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directness, and respect, and with an affectionate- ness which moves one all the more because it is touched with kindly humour and expressed with decided restraint. It is, no doubt, just the kind of work so near to the real, in a fine sense so unliterary of which commendation in a review is a little impertinent ; still, in the interest of readers for whom one cannot but desire the pleasure of acquaintance with John Smith, perhaps this hint of its excellence may be passed as allowable

Westminster Cathedral. Edited by the Rev.

Herbert Hall. (Westminster Press.) THIS illustrated guide, published at one shilling, contains an authorized history of the Cathedral, written by the Chaplain. Its story shows that want of funds alone prevented Wiseman from having it built ; and though Manning warmly encouraged the scheme, he felt that the first neces- sity was the education of the poor Catholic children of London. However, he secured the present site, though it was left to his successor Vaughan to raise the edifice. John Francis Bentley was chosen architect upon the under- standing that the early Christian Byzantine was to be the model. To test the acoustic pro- perties of the building, ' The Dream of Gerontius,' set to Newman's poem, was performed, Sir Ed- ward Elgar, the composer, conducting. Vaughan died on the 19th of June, 1903, and it was his successor, Cardinal Bourne, who saw the Cathedral consecrated. This took place on the 28th of June, 1910.

The building covers an area of 54,000 square feet, and the nave is the greatest in England ; but the magnificence of the interior, as it will appear when completed, must be left to the ima- gination. The walls are to be lined with marble to a height now marked " by a horizontal line of red brick, and above this line there will be a blaze of coloured mosaic, blue and green and red and gold ; and in the circles of the dome, groups of figures representing the mysteries of religion." In the crypt repose the remains of Wiseman and Manning.

The illustrations in the guide are by Mr. Hanslip Fletcher.

Bulwer Lytton : an Exposure of the Errors of his Biographers. By W'illiam Alfred Frost. (Lyn- wood & Co.)

BIOGRAPHY is fascinating, yet there is no other 1) ranch of literary work in which there are so many pitfalls. Our readers know this from the space that has been occupied in our pages with notices of errors and omissions in the * Dictionary of National Biography,' and this notwithstanding the fact that the contributors to that monumental work were specially chosen, and every care was 1 iki-n to ensure accuracy. Instances of error in other places may be cited. For example, the date of Lytton's birth was given in Burke's ' Peerage ' until 1911 as 1806, instead of 1803 the original information was faulty. Another case is that of Turner, the inscription on his coffin in St. Paul's giving his age as 79, whereas he was only 76. A curious mistake, it will be remembered, occurred about Goldsmith. At the time of Macaulay's funeral in the Abbey it was stated that Macaulay's grave was near to that of Goldsmith, instead of which Goldsmith rests in an unknown grave in the burial-ground of the Temple Church ; yet this misstatement has even recently appeared in print.

Mr. Frost has shown much industry in his researches concerning Lytton, and the result will no doubt prove helpful to the writer of the biography of Lytton which he intimates " will not be long delayed."

ONE of the most interesting papers in the October Fortnightly Review is M. Fabre's account, under the title ' My Relations with Darwin,' of some experiments carried out, by the English- man's suggestion, to test the operation of the homing instinct of the mason-bee, of which Darwin's death prevented the intended com- munication. They are related in that fresh, vivid, almost dramatic manner of which lately we have heard so much. Dr. George Brandes's ' Don Quixote and Hamlet ' is a whimsical but. significant flight of imagination. Mr. P. P.. Howe criticizes Mr. Galsworthy as dramatist according to the principles which we have already seen him applying to the work of other writers.. The personal equation in the sense of intuition keen in this way rather than in that seems to- count in Mr. Howe's criticism even more than it usually does, but his remarks are invariably suggestive, often illuminating. Mrs. Woods con- tributes a poem, ' Vale atque Ave,' which is highly interesting for its technique, and has the right breath of poetry in it, despite a central idea which has something alien or artificial about it. Mr. Francis Gribble in ' Descartes and the Princesses ' gives us yet another study of departed French personalities in his accustomed manner. The first article is the conclusion of M. Maurice Maeterlinck's study ' Life after Death,' in which he appears to voice more eloquently than most of us can, without dispelling even for a moment, were it merely by his own hope or authority, the universal uncertainty. The other papers are for the most part on the political or social questions pressing at the moment.

The Cornhill Magazine for October is an un- usually interesting number. It gives the first place to an unpublished poem by Browning, dated January, 1886, entitled ' Epps,' and furnish- ing a good average example of the poet's work : its attitude highly characteristic, but not, perhaps , illustrated by lines that linger in the reader's head. Col. Sir Edward Thackeray's ' Recollec- tions of the Siege of Delhi in 1857,' now com- pleted, are even better reading than those of last month. Bishop Frodsham has a delightful article on the imagination of the Australian aborigines, to which he is, perhaps, right in denying any anthropological value, but which is singularly welcome by reason of his knowledge of the " black fellows " and his all too rare sympathy with them. Dr. Frederika Macdonald's ' Char- lotte Bronte's Professor ' is an account, both well done and worth doing, of her own experience of M. Heger as a teacher. Miss Login's transcript if we may so call it of her mother's conversa- tion about the events and people she had known from 1820 to 1904 is full of pleasant, sometimes of curious, anecdote. Lady Login, having been born with a " caul," was held in special veneration in the Scotch home of her childhood, and, if her poorer neighbours had a cow or horse that was sick, would be secretly whisked out of her bed at night by all too compassionate servants, and carried off, dazed with sleep, to some byre to murmur a Gaelic charm over the sufferer. Mr-