It must be
admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case
with natural spontaneous verse. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly
modern. Nature is always a little behind the age.

The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a
strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry. Mr. Nash, who
styles himself 'a humble soldier in the army of Faith,' expresses a hope
that his book may 'invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the
young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,'
but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such
a paraphrase as the following:

Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest,
The birds of air find shelter in the nest;
But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all,
Has no abiding place His own to call.

It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best
intentions, and that people are never so trivial as when they take
themselves very seriously.

(1) David Westren. By Alfred Hayes, M.A. New Coll., Oxon. (Birmingham:
Cornish Brothers.)

(2) The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems. By Rennell Rodd. (David
Stott.)

(3) The Wind and Six Sonnets. By James Ross. (Bristol: J. W.
Arrowsmith.)

(4) Saul of Tarsus. By Isaac Sharp. (Kegan Paul.)

(5) Highland Daydreams. By George Mackenzie. (Inverness: Office of the
Northern Chronicle.)

(6) The Story of the Cross. By Charles Nash. (Elliot Stock.)

M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)

The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike
writer--this is the best description we can give of M. Caro's Life of
George Sand. The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly
about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished
phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt
for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the
Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in
literature that he could not explain away for their edification; having
never done anything remarkable he was naturally elected a member of the
Academy, and he always remained loyal to the traditions of that
thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious institution. In fact,
he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a
Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand's genius. He was too
feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too
much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and
ardent mind. He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never
brings us near to her wonderful personality. He looks on her simply as a
litterateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of
charming, if somewhat exaggerated, romances. But George Sand was much
more than this. Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and Mauprat,
Francois le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of them is she
adequately expressed, by none of them is she adequately revealed. As Mr.