Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side of our essayist. In his essay “On Myself” he relates the charm of verse, falling on his boyish ear, without comprehending fully its purport. “I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother’s parlor (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over, before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.” The charm of Miss Repplier’s pages lies in their good sense. She is a lover of the good and beautiful, a hater of shams and shoddies. Everything she touches becomes more interesting, whether it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats, Babies, or the New York Custom House. Like Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of old books, finding in them the pure silent air of immortality, she will welcome graciously any new book whose worth is its passport. Agnes Repplier was born in the city of brotherly love more than thirty years ago. Her father was John Repplier, a well-known coal merchant. Her earliest playmates were books. Her mother a brilliant and lovable woman, fond of books, and, as a friend of her’s informed me, a writer of ability, watched over and directed the education of her more brilliant daughter. Under such a mother, amid scenes of culture, Agnes grew up, finding in books a solace for ill-health that still continues to harry her. When she entered the arena of authorship, by training and study she was well equipped. At once she was reckoned as a sovereign princess of “That proud and humble ... Gipsey Land,” one of the very elect of Bohemia. She came, as Stedman says, “with gentle satire or sparkling epigram to brush aside the fads and fallacies of this literary _fin de siècle_, calling upon us to return to the simple ways of the masters.” Her charming volumes should be in the hands of every student of literature as a corrective against the debasing theories and tendencies of modern book-making. The student will find that if she does not know all things in heaven and on earth, she may plead in the language of Little Breeches: “I never ain’t had no show; But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir On the handful o’ things I know.” A WORD. LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR.