The subject matter of the book could not have been of other than deep interest. Mrs. Howe's long and beautiful life has been lived in surroundings of the highest culture of her time; the events of which she has written are those which will take their place in the history of the century just closing; and finally, the men and women who were her friends and in whose labors she shared, were the men and women whose opinions have largely moulded the events. But it is not all this, of unfailing interest though it must be, that gives the book its finest quality, and that makes one wish to read it over the moment one has read it through. It is, instead, that we have learned so much of a beauty-gifted and beauty-giving life in words at once so simple and so satisfying. Cheeriness and healthiness--if by the latter word one may express a certain poise and normalness of outlook--are the characteristics of the narrative. The great and the small of life each receive their just due; perhaps it is by her treatment of the small that we are best assured we have read into an intimacy with Mrs. Howe. That perennial question as to the feminine lack of humor, which has lately been re-threshed in the newspapers, should receive final and silencing reply--had it ever deserved a reply at all--in the 'Reminiscences.' The narrative twinkles with keen appreciation of the humorous, the ludicrous, even of the deliciously nonsensical; also abounding in that larger sort of humor which does not consist in seeing the point to a joke, but which makes life bearable and judgments tender under conditions least likely to keep them so. Assuredly Mrs. Howe did not put together the recollections of her life with primarily didactic purpose, just as assuredly she did not write them down primarily for the benefit of the American young woman. Yet in view of the cause to which she has given the work of her latter years, it is permitted me to say that no greater encouragement could be given it for the future than the words from which we learn her personal services to it and to the other causes which she has aided with brain and hands throughout her life. _Helen Tracy Porter._ (Contemporaries, By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899. $2.00. Reminiscences: Julia Ward Howe. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston and New York. $2.50.) * * * * * LIFE AND LETTERS. ----The last scenes in the present-day epoch of commercialism promise to be like the last scenes in the old-time epoch of feudalism, picturesque, violent, and significant rendings and tearings of the whole body politic prior to a re-formation on the basis of a larger unity. Then they portended the unification of England under the Tudors, or the unification of France under the eleventh Louis. Now they portend--what?