast, and its peculiarity remains. On the other hand, the cold indifferent parson can contract the words at will. The Book is in the vulgar tongue, but its sentences can be rendered so academic, so rhetorical, so foreign to the colloquial speech of today as to have an effect of formality which can never be rivaled even in Latin. There are churches in England which can kill the enthusiasm of the

worshiping nature. For years the cold airs of a stereotyped and halfbelieved-in ceremonial have filled the temple. A new parson cannot at first warm the church. For a long while he will be discouraged and frozen by the aura of the edifice, and be tempted, perhaps in more senses than one, to look through some open door into the world outside this sepulchral sanctuary.

But if the emotion expressed by the Prayer Book is always grave, its least ardent admirer must admit its astounding profundity. There are Anglican churches whose aura almost forbids both frivolity and worldliness. They are not always beautiful or shrines of tradition. The aura which silences a side of our nature may owe nothing to the ages and nothing to art. Those who

enter to worship are conscious of an atmosphere which is new and yet familiar, as of a strange land in which they are yet at home. The aura of the Roman Church is also homely, but to the Protestant it is the aura of a nursery. She provides her children with incentives to worship which are very like toys, and treats them always as children. There is something wonderfully pleasant and comforting about the atmosphere of a Roman Catholic church. One can feel again, as one draws in one's spiritual breath, something of the happiness and expectation of a child before Christmas. To many people the smell of incense is festive and suggests welcome. For all that, to those who are not brought up to it, it also is childish.

The aura of the chapel is a very subtle thing. It is not devotional, or not unless it is full-and even then decorum rather than devotion is suggested, unless, indeed, where enthusiasm sets all forms at defiance. An empty chapel is a dull place. It suggests the daily round, not a saint's day or a feast. Noncomformist churches are not often very beautiful, but if they were we doubt whether many people would wander in, when no service was going on, that they might submit their minds and hearts for a moment to the influence of the place. On the other hand, when religion forms an integral part of everyday busy life, one would not, perhaps, expect that any aura should emanate from a building into which men and women take, not only their cares, but their interests and their pleasures, and where they go for strength rather than consolation, for mental exercise rather than emotional peace.

Does any aura cling to theatres or concert halls? We are inclined to believe that music creates some soul which remains to haunt the silence where melody has been. We listen best where many men have listened, we

have ears to hear where many ears have been delighted. It seems as though genius must influence even stones, as if even they must cry out in harmony with it, though their voices sound only in the soul. What, we have sometimes wondered, is the impression made by civic halls upon those who enter them very often? Huge receptacles of ceremonial have, we imagine, no perceptible influence, no aura at all. But Town Halls have an aura, and we suppose the workhouse must have one. Probably, as in a hospital, the sense of discipline is all-pervading, and overpowers to a great extent the miasmic influences of failure, decay, and humiliation. The smaller and less important public buildings in which Committees meet, largely for the discussion of poverty, have an atmosphere all their own. A great puff of pomposity greets the member of a philanthropic Council as he or she enters the door, and in a tiny way he or she is soon helping to increase it. But pomposity is a superficial if a showy thing, and the unprejudiced worker will soon get used to it and forget it. Goodwill is a less instantly perceptible influence, and so is good sense. But what does the pomposity come from which, to use a colloquial phrase, seems powerful enough to "knock down" the newcomer? Taken separately, probably none of those who meet to discuss the best means of settling their neighbors' affairs are pompous. The difficulty is that the persons who meet have nothing in common but a genuine desire to mitigate evils and an everpresent wish to impress each other. They come from social strata which differ widely, and where rules of thought, talk, and behavior are not the same; but it is not snobbery which inflates the spirit of the meeting. Those on the mount are quite as anxious about the impression they are creating as the dwellers in the plain. Both are very keen to show themselves benevolent

and businesslike, and both are constantly wondering what the other is thinking. The result is an atmosphere of extreme discomfort, and the odors of irony and spite often taint the wholesome breeze of charity. In the end more good work is done than the factions are willing to give each other credit for. Could not this unfortunate spirit be cast out? We know that there are some educated persons who still believe not only in consecration but in The Spectator.

exorcisement. To most of us the notion is nonsensical when we first think of it. But when we consider what an influential thing the aura of the edifice is we begin to wonder whether the present generation is not too hastily sceptical. Perhaps it is possible to convert the soul of a building. At any rate, it seems possible to injure it. No one would like to see chaffering again permitted in St. Paul's.

