old woman's. Some opprobrium still adheres to the latter term, while the word "elder" is a word full of deference. For men in high place the romance of ambition begins very late indeed. The heads of the professions are all getting old. The fact that Europe is governed by old men has some obvious disadvantages, but it does have a far-reaching and beneficent effect upon the spirits of those who are beginning to sigh for the loss of their youth. How The Spectator.

delightful if there were some new romance to be looked for after fifty, as even a remote possibility! But for women it is not so. All the more are they wise if they root out of their hearts this unworthy feeling towards youth. When once a woman is past her prime, if she refuses to take delight in watching the young world going its own way she will have little to delight in. Half the art of life is the art of abdication.

When you take up a very old book, one of the early productions of the printing-press, you find a spelling that is quite irregular. A common word is spelled in two or three different ways on the same page. If we found such spelling in a modern book it would irritate us; but we have become accustomed to seeing it in old books, and we do not resent irregular spelling there.

After all, it does not give us much trouble to read it, but most people, if asked why we read it so easily, would probably give the wrong answer. It is not because we have the same speech as Elizabethans. If Shakespeare came among us now and were presented with one of the beautiful modern editions of his plays, he would be able to read the text without trouble; but if we asked him to read it aloud, we should hardly recognize what he was saying; and if we took him to see one of his plays performed he would find it by no means easy to follow the words.

The fact is that since his day English speech has changed very greatly, particularly as regards the vowel sounds, but the spelling shows little or nothing of these changes. The spelling of the early printers was not standardized and shows a good deal of variety; still,

on the whole, it was not at all a bad representation of the spoken language of the Elizabethan age.

Let us take a few lines from Shakespeare, in the original spelling, and consider how the pronunciation differed from ours:

Sweet are the vfes of aduerfitie
Which like the toad, ougly and vene-

mous,

Weares yet a precious Iewell in his head:

And this our life, exempt from publike haunt,

Findes tongues in trees, bookes in the running brookes, Sermons in ftones, and good in euery thing,

I would not change it.

The spelling is really not very unlike ours; but what about the pronunciation? Every "r" was really pronounced as a trilled tongue "r." The "e" in "precious" was pronounced as in "city." The "x" of "exempt" was equivalent to "ks." Otherwise the consonants were the same as ours. It may be added that the "1" of “would” had not yet become silent.

The vowels show more extensive changes. The "ou" in "ougly," "venemous," was pronounced like that in

"would." The "u" in "publike" had not yet acquired the sound we give it (which is indeed a comparatively recent development in our language), but was pronounced like the "u" in "put." The "i" in "like," "life," "findes" had the same value as in "machine." The "ew" in "Iewell" was pronounced as in "few." The "au" in "haunt" was the same as in our "aunt"; it was not till the nineteenth century that our present pronunciation of the "aun" words ("flaunt," "launch," "gaunt," etc.) really gained ground. The "oo" in "bookes" and "brookes" was long, as in "food." The "a" of "change" was pronounced like that of "man."

You may wonder how we can make such statements about the pronunciation of a past age. The Elizabethans had no talking-machines; Shakespeare made no gramophone records. But the student of language has other means at his disposal for ascertaining the sounds of a language at any given period. He receives valuable hints from his knowledge of the way in which sounds are produced and developed; he gets some help from poets' rhymes; he often derives useful indications from the statements of grammarians, starting with John Palsgrave, who wrote his book, Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, in 1530, and explained the pronunciation of French by frequent references to English and Italian sounds.

The Outlook.

If we had a spelling that really represented our speech we should be better able to understand the changes that have taken place since Shakespeare's day; we have had our linguistic sense dulled by the present spelling. How it came to be such as it is, you may like to know; there is a Brief History of English Spelling that you can obtain on application to the Simplified Spelling Society, 44 Great Russell Street, London, W.C. Read it, and you will probably revise your ideas as to the relation of the spoken and the written word. We have long been slaves of the printed letter, we regard bad spelling as evidence of illiteracy, but we do not consider a slipshod, stumbling speaker as uneducated.

In social intercourse good clear speech is a duty, even more than a good clear handwriting; this conviction is happily no longer rare. Good literature calls for good speech. We may be sure that Shakespeare cared little about spelling; we have little from his pen, but he was not even particular in signing his name. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that he cared a great deal how the actors uttered the words he gave them to speak.

There are signs that the living, spoken language is coming into its own, and our dead spelling is recognized for the hollow sham it is. The Renaissance gave us the printed word; it is time that we learned again to honor beautiful speech. Walter Rippmann.

Such our proud cry-a vain and empty boast;

Love did not ask so great a sacrifice; The first révéille found you at your post;

You knew the cost; clear-eyed you paid the price;

Some far clear call we were too dull to hear Had caught your ear.

Not ours to urge you, or to know the voice;

No stern decree you followed or obeyed;

66

'Estimates in Art" by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., professor of art and archæology at Princeton, touches swiftly and lightly on a dozen or more great painters, ancient and modern. It has no thesis to expound, and no purpose beyond the clear, just interpretation of the pictures which it considers. Its various essays are bound together only by the vigorous, straightforward common sense of the author. If it has any gospel, and a gospel is a very different thing from a thesis,it is this: "When an artist thinketh nothing in his heart, the art, whatever its specious appearance or repute, will be-according." It is full of such muchneeded bits of sanity as, "It is perhaps the supreme value of Greek art to have proved how the vision of the artist and that of the common man need vary but by hairs' breadths, and yet give sufficient play to genius." And, not content with mere sanity, Prof. Mather also gives us courage. He

refuses to believe that El Greco is a great portrait painter; at the end of an appreciation of Chinese art he pleads a frank ignorance of the subject; and, best of all, he says, in flat contradiction of the experts who have degraded Botticelli's "Pietà" in Munich to the rank of a school-piece, "it remains for me, one of the greatest and most authentic creations of the master." The essays on Carrière,

Watts, and La Farge are especially good. The author is full of a clean enthusiasm for art and yet free from the esoteric emotionalism that breathes from so many of the pages that have been devoted to it. It is good to read of pictures in words that fly so true to their mark. Charles Scribner's Sons.

"The End of a Chapter" is a book of memoirs written by Mr. Shane Leslie, a Cambridge graduate of distinguished birth and gifts who has seen service at the front, and who, while lying in a hospital, jotted down the notes from which the book grew, realizing that he had seen the suicide of a "civilization called Christian and the travail of a new era to which no gods have as yet been rash enough to give their name." Mr. Leslie writes of most of the prominent figures in English life and letters from the beginning of the nineteenth century until today, for his grandfather, who had “seen Talleyrand and heard the voice of Sir Walter Scott," furnishes a "link with the past" of inestimable value. The weak points in England's public schools, her universities, her reigning family, her sports, her religion, and her politics are shown by brilliant quickly drawn portraits of the men who typify these institutions. It is plain to be seen, however, that there is one institution in which Mr. Leslie detects no signs

of decay, no taint of that over-developed sense of sport which lies at the bottom of much of England's greatness as well as failure, and that institution is the English Navy. It is significant to find so firm a faith in one whose clear eyes penetrate hypocrisy and acknowledge disillusion. The book is notable for its fine restraint; it contents itself with facts and occasional comment, and nowhere yields to the temptation to prophesy. Charles Scribner's Sons.

"The Confession," by Maxim Gorky, translated by Rose Strunsky, was written after 1905 when Gorky went to live as an exile on the island of Capri. The novel, for it is a work of fiction, belongs to the period when the author was living entirely in the cultured world, and thinking, according to the translator, "earnestly and scientifically to to the best of his ability about the political and social conditions around him." Admirers of Gorky's earlier style quarrel with his later work, of which this book is an excellent example, because they miss the estheticism of the earlier books and find this "too doctrinaire, too purposeful," but it is an open question whether in modifying an æstheticism which may be onesided he has not gained in force. "The Confession" is a wholly religious book; it tells of a man's search for God, in monasteries, churches, and among individuals of almost every class of society, and the search ends with the discovery that God is the people and the people is God. All sorts of strange and terrible experiences fall to the seeker's lot, and life seems stripped of all illusions, but he is able through it all to declare how "indescribably beautiful is life." The book is profound and terrible, sometimes almost unbearable, but seldom has a work of fiction shown so clearly the beauty of life and the urgency of the

quest for God. Frederick A. Stokes Company.

Miss Susan N. Cleghorn's "The Spinster" is a curious and searching study of a species especially interesting to the American citizen, inasmuch as it is disproportionately large in the population of the United States, and wields enormous influence in many fields. It is a significant detail of the plot that Ellen, the heroine, is left at twenty-seven, rejoicing in her spinsterhood, after marching in a socialist procession, and contributing to the funds of certain strikers, knowing only that their work is dangerous, and that the physical condition of some of them is pitiable. In short, she is utterly illogical. But her womanliness is always lovable and delightful, and Miss Cleghorn's story of eighteen years in the life of a family of workers abounds in delicate sentiment and pathos. Ellen is a precocious child, nourishing herself on the highest thoughts and the best literature that come in her way, ambitious to write, a "muse in sunbonnets," but always disposed to side with the weak, and to shrink from causing any living thing to suffer. She overestimates almost every human being whom she encounters and secretly bestows her girlish affections on undeserving objects, but openly she never forgets herself, and never was there a more steadfast friend or a kinswoman more devoted to the children of her family, or to her elders. Miss Cleghorn's description of a Vermont village, quite unspoiled by the daily New York and Montreal Express, is perfect, even to the names of its estates, and the accuracy with which the costumes of 1892 are described, but the very first page reduces mere man to humility by telling him of two ladies in "bustled black henrietta dresses." Henrietta Maria he knew in his schoolboy days, and he may even have smiled at Yates's

"What is this that I hear about Henrietta?" but "henrietta" with a lower case "h" is "ropt in mistry" and he wonders whether it is a stuff or a style. Women, untroubled by such doubts, will enjoy every word of the story, which really has no end, and both women and men will beg for a few more chapters. A woman who writes poetry is only at the beginning of her romance, at the age of twenty-seven. Henry Holt & Company.

The title of Mr. Howells's "The Daughter of the Storage" is a stroke of genius; for who could possibly refrain from examining the book to discover what such an offspring might be and what she did? Her story occupies but forty pages of the volume, the rest being given, as the sub-title says, to "other things in prose and verse" and, as there are eighteen of the other things none of them is very long, but they will especially please women because the author gives them no monopoly of human absurdity, but shows that the stronger sex can be at least as fatuous as the weaker, as shameless in revealing its foibles, and as unchastened by their exposition. The little farces and farcical tales abound in fun of the well known Howells brand, and those in which tragedy bears a part rank with the best that he has ever written. The verse is frankly prosaic, whatever may be its subject; but the elusive irony of some of the prose sketches is worthy of a Frenchman. Booksellers will especially enjoy a story dealing with their craft and with the kind persons who deign to be their mentors in season and out of season. The finest things of all are those to which a touch of the mysterious gives a haunting quality rare in Mr. Howells's work, and showing that it is by choice that he polishes pebbles, instead of working at the gems in the

casket of his mind. May it be hoped that he will turn his attention to his neglected capacity for stirring the highest emotions? Meanwhile, "The Daughters of the Storage" is a brilliant volume. Harper & Brothers.

Mr. William John Hopkins might make a charming play of his "Those Gillespies," if a clever boy or a "principal girl" could be caught to play the part of Rudolph Gillespie. The other members of the clan are pleasant folk, and Love, that hath them in his net, plays with them with delightful caprice, but long-lashed Rudolph, plainly clad in perfectly plain but perfectly expensive clothes, and lisping "Excuse me" whenever he asks a question: Rudolph, kicking his heels in the air as he lies on the floor to examine Agassiz's Turtle Book; Rudolph, adopting an uncle, and looking like a Raphael angel; Rudolph whatever he does is exquisitely polite and charmingly funny. His elders do their best, playing golf with sinful recklessness, fibbing with cheerfulness when it seems necessary, escaping manslaughter, elopement, and suicide by pure luck, but Rudolph holds the center of the stage, and compels one to think of him even when the golfers play and ejaculate as tempestuously as if they were curling. By one of those whimiscal devices of which Mr. Hopkins has exclusive possession, the characters next in importance to Rudolph are the French driver of his mother's motor car, her French maid, and a club waiter. The other Gillespies are puppets of these four but they are most mercifully handled and are left in nearly perfect condition. Rudolph is not six years old when the story closes. Further information in regard to him will be urgently desired by all who make his acquaintance. Houghton Mifflin Company.