clocks is on her stockin's." Those who have been brought up among the negroes, those who have heard and collected negro songs, even those who have read their Uncle Remus discriminatingly, all realize that negro humor is mostly of the broad variety, depending upon ridiculous and exaggerated situations, not phraseology. Caucasian wit and negro humor are too often confounded in these poems of Mrs. Stuart's.

Before leaving the matter of psychology one or two other points might be noticed. The real negro songs contain much fewer and poorer figures of speech than do these songs of Mrs. Stuart's. Only a very small proportion of the genuinely negro songs are feminine in their point of view. Like most folk-songs, their psychology is predominantly masculine. These Plantation Songs are, on the contrary, predominantly feminine in their point of view. There is a great deal more sentimentality in these songs than in the songs sung by the negroes of to-day. It appears that the songs of Stephen Foster and others of his kind have caused us to look for more sentiment in negro songs than actually exist there. The result has been a false conventionalized idea of the negro song to which many who know better, like Mrs. Stuart, have unconsciously deferred too much. One of the widest divagations from the real negro is in the love songs. In the songs of the negro himself love is not so important as many suppose, and as these poems of Mr. Stuart's imply. Where it does play a part it is generally crude, frequently coarse, and almost always actual and concrete rather than abstract, as in Mrs. Stuart's "O Love's My Meat." Your negro is not of the amans amare school; his type is amans Amanda or Mary Jane. Mrs. Stuart's negroes sing of love like educated negroes or slightly sentimental Caucasians. Perhaps the most realistic songs in the volume are the hymns, which come very near the spirit and expression of the old negro spirituals.

In the matter of form these poems also depart from the beaten tracks of genuine negro songs. Most negro songs are composed of rhymed couplets. They are metrically loose and contain plenty of repetition, especially the hymns. In some songs only the second and fourth lines rhyme. Mrs. Stuart's songs have an exactness of metre, a facility of diction, and a variety of stanza

forms unknown to the negroes themselves. One poem-"Lord 'a Mercy On Us!"-flaunts an envoy.

Yet these songs are attractive. Once establish the point that they are not real negro songs and nothing more can be said against them. A contrast with the cruder songs actually sung by the negroes serves to emphasize the gracefulness of phrase, the rhythmical facility, and the readiness of dialect commanded by Mrs. Stuart. She has elevated the tone of the negro songs and altered their psychology and form; but in so doing she has made them more entertaining and enjoyable, and has suited conventional expectations. Everyone is pleased and entertained, except the technical student of negro songs. Once let him make his academic distinction between these songs and the songs composed and sung by the negroes themselves, and he too should be content. N. I. WHITE

FROM THE HIDDEN WAY. Being seventy-five adaptations in verse. By James Branch Cabell. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co. $1.35.

Mr. Cabell's little offering of verse adaptations, whose title, From the Hidden Way, is itself an adaptation from that haunting, yearning Ballade des belles dames du temps jadis, is indeed a revelation of verse technique of no mean order. Though one may dislike the note of "preciosity" that sounds once and again in his prose as well as in his verse, Mr. Cabell does charm us with his echoes of frankly epicurean relish for love and life and the good things of the earth. The hidden ways he explores are faintly traceable in half a dozen minor poets, ranging in date from the days of the troubadours through the Renaissance to our own more recent imitators of Baudelaire and Verlaine. I say faintly traceable, for indeed Mr. Cabell has hardly anywhere approached the exactness of translation.

The volume constitutes one of the many protests, more or less sincere, against the sordidness, the abject materialism, the puritanism of our age. Such a protest against the rampant conventionalities of life is by no means new, and will generally find those who condemn it and those who approve it. Mr. Cabell's protest, let me hasten to assure you, is generally quite decorous.

But one cannot refrain from asking if he is quite desperately sincere in his yearning for the naïveté and the unrestraint of the days, say, when his Jean Passerat sang and when a free Protestant poet was silenced in France and a free Catholic poet was hanged in England?

The thesis of the book is nearly comprised in the following lines from the "Ballad of Plagiary" (p. 119), where it is said of the poets:

Ye have toiled and ye have fretted; ye attain perfected speech;
Ye have nothing new to utter and but platitudes to preach.

But it might be said without undue disparagement of Mr. Cabell that this very dictum applies to many of his adaptations—they are clever, they are even a little more than clever: they do not take you off your feet, snatch you up into a seventh heaven, or transport you in a whirlwind of passion: and that is what the verse of protest should do.

