CURRENT LITERATURE.
Harper's Magazine has made a most promising start this year. Mr. Hardy's new story is evidently to be very interesting, and at least one of the characters in it, Jude Fawley, would seem to be a strong one. Yet this description of him in the February instalment is too obviously Iteredithian,—" The doings of Jude Fawley may be passed over henceforth till he appears moving as a mere speck through a dusky landscape of some two years' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella and the disrup- tion of his coarse conjugal life with her." The miscellaneous articles in the February number of Harper are exceptionally good. Lovers of adventure and fighting ought to be delighted with the spirited papers of Mr. Janvier and Mr. Poulteney Bigelow on "New York Colonial Privateers" and "French Fighters in Africa," while we have not of late come across a better bit of description than " Oudeypore, the City of the Sunrise," by Edwin Lord Weeks. Art in the more comprehensive sense is done justice to in "Music in America," by Antonin Dvorak, and "Art in Glasgow," by Mrs. Pennell. A good deal has been heard—even more on the Continent than in England—of the Glasgow School of Art, yet to many there will be a sense of novelty in Mrs. Pennell's proposition that "it is from Glasgow, and not from the Scottish Academy and schools of London, that modern British art has received its strongest impetus ; it is to Glasgow one now looks for that art's most brilliant achievement." Yet the reader of Mrs. Pennell's paper will admit that she makes good her contention. The Glasgow painters have an enthusiasm fcr art and a delight in criticising each others' work that are not to be found out of Paris, and as Mrs. Pennell says, they have not sacrificed artistic effect to commercial
ambition or popular puerility. The short stories in this magaz'ne are all good, more particularly the old-fashioned and somewhat mournful" Merry Maid of Arcady " and "John Sanders, Labourer," which tells of the surely unnecessary sacrifice of a man's life for a lame dog.
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