The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee's story is a very
noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age
of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero. Her
husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with
which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a
factor in his degradation. 'You are too good for me,' he says to her in
a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; 'we have not an idea, an
inclination, or a passion in common. I'm sick and tired of seeming to
live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire. We
make each other miserable! I can't pull you down, and for ten years you
have been exhausting yourself in vain efforts to raise me to your level.
The thing must end!' He asks her to divorce him, but she refuses. He
then abandons her, and availing himself of those curious facilities for
breaking the marriage-tie that prevail in the United States, succeeds in
divorcing her without her consent, and without her knowledge. The book
is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so literary as
ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded and have been
largely influenced by fiction. Faithful and Unfaithful seems to point to
some coming change in the marriage-laws of America.

(1) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and Selected by
W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)

(2) Helen Davenant. By Violet Fane. (Chapman and Hall.)

(3) Dreams and Dream-Stories. By Dr. Anna Kingsford. (Redway.)

(4) The Romance of a Shop. By Amy Levy. (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) Faithful and Unfaithful. By Margaret Lee. (Macmillan and Co.)

ONE OF THE BIBLES OF THE WORLD

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1889.)

The Kalevala is one of those poems that Mr. William Morris once described
as 'The Bibles of the World.' It takes its place as a national epic
beside the Homeric poems, the Niebelunge, the Shahnameth and the
Mahabharata, and the admirable translation just published by Mr. John
Martin Crawford is sure to be welcomed by all scholars and lovers of
primitive poetry. In his very interesting preface Mr. Crawford claims
for the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to
collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century
we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and
interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North.
But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of
our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were
practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact
with the people of Finland. Topelius, who collected eighty epical
fragments of the Kalevala, spent the last eleven years of his life in
bed, afflicted with a fatal disease. This misfortune, however, did not
damp his enthusiasm. Mr.