Before a society whose members are so largely teachers of language, and conversant with the art of writing, it would be superfluous to insist upon the value of style as an element of power in literature. As the thoughts of the mind involve the highest of human interests, what can be more important than their fit expression ? What are the enduring books, of which the reading world calls for continually new editions ? Invariably they are the books which are the best written. The sense of the world is keen and the survival of the fittest is as certain as that art is long. Considering that most books are written by sciolists or else by ignoramuses, and by authors who have never learned the rudiments of literary art, is it any wonder that they nearly all perish almost as soon as they are born ? Perfection in style, indeed, is rarely or never found. As Alexander Smith sought through all literature—and sought in vain,—for

so the perfect style is far to seek and hard to find. Style is not merely, as some conceive, manner independent of matter; it is not merely the dress of thought, but the living body of thought itself.

A Two themes welded in perfect harmony will tell the story of our poet's life, music and love. Music-born with him, descending to him by a long line of inheritance, his life-long passion; love, broad, catholic and unfathomable, the source of his real living and the key note of his character. Love, the core of his inmost being, the very marrow of his daily thought. Music, the flower of his daily life and the fittest utterance of his secret soul. By good right, too, could he lay claim to the gift of music. In the days of good Queen Bess, one Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee had been kindly received in England and he repaid this kindness by giving to England's sovereign his talents and by bequeathing to her successors, James I. and the First Charles, the talents of his gifted son, Nicholas.

The third and fourth decades of. the seventeenth century, or more strictly speaking the years from 1625 to 1637, form a rather important period in the history of French literature. This is the time when the great Corneille makes his appearance and the “Académie française” is established. For this reason it is all the more striking that there exists, apparently, a great uncertainty concerning a number of the precursors and contemporaries of Corneille, not only with regard to chronology, but also as to their true merits. One of the poets of that time, about whom opinions seem to be divided as to his literary position and undecided as to the chronology, is Jean de Mairet. of Besançon, who lived from 1604 to 1684. The chief works which Mairet wrote, are in chronological order as follows:

Chryséide et Arimand, a tragi-comedy; Sylvie, a pastoral; Silvanire, also a pastoral, or as Mairet himself terms it, a tragicomédie pastorale; Due d'Ossonne, a comedy; Virginie, a tragi-comedy; and the tragedies: Sophonisbe, Marc Antoine Soliman, and Roland furieux.

In the discussion of the genesis of the characters in Lessing's ‘Nathan’ there are four elements to be considered, of which we must form a correct estimate before we can obtain a clear conception of the way in which these characters received their present form. First in importance is the plot, or action, of the drama. When Lessing first conceived the idea of making the story of the three rings in Boccaccio the central scene of a drama, he must have outlined in connection with the main features of its plot the leading characters in the play; and he must have given his conceptions of these characters such personal characteristics that the action would logically proceed from them. To this factor, then, we may ascribe the creation of most of the characters, and the salient and important personal traits of all. The first rough draught of the play, (the date of which is unknown but which must have been jotted down some years before it was worked up into the drama as it now is),∗ shows in the main what is to be attributed to the influence of this element. So much for the present, as this point will be taken up again later at greater length.

Civilization in the United States has been diffused from two centres—New England and Virginia. In the former the starting-point was the town-meeting; in the latter, the planter's mansion. As has been well said, the germ of the whole difference between them lay in their different notions concerning the value of vicinity among the units of society. From the town-meetings of New England have come schools, manufactures and a literature; from the planters’ mansions of the Old Dominion generals, statesmen and liberty. One of the most philosophic political judgments of recent times, says Nichol—the anti-Southern historian of American literature, admits that “the honour of maintaining self-government, and making it possible for the Federation to dominate over the continent cannot be wrested from the Southern States.” The spirit of liberty, Bancroft tells us, had planted itself deep among the Virginians and elsewhere he adds, “an instinctive aversion to too much government has always been a trait of Southern character.”