of one degree in about seventy-one years. This movement is known in astronomy as the precession or recession of the equinoxes. It happens, therefore, that when the astrologer consults his tables, and finds that, at, the time of the birth of a person whose horoscope he is going to cast, Venus was in Cancer--a terrible condition of things for happiness in love--Venus is in reality passing the constellation Gemini or the Twins, which ought to make everything all lovely. The development of the Copernican system did a great deal of damage to the interests of astrology, but it was not until the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes that this venerable and pretentious art received its death-blow. To be sure, "the fools are not all dead yet," for certain people still pay five dollars to have their horoscopes cast, and not a few rustics consult the moon or the almanac before planting beans or weaning calves. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. The Romance of the English Stage. By Percy Fitzgerald. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. According to Carlyle, the only biographies in the English language worth reading--of course with implied exceptions--are the lives of players. Over English biographers in general there hangs, as he says, a "Damocles' sword of Respectability," forbidding revelations that might either offend somebody's sensibilities or exhibit the subject in any other than a dignified attitude and sober light, and, as a consequence, compelling the suppression of details which were needed to render the portraiture characteristic and lifelike. Actors being as a class outside the pale of "respectability," no such sacrifice is demanded in their case; and whereas in their lifetime they assume many characters, and though constantly before the public are known to it only in disguised forms and borrowed attributes, after death their personality is laid bare, and they are made to contribute once more to the entertainment of the world by a last appearance in which nothing is unreal and nothing dissembled or concealed. This, of course, applies far better to a former period than to the present, as does also the explanation of the same fact offered by Mr. Fitzgerald--namely, the romantic interest attaching to the stage and exciting curiosity in regard to those wonderful beings who appear before us as embodiments of passion and poetry, humor and whimsicality, transporting us into an ideal world, and leaving us, when they vanish, in a prosaic one to which they do not seem to belong. Illusions of this kind are scarcely retained by even the young--perhaps, indeed, least of all by the young--of our generation. Moreover, the changes which society has undergone during the last half century have rubbed out much that was distinctive in the actor's life, and have given to manners and habits in general a uniformity that leaves little that is striking and piquant to describe. The adventures and the eccentricities