Setting aside, then, all purely theoretic tests, true success in a book is measured by the depth and width of its impression. It is to move men and have an effect; but moving men is largely a thing of masses, and massing is by means of waves and currents, electric and cumulative. Touching at isolated points is not movement, but ricochet. No one can adequately estimate the force and effectiveness of a book in motion. Its very life, like that of the blood in the human body, is in its circulation. It gains in grip by the energy and irresistibleness of its course among men. Its authority and charm are indefinitely heightened when it has passed from a personal to a race possession, and all men share in and repeat the message. Henceforth, it takes us out of ourselves and widens our circle of acquaintanceship. "Through all his refinements, too," says Emerson, in speaking of Tennyson, "he has reached the public,- a certificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as large as London,not in the same kind as London, but in his own kind." Tennyson has been one of the subtlest as well as one of the most wide-spread influences of his time. A thinker and scholar, he has kept abreast of the latest discovery of the age in all its departments of thought. The poet of its sentiment and passion, he has also touched its deepest problems of life with a masterful firmness and insight. Despite his occasional want of seriousness and the later puerilities of his style, he has the acknowledgment of thinkers as an intellectual stimulation of the higher kind. Condescending, however, to be, for the most part, intelligible, he has had with him from the start the great body of poetic readers, who like both to understand and to be understood. He has never been honored by the study and patronage of a special school, but has enjoyed a great and well-deserved popularity, which no one for a moment thinks of confounding with the mere notoriety of ephemeral work. No one doubts his ability to hold in future the representative position in English literature which is now so freely accorded him on every hand. Nor is Tennyson more than one of a class

in this respect,—a conspicuous, but not an exceptional example of successful authorship.

Timely and temporary are by no means interchangeable terms in matters of this kind. Many instances at once come to mind of standard books, whose present currency is but a carrying out of the original impulse which gave them name and fame. Their first appearance was the event of the day, as their republication is from time to time an event of literary moment. Such were the novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot; the histories of Gibbon, Hume, and Macaulay; the great poems of Milton, Burns, and Byron; the sermons of South, Chalmers, and Robertson. These books were immortal from the first. They forced public attention, and henceforth held the position they had conquered, without any fortuitous aid. Nor was this any truer of the novels than of the sermons. Chalmers' discourses and the "Waverley" novels kept pace in circulation, while Dickens and Robertson divided the popular honors of their day. Rebuff and delay have not always been the portion of the finally successful author. Sometimes, these have been called to do a special work of discipline; but, more often, they have presently passed into that sense of conscious power, out of which alone comes the largest and best accomplishment. In some cases, the writer has himself been ready from the start, and found an instant public, which has never failed him. Immediate popularity no more disproves lasting merit than obscurity affirms it. Many of the favorites of the hour are forgotten. Nevertheless, the permanent names of literature were, for the most part, at home and appreciated in their own time.

Undoubtedly, here as elsewhere, there are different degrees as well as various kinds of success; but the very existence of these points to one supreme and ultimate test of power, that the book shall have actual reading and influence. There are books designed for a limited class, which, of course, fulfil their end in a narrow reception. There are others which survive a long period of inanition, to discover, later on, an unsuspected vigor and adaptation

to human need. The poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough is an instance in point, and one cannot but admire this persistent creation of an audience out of long-continued apathy or opposition. To assume, however, as is frequently done, that books of such slow and uncertain growth constitute a literary aristocracy would result in the practical decline of publishing. This, at least, must be insisted upon, that it is only when, at last, this point of actual influence has been reached that the book can be called a success.

Great books are constantly proclaimed and prophesied by friendly voices in the public press; but no amount of forcing can make them live, if they are really destitute of those irresistible qualities of breath and being which often seem to make them almost human like ourselves. In general, the books that live - and they live because they have life, and not because of any art or artifice — come in other ways. There is something subtle and mysterious in their approach and appropriation. It seems, in the end, as if they were too robust to have been easily put down. Without making any demands upon the charities of the reader, they quietly assume their place and accomplish their work. Henceforth, they are to be treated, not as automata, totally without human awe or fear or love, but as veritable existences, a part of all human action and influence. Doubtless, to be thus successful has its reactionary dangers upon the author and his future efforts; but most true books must survive in spite of, not without, the peril.

