LAFCADIO HEARN (Y. KOIJUMI).

the West, when he presented himself at the office of a Cincinnati newspaper, in which his articles had been appearing for some time, and timidly asked for steady employment, which he readily obtained. Even then his work was recognised to be charmingly written. in pure and strenuous English. From Cincinnati he subsequently drifted to New Orleans, where the climate and the sensuous life of the creoles charmed him. Before Cable had made us familiar with their dialect, Hearn had fathomed the mysteries of their minds and delved into their folklore. His singular work attracted the attention of a New York publishing house, and Hearn was sent by them to the West Indies to write of the natives as he had

written of the Louisiana creoles. This work established his literary reputation in the East. Six years ago he went to Japan, and before long he seems to have found a method of life which suited him. The philosophy of the people appealed strongly to him, and their life was like the fulfilment of his dreams. He mastered their language, lived among them, wore their garments, and ate their food; and found occupation as He studied a teacher in their schools. and wrote, and the result in time was his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan-not only one of the most interesting, but one of the most just, sympathetic, and reliable books that have yet been published on modern Japan. A year ago Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company published another volume by him. entitled Out of the East, and the same firm has just issued his new work, Kokoro: Hints of the Japanese Inner Life. Mr. Hearn is now a Japanese of the Japanese. He has a Japanese wife, and is proud of the son born of this marriage; he has a Japanese house in Kobé, where he now lives, and as if to complete the transmutation, he has taken a Japanese. name, and is no longer Lafcadio Hearn, but Y. Koijumi.'

Henri Rochefort's Aventures de ma Vie, the first volume of which was recently published in Paris, reached its eleventh edition within five days-one of the greatest popular successes of recent years. An extensive review of the book will be found on another page.

So

The new novel by Miss Katharine Pearson Woods, which was announced last autumn, is now in the press, and will be issued early in the autumn. It is the most important novel that Miss Woods has written since Metzerott, Shoemaker which appeared shortly after Mr. Bellamy's Looking Backward, and made a deep impression by its story of endeav our to bring about social reform. ciology has always strongly attracted Miss Woods, and her large experience as a settlement-worker, and her long study of the subject, combined with her fine imaginative quality and graphic power of characterisation, have given a modern touch and interpretation to a theme of perennial interest. The new novel will be entitled John: A Tale of King Mes

siah, and is the first of a trilogy which together will form a sociological study of the first century, or rather of the social message of Christ to the first century. The work has occupied Miss Woods nearly five years. She is a most painstaking and conscientious writer. "To me, she wrote recently, "while all religion is not art, all art is religion." In view of the steadily growing interest in the life and times of Christ, Miss Woods's novel is sure of a wide reception. The story of the Christ is retold with strong human interest, stirring into new life the wonderful forms of the East that moved about in that little arena of the world's history during the first thirty years of our era.

Last summer there appeared from the press of the Putnams a story entitled The Countess Bettina, with no clue to the identity of the author except the modest statement on the title-page, "edited by R." It was only few weeks ago

that the writer turned to the book and read the story, which from the first page to the last he followed with avidity. The author proved that he could tell a story with dash and vivacity and that he had facility in writing dialogue, but the book betrayed signs of haste and carelessness in style which it would be hard to forgive, were it not that his subsequent work shows more careful writing and a rigorous self-exaction to polish the phrase and find the inevitable word. Mr. Clinton Ross is probably still in his apprenticeship, but two books. of his, which will be published this month by Messrs. Stone and Kimball, will mark a considerable advance in his literary development. One of these, The Puppet, is a modern story of adventure, dealing with an improbable situation in a realistic fashion; and the other, The Scarlet Coat, is a tale of the Yorktown siege. Mr. Ross has for some time been making a study of the Revolutionary period, and the latter story is the concrete result. Another historical story, entitled "The Confession of Colonel Sylvester," will appear in the midsummer number of Scribner's Magazine, which is told almost wholly in dialogue, and he is now engaged on a new novel dealing with the fortunes of war in the same period of our history. Mr. Ross has an opportunity in this field which

