English, Dutch, and French, Americans acquired their characteristics and ideals. He declared that the National traits of self-reliance, democracy, religious tolerance, and energy, which have dominated the development of America and which still control and impel American life, were bred before the Revolution." A reading of the first chapters of Thomas Nelson Page's "John Marvel, Assistant," suggests possibilities for the development of a story of the widest interest. The narrator (the story is told in the first person), John Marvel, and Wolffert, the young Jew with his high ideals and intense consciousness of the prejudice against his race, are characters that arrest the attention and enlist the sympathies. This is a story of no section; the background is national, and it will deal with the lives and thoughts of those who are representative of the whole country. The story has a note of seriousness, a sympathy and understanding of life with its increasing difficulties in these modern days of striking contrasts between wealth and poverty, and an irresistible charm of manner in the telling. It wasn't so many years ago that the young American art student who sought a European training went almost as a matter of course to Munich or Düsseldorf. The schools there have left their impress upon the work of some of the best-known American painters, and at the exhibitions you may hear the knowing ones pointing out the Munich or Düsseldorf peculiarities. German art has always been very individual and essentially a reflection of the nation's temperament and philosophy. Art and the theory of Art have developed side by side, and German literature is rich in books devoted to the elucidation of the philosophy of æsthetics in general. The World's Fair at Chicago helped to make modern German art better known, and the work of Menzel and Lenbach, to name no others, has had the widest influence and been recognized as belonging to really great art. In the February number Christian Brinton will write of "German Painting of To-day." The article will be especially interesting and timely in consideration. of the forthcoming exhibition of German Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and in Chicago and Boston. This exhibition, in which will be included some one hundred and twentyfive paintings and about thirty sculptures, will be thoroughly representative. Included in the collection are a number of examples chosen from the Royal Museum at Berlin and lent by the special permission of His Majesty the Emperor. The anonymous author of the articles on "England and the English from an American Point of View," whose First Impressions are given in this number, will answer in February the question, "Who Are the English?" He traces them back to beginnings, and dwells upon the qualities that have made them what they are, and upon the remarkable fact that the English to-day dominate more than one-fifth of the world's surface and twenty-two per cent. of its inhabitants. His comments upon the origins of a number of the titles to nobility will be read with much interest. "The House of Lords," he says, "is the most democratic institution in England." There is no lack of appreciation of the great qualities of the nation, and no one can overlook the writer's evident spirit of fairness and desire to find the truth in fact. Many of the statements he makes in the second paper will be quite as much of a surprise, no doubt, to a very large number of English readers as to the world at large. Baudelaire, the French poet and critic and translator of Poe, was the occasion for as many stories and controversies over his life as the author of "The Raven" himself. He was, to say the least, unconventional, and it was only natural that there should have gathered about his fame a number of stories that are purely legendary. James Huneker writes of "The Baudelaire Legend" in the February number, and gives a most interesting impression of the real Baudelaire, and of his work. In many ways his life suggests a parallel to that of Poe. "As long ago as 1869 and in our 'barbarous gas-lit country,' as Baudelaire named the d of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in whis a this poet was described as 'unique and as i teresting as Hamlet. He is that rare and unkown being, a genuine poet-a poet in the midf things that have disordered his spirit—a p excessively developed in his taste for ar beauty.. very responsive to the ideal, greedy of sensation.' A better descripti Baudelaire does not exist. The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout the disordered symphony of the poet's life." 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