The unusual felicity of Mr. Cabell's phrase for the purpose he has in view, and the aptness of the rhythm, will appear in some brief quotations we can give; but before we close with the praise of some lines that will fairly represent Mr. Cabell's gift, let us note how once in a while the passion for new forms of verse results in just no form at all. Unless the reader of this article consults the book, we doubt if he can reconstruct the versemusic of: "What of these ladies that have been exalted by stern songs wherein beats strong the valorous heart of love and all the power and pride thereof-unto what haven are they sped?" We submit that this is very acceptable Ossianic prose, perhaps; but when we read poetry we confess to an old-fashioned distaste for being bewildered about prose as M. Jourdain was. But more often the reader is charmed by some subtle grace in the rendering of Villon, say, in the "Exhortation toward Almsgiving" (p. 71), where something like the whimsical artificiality of the form and something like the subtle melancholy of the tone heard in Villon will be found. Or one will be arrested by a stanza like this, from "Alone in April" (p. 80):

So swift, so swift the glad time goes,
And Eld and Death with their countless woes
Draw near, and the end thereof no man knows.

Or one will catch a genuine enthusiasm in the happy swing of "The Lovers' Doxology" (p. 83):

Listen, all lovers! the spring is here,

And the world is not amiss;

As long as laughter is good to hear,
And lips are good to kiss,-

As long as Youth and Spring endure,—
There is never an evil past a cure,
And the world is never amiss.

O lovers all, I bid ye declare

The world is a pleasant place;—

Give thanks to God for the gift so fair,

Give thanks for His singular grace!

Give thanks for Youth and Love and Spring!

Give thanks, as gentlefolks should, and sing,
The world is a pleasant place!

PIERCE BUTLER.

TEXAS VS. WHITE: A STUDY IN LEGAL HISTORY. By William Whatley Pierson. Durham, N. C.: The Seeman Printery. 1916. Pp. 103.

After our Civil War the theory of State sovereignty was dead. Under the radical onslaught led by Stevens and Sumner the doctrine of States' Rights itself seemed about to receive a mortal blow. In this most critical and dramatic period of American history the Supreme Court interposed, first, to preserve the old federal form of government, and, second, to re-interpret the Constitution after the decision just made by the sword. In this respect the case of Texas vs. White is all-important for the constitutional historian. Dr. Pierson reviews the whole history of the case, the arguments of the lawyers and the opinion of the Court. His sub-chapter on "The Location of Sovereignty in the United States" is particularly valuable in a valuable monograph. S. L. WARE.

THE FRENCH Revolution aND NAPOLEON. By Charles Downer Hazen. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1917. Pp. 385.

There is as yet no really good one-volume history of the French Revolution in English. We, therefore, knowing the character of the work of the gifted author of Europe Since 1815, welcomed the present book from his pen with high hopes. We confess we

have been somewhat disappointed. In the first place it was not originally planned as an independent volume, but consists of chapters taken from a larger work, the author's Modern European History. As the present volume devotes 99 out of 365 pages to the Old Regime, a better title would perhaps have been The Old Regime in Europe and the French Revolution. Again in the book under review we miss the intimate knowledge and wide grasp of the subject-matter which distinguished the Europe Since 1815. Professor Hazen has too closely followed Aulard, even to the extent of making Robespierre "practically dictator" for nearly four months during the Red Terror (page 213), and of calling him a "hypocrite."

But these criticisms apart, the book is written with the author's usual charm of style and capacity for throwing into picturesque relief the points which he wishes to emphasize.

The printing and the ten maps in color, not to mention two maps in black, deserve the highest praise. S. L. WARE.

THE NULLIFICATION CONTROVERSY IN SOUTH CAROLINA. By Chauncey Samuel Boucher. University of Chicago Press. 1916. Pp. xi, 399. $1.25.

In this book Dr. Boucher covers the same subject as Professor Houston in his monograph, A Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina (New York, 1896). But whereas Houston is concerned with the theory of nullification from the standpoint of political science, and devotes about one half of his book to the antecedents of the critical period 1828-1833, Dr. Boucher, on the other hand, plunges at once into these critical years, and narrates with great detail issues and arguments between Union and State's Rights men respectively. Though he has not neglected MSS. nor pamphlet material, the author has drawn chiefly from a great number of South Carolina newspapers. In fact he has shown remarkable industry in collecting such a mass of editorial comment representing nearly every shade of political opinion throughout the state.

Eleven maps, covering the period 1830 to 1834, illustrate party voting in the various state districts. S. L. WARE.