Mr. Ross only began to adopt literature as a profession last June, but already he has been eminently successful. Several short stories and serials of his have appeared in various periodicals, and during the next few months his work will appear in a number of the prominent magazines. Mr. Clinton Ross, who is not yet thirty, prepared at Philips Academy, Andover, Mass., and graduated from Yale, afterward travelling in Europe and India. He comes of an old New York State family, and it was not until financial disaster compelled him to resort to some means of livelihood that he turned to literature, although he had dabbled as an amateur with college papers and had published several adolescent experiments.

much to disarm carping criticism by its frank, sweet-spirited avowals of ignorance and shortcomings, and by its ardent appreciation of all art finer than her own. And however various may be the opinions of the author as an artist, there can never be more than one opinion of Mary Anderson as the finest type of American womanhood.

Mr. James Lane Allen's story, which ran through the Cosmopolitan at the beginning of the year under the title But terflies: A Tale of Nature, will be issued this month by Messrs. Macmillan and Company. The title has been changed to Summer in Arcady, and when it appears in book form it will embody a number of slight changes. More important still, it will contain a grave preface. Many readers of the story in its serial form were strongly exercised about its main drift; but whatever Mr. Allen may write we have no doubt about its tendency. His art will always be on the side of right against wrong, and will be what we know he wishes all his work

to be, spiritually invigorating and uplifting. It is more or less well known that this story has been keenly sought after by the leading American publishers, and we venture to predict that a large degree of interest will be taken by the public in the book when it is published. Mr. Allen takes no neutral ground in facing the baneful influence of erotica in recent fiction, and we imagine that the story which he has told will act like a thunder-cloud which brightens the atmosphere by alluring to or repelling from itself the thickly congregated particles in the murky air.

A lady in Cambridge, Mass., is now engaged on an authorised translation into German of Mr. James Lane Allen's Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath. They will be published in one volume in Ger

many.

The multi-variorum edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, on which Mr. Nathan Haskell Dole has been so long at work, is at last on the eve of publication by the Joseph Knight Company of Boston. Many almost entirely unknown versions of the Persian astronomer-poet's quatrains are included in this encyclopædic work, not less than thirty

different translators besides FitzGerald being represented. The two volumes make together about 780 pages, of which nearly one quarter are in the editor's introduction entitled "Omar and his Translators." The rare second edition of FitzGerald is reprinted in full, and there is an elaborate index, in which the catch-words of the FitzGerald version are arranged for convenient reference.

Messrs. Henry Holt and Company will issue shortly a translation of André Chevrillon's In India. The work, written in a poetic and picturesque Gautierlike vein, conveys in a wonderful manner the spiritual atmosphere of the Mystic Hindu element which inheres in that supersensitive clime. The translator of In India is also at work on a translation of Pierre Loti's Jerusalem, Galilee, Morocco, and the Desert.

M. Maurice Maeterlinck's new prose volume, Les Trésor des Humbles, contains a series of short essays on such subjects as "The Soul's Awakening," "The Morality of Mysticism,' Morality of Mysticism," "The Tragedy of Daily Life," "The Star," "Unseen Goodness." Several of the essaysthose on Emerson, Novalis, and Ruysbroeck-have appeared as prefaces to translations from the works of these authors. M. Maeterlinck has, we understand, arranged for an English translation.

The following from an editorial in the Evening Post of April 4th is a solid piece of timely common-sense :

The public was never so eager as now to have a literary genius to pet and flutter about. They run off impetuously on false scents and at every hasty cry of lo! here and lo! there. And if they ever do find the first sign or glimmer of genius, they straightway do their best to extinguish it. They do this by the method of what is called making a great literary reputation' The process has often been witnessed. An author produces something unusual, something showing an original turn, giving promise of genius. Immediately the signal is given and the whole pack of destroyers of genius is let loose upon him. The reporter runs him to earth. The photographer levels the deadly camera at him. A dinner is given in his

honor at the Aldine Club. He is invited to write for the Ladies' Home Journal. Then the end is not far off. Only one step remains. It is to be 'syndicated.' Genius in the clutches of a syndicate is a melancholy spectacle. It soon becomes subdued to the medium in which it works, and appears as dull and ditch-watery as if the divine spark had never glowed at all.'