have such a life as this laid before us with all the particularity of treatment which belongs to the realistic school. But granted that we did desire it, we must confess that we could not wish for it better done. The life-portraiture, inner as well as outer, is perfect and minute to admiration. The end is brought about in fine melodramatic style. Around Sidonie are grouped several personages lovable and unlovable, admirable and unadmirable, but all painted with perfect, clear conception and firm, minute touch. The distinctive Frenchness of the author is manifest in every page. It is shown particularly in the absence of any touch of humor in the portraiture of Sidonie. Unlike Becky Sharp, she hems no little shirt in public until a little Rawdon has long outgrown it. The hard portrait of her hard soul has no such softening touch as that. The book is of a bad sort; but of its sort most admirable. [10] "_Sidonie._" From the French of ALPHONSE DAUDET. 16mo, pp. 262. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. * * * * * The Lenten season is peculiarly the time for religious books, and the publishers have not failed to take advantage of it this year. Among the most interesting and valuable of the new works is Dr. Gregory's examination into the reason for having Four Gospels.[11] Why there should be two, three, or any number more than one, or less than eleven, is a question that has been considered significant for many centuries. Why out of eleven faithful disciples, precisely four should be inspired to write the history of the founder of the Church is certainly a problem that must be worth examining. The first idea, and it is one that has not died out yet, was that the four Gospels were so many incomplete but supplementary narratives, and in the second century efforts were made to improve upon the Biblical record by the Harmonists, who tried to compile what they considered a consistent and progressive account of the acts of Christ's ministry. They were followed by the Allegorists, who took the vision of Ezekiel, with its likeness of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and applied it to the writers of the Gospels as an exemplification of the meaning each of the narratives was intended to have. Though they, and their modern followers also, have not been able to agree upon this symbolical purport, the four Evangelists have retained in art those symbolical figures. The lion and St. Mark, the eagle and St. John are indissolubly connected in ecclesiastical art and story. The other schools of interpretation are, according to Dr. Gregory, the rationalists and "the common-sense critics." His own answer to the question, Why Four Gospels? is, that Christ had a mission to the Jews, and Matthew presented that argument for his divinity which was best calculated to impress that people; and to the Romans, to whom Mark was an interpreter; and to the Greeks, to whom Luke spoke; and to the Church