.

EDWARD F. HAYWARD.

THEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

The Revised Version of the Old Testament is received in England with general favor by the critics of all schools. Its faults of omission seem to be its greatest errors. Dr. Davidson, in the Athenæum, calls the revision a literary success without pretensions to scholarly completeness; the margin contains most. of the scholarship; it may be called a paragraph Bible, with a revised margin. Prof. J. E. Carpenter, with the Book of Hosea chiefly in mind, says that the gain to the common reader is, on the whole, immense. "The spirit is there, as it was not in the old version; and the burning thoughts of the prophet of redeeming love stand clearer on the page than the English Bible-reader has ever found them before. . . . Whatever be the shortcomings of the revisers, their hesitation, their occasional lack of uniformity, their lack of enterprise,- their main results are to be accepted with hearty gratitude." Rev. P. H. Wicksteed yet finds ground for serious complaint that a number of scholars, in a sense the trustees of the nation, "finding sense in the Hebrew, should deliberately write non-sense in the English," as in the beginning of the eighth chapter of Amos, and a large number of other passages. One of the best articles on this subject is Prof. Mead's, in the Andover Review for June.

One more volume of Ewald's History of Israel remains to complete the work. It is now being done into English by Rev. J. F. Smith. A volume of Expositions by Rev. Dr. Cox, the late over-liberal editor of the Expositor, is out.- The Commentaries of Rev. J. A. Beet, on St. Paul's Epistles, receive very high commendation. Having previously expounded the letters to the Romans and the Corinthians, he has now treated the Galatian Epistle in a thorough, independent, and impartial style. "The most distinctive merits," says Canon Farrar, "are his severely logical analysis of the arguments of St. Paul according to the unchanging laws of the human mind, and his careful examination of dogmatic theology." Prof. Pfleiderer's Hibbert Lectures, on Paul's Influence upon the Development of Christianity, are now published. They present a very different treatment from that shown in such works as Dr. J. F. Clarke's recent popular book.-Max Müller's series of "Sacred Books of the East" has three new volumes added to it. The first volume of

a translation of Dr. W. Geiger's Civilization of the Eastern Iranians is announced. The Longmans will publish a series of little books on "Epochs of Church History," edited by Canon Creighton. His treatment is meant to be purely historical, stating fairly the conflicting opinions in every controversy, and exhibiting the results produced by the ecclesiastical organizations and the ideas of Christianity in the history of Europe.

comed.

Lord Houghton will publish more of his Reminiscences soon. The first part, of thirty, of Ruskin's illustrated autobiography, with a characteristic title, is out. Edwin Arnold has translated, in verse, the Bhagavad Gita as The Song Celestial. Mrs. Sutherland Orr's Handbook to Browning will be welRev. Dr. E. A. Abbott has just issued a full life of Bacon, the outcome of special studies, which cannot fail to be valuable. Prof. David Masson has put into a little volume two lectures on Carlyle, personally, and as seen in his writings. Swinburne's recent tragedy, Marino Faliero, receives general praise. The Scribners will publish, by authority, next autumn, a collection of "certainly remarkable and decidedly autobiographical papers and letters of Thackeray, which have been for many years in the possession of an intimate friend.". George Barnett Smith's Life of Victor Hugo is now ready. "Scotus Novanticus" is understood to be Prof. Laurie, of Edinburgh.

Mr.

Dr. Young, of the famous Concordance, has prepared a Grammatical Analysis of the Book of Psalms, containing the Hebrew text with the vowel-points, a literal translation, the parsing of every word, paradigms of verbs, and much other matter of a kind very helpful to the Old Testament scholar whose Hebrew is his most rusty language. The third volume of Mr. H. H. Howorth's History of the Mongols is ready.The Spectator has given three long and eulogistic notices of Dr. Martineau's late volumes, which it pronounces "the most important and original ethical work which English philosophy has produced for at least a century and a half." Prof. Fowler, in the Academy, while full of general admiration, is unable to accept the main theory of the book.

The English works of Rammohun Roy have been collected, and are to be published in Calcutta. W. C. Coupland's Spirit of Goethe's Faust deserves the attention of the beginner, at least, in German literature. Rev. George Edmondson's volume