So

Mrs. Gertrude Atherton had written more than twenty books before she produced her latest, "Mrs. Balfame," but she is one of those authors whose style and method crystallize early, and admirers of any of her early stories will like this, although its subject is one which she has hitherto left untried. Her heroine is one of that large class persuaded by the possession of ample means and membership in a club ambitious of intellectual distinction that she has literary ability, and is otherwise greatly superior to the fat and jovial husband who, for some twenty odd years has defrayed her bills. she decides to murder him, in a nice, clean, neat way, and finds her world, and more especially the reporters, persuaded that she has shot him. Moreover a jury of her peers is similarly persuaded, only a few faithful women and her lover are true to her, and the final disclosure stuns and appalls neighbors, friends, and kindred. Mrs. Atherton, having long experience to guide her, so manages her story that her readers are as agitated and as horrified as her characters. As this state of mind gives the highest felicity to the seasoned reader of the modern novel, "Mrs. Balfame" is already in its fourth edition, and will probably attain to

If Mrs. Julia Ward Howe were remembered for nothing else than her imperishable "Battle Hymn of the Republic" hers would be a noteworthy figure among the distinguished Americans of the last century; but her long and useful life, covering most of the nineteenth century and lapping over into the twentieth, her enthusiasm for human freedom, her labors for the advancement of her sex, her sympathy with all good causes, her intimate acquaintance with men and women of letters, and her wide experience, travel and observation contributed to make hers a memorable personality. It would be a pity if the story of such a life were to be inadequately told; and it is an especial occasion for congratulation that the writing of it should have fallen to those who knew her most intimately-her daughters, Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, assisted by a third daughter, Florence Howe Hall. In "Julia Ward Howe, 18191910" (Houghton, Mifflin Co.) we have the fruit of their labors, in two attractive volumes. The first volume is mostly narrative, beginning with the days when she was "Little Julia Ward" and describing her girlhood, her romance,

her life in her home, her varied activities and her public services down to her closing days. The second volume is largely drawn from her letters and journals. Altogether, there was no lack of material, and it must have been a labor of love for the daughters to select from it whatever would make the most truthful portrait and most surely perpetuate their mother's memory. Among the illustrations, twenty or more in number, there are portraits of Mrs. Howe, of Dr. Howe, of their children and of Mrs. Howe's parents-Samuel and Julia Rush Ward-a view of the Howe home on Beacon Street and a facsimile of the first draft of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

It might be thought that the life of Abraham Lincoln had been treated from every conceivable point of view and that it would be impossible to add anything of importance to the story of it; but John T. Richards, former President of the Chicago Bar Association, in his volume upon "Abraham Lincoln the Lawyer Statesman" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) has achieved the seemingly impossible and has made a new and valuable contribution to the literature of Lincoln's biography. As he explains in his Preface, his intention was to present the results of an investigation into Lincoln's record as a lawyer, his views upon the subjects of universal suffrage and the reconstruction of the Confederate State Governments at the close of the civil war, and his attitude towards the judiciary, and also to give some consideration of his standing as an orator. The fresh material collected and appraised in this volume was obtained by careful research among the records of the courts before which Lincoln practised. The most important cases in which Lincoln appeared as counsel are described, the points at issue explained, and his presentation of them analyzed. These researches

afford a basis for a more adequate estimate of Lincoln's abilities in his chosen profession and justify the conclusion that he might have been one of the greatest constitutional lawyers of his time, had not a great crisis called him to be the chief executive of the nation. Incidentally, such incidents as that at Cincinnati when Edwin M. Stanton-who afterwards was Lincoln's Secretary of War-treated him discourteously and contrived to have him elbowed out of a case because he fancied that his uncouth appearance might prejudice it show his patience in disappointments. An Appendix summarizes concisely nearly two hundred cases in which Lincoln was counsel.

The utterly absurd, the horrible, and a reckless blending of the two strive for first place in Claud Field's translation of Nicholas Gogol's "The Mantle and Other Stories," a volume introduced by part of Prosper Merimée's critical essay on the author, one of the most characteristically Russian among the writers who antedate the Nihilist period of Russian history. The first of its five stories, "The Mantle," superficially a comedy ending in a grotesque succession of thieveries, has a most melancholy hero, lonely, friendless, industrious and thwarted in his single pitiful ambition. "The Nose" seems to be very nearly related to the French "The Nose of a Notary." "The Memoirs of a Madman" is a study in egotism, almost too pitiless for the lay reader, but not exaggerated, as any alienist will testify. "The Pig," is simply horrible and "A May Night" is a pastoral with a few Russian additions. Gogol died in 1852 but he was one of those who moulded the Russian writers of today and this book should be read by all who would understand later Russian authors down to Tolstoi and Sienkiewicz. Frederick A. Stokes Com

pany.