The French edition of Mr. H. M. Stanley’s book on the Congo, which, as recently announced, is to be published in Brussels, will, we are informed, be translated by Mr. Gerard Harry, one of the editors of the Independance belge and of the Mouvement géographique.
Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s second series of “New Arabian Nights” will be called, not “The Man in the Sealskin Coat,” as at first announced, but “The Dynamiter.” Its purpose is comic. It consists of a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue,” both in the Cigar Divan (in Rupert Street) to which, as readers of the first series may remember, the chance of revolution relegated Prince Florizel of Bohemia; of a certain number of “adventures;” and of a set of subsidiary stories, “The Fair Cuban,” “The Brown Box,”“The Destroying Angel,” and “The Superfluous Mansion.” It will be published almost at once, we believe.
Dr. Ludwig Geiger has begun a new journal which promises to be of great literary importance, Vierteljahrsschrift für Kultur und Litteratur der Renaissance. (Leipzig: Seeman.) In the first number the editor contributes a very thorough study of the life and writings of Publio Fausto Andrelini, of Forli, who taught in Paris from 1489 to 1518, and did much to quicken the impulse of humanism in France. Herr Grimm examines Vasari’s authority for the statement that Michelangelo finished four statues of captives for the tomb of Julius II. He comes to the conclusion that Vasari was mistaken, and that only two, now in the Louvre, were really his work. Herr Zupitza criticises “Three Middle-English versions of Boccaccio’s story of Ghismonda and Guiscardo”—one by Banister, a second by Walter, and a third anonymous. Besides these articles are published unprinted letters of Guarino and Reuchlin. This new quarterly journal has every prospect of filling a decided need in literature, and bringing to light much new material for literary history.
In a recent number of Deutsche Rundschau Herr Herzog gives a vivid sketch of modern progress in an article on “Die Einwirkungen der modernen Verkehrsmittel auf die Culturentwicklung.” His general conclusion is that the discovery of railways and the electric telegraph has tended to democratise society and substitute practical materialism for any moral ideal of life. Only when commerce has become truly world-wide, and national interests have ceased to jar and conflict, must we look for a world-state in which ideal ends again will meet with due recognition. Freiherr von Lilicronen, in a paper on “Die Kunst der Conversation,” undertakes the defence of German “Ernst” against French “esprit” as a basis for social life. An English bystander is probably inclined to suggest a happy blending of the two. Dr. H. Hüffer publishes some hitherto unprinted letters of Heine to his friend Johann Hermann Detmold. They are the scanty records of a friendship of thirty years, and are of great importance for Heine’s biography, especially as regards his life in Paris and his relations to his wife.
In an exhaustive paper recently read before the Académie des Inscriptions (La Donation de Hugues, Marquis de Toscane, au Saint Sépulcre, et les etablissements latins de Jérusalem au Xe siècle), M. Riant reminds us how little is known of the history of Palestine previous to the time of the Crusades from the Latin side, although much has been done of late years to elucidate its history in connection with the Greek Church. He makes the re-examination of an important grant of property by the Duke of Tuscany, in A.D. 993, to the Holy Sepulchre and St. Maria Latina the occasion for a sketch of the Latin occupation from the end of the sixth to the end of the eleventh centuries, showing especially the nature of Charlemagne’s protectorate of the holy places. The document itself he subjects to a searching criticism, calling up, while so doing, a most striking figure in the Abbé Guarin, of Cuxa (one of the grantees), an eloquent ecclesiastic of great influence in both France and Italy, and a wide traveller.