See! see! This then is the latest ideal? Formerly the ideals were painters, musicians, hussar riding masters, and players. Now love also is practical. So then an artisan? All the enthusiasm runs to tunnels and viaducts.
[15] "_The Convicts and their Children._" By BERTHOLD AUERBACH. Translated by Charles T. Brooks. Leisure Hour Series. New York: H. Holt & Co.
The book is marred by unnecessary exactitude in translation. Thouing and theeing make no impression of intimacy and confidence on the American understanding as they do on the German, and should be omitted. Nor has the author the strength of his youth, and the beauty of his fancy no longer atones for the weakness of the story. Nothing in the whole of the book proper is so good as the following from the preface:
A generation has passed away since I began to present in a framework of fiction the interior life of my countrymen and neighbors. If after another generation a poet shall again undertake to express the village life of my home, what will he perhaps find? Flowers bloom in all times out of the German soil, and Beauty will in all times bloom out of the German soul.
OF late years there has been a tendency to abandon the exhaustive "manuals" which once formed the only style of school and hand-books known, and to use in their place books which contain only so much of a science as is taught in some one well-proportioned school. The change is based on the rational supposition that whatever suffices for the thorough instruction of students should also satisfy the wants of an ordinary practical worker. Mr. Ricketts's "Notes on Assaying"[16] belong to this modern kind of text-book. They contain what the students in the School of Mines in New York learn, and as a thorough knowledge of assaying is obviously necessary to a mining engineer, the author considers that the same course if honestly worked through should suffice for practice outside the school. The book covers both dry and wet assaying, and gold parting, and there are chapters in which the apparatus and chemical reagents are described. A few condensed notes on blowpiping finish an extremely concise and useful book, always available for reference, and in which the self-taught workman may find his way without confusion.