An editor of a brave magazine, which allows its contributors the free use of the first personal pronoun, has rebuked me for my too-subjective animosity towards Mr. Harris’s book and for my failure to see its other, better, side. I find my justification in Mr. Harris’s own words: “I put these portraits forth as works of art.” In the same measure as the artist is allowed—or rather, expected—to present that which seems to him most intrinsic and striking in his subject, so am I, the appreciator, to have the liberty of criticising in a work of art those features that appear to me most salient and conspicuous. As a matter of fact I enjoyed reading Mr. Harris’s characteristics of the persons he has met; he doubtless has an artistic touch in his pen-and-ink portraits; his criticisms on Mathew Arnold, John Davidson, Richard Middleton, are interesting. But it is the leitmotif of the book that gives you a general impression. The impression it made on me I have told in the preceding paragraphs. The pages on Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Renan, and others, are malodorous; the persons whom you admire or love appear blurred and maimed, for in front of them spins the annoying little figure of the portraitist, who preaches good behavior to Oscar, who is charitable to Jimmy, who tells silly anecdotes about Paul, who condescendingly smiles at old Renan, and journalistically interviews Anatole France and Maeterlinck. K. Pot-Boilers _The Sorrows of Belgium, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: The Macmillan Company._ It does make you feel sorry. Sorry for a big talent corrupted by the omnipotent Huhn-Public. During the Russo-Japanese war Andreyev wrote his _Red Laughter_, a rough affair, yet powerful in its horror. This pamphlet is nothing but an editorial from an anti-German newspaper. A test of man’s well-being and consciousness of power is the extent to which he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable character of things, and whether he is in any need of a faith at the end.—_Nietzsche._ _The Poets’ Translation Series_ The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those authors who are less frequently given in English. This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead.