a mad passion and heartbreak to settle the long score with Carver Doone. It is a tiny building, well hidden by trees, with a low square tower, a nave so small that it seems like a toy structure, and a chancel as tiny-one of those quaint little churches which one finds in England, with room for but a handful of people, but touched with old associations and giving a quiet landscape a hint of ancient worship and half-forgotten history. In this church John Ridd held office as warden with a deep sense of his unfitness. The Plover's Barrows Farm of John

tops. But all below, where the valley bends, and the Lyn stream goes along with it, pretty meadows slope their breast, and the sun spreads on the water." Here lived the Ridds-slow-witted, big-framed, honest-hearted farmer folk; loving the soil which they had worked for generations; clean-handed, God-fearing men and women of the stock which has given England an immovable foundation.

The Bagsworthy Valley lies a mile or more beyond, and here, at Bagsworthy Farm, one leaves the road and follows a foot-path along the stream for three miles,

Ridd's time has vanished, but its site is pointed out, and one needs no imagination to look upon the landscape through his eyes: "Almost everybody knows, in our part of the world at least, how pleasant and soft the fall of the land is round about Plover's Barrows Farm. Above it is strong dark mountains, spread with heath, and desolate, but near our house the valleys cove, and open warmth and shelter. Here are trees, and bright green grass, and orchards full of contentment, and a man scarce espy the brook, although he hears it everywhere, and, indeed, a stout good piece of it comes through our farmyard, and swells sometimes to a rush of waves, when the clouds are on the hill

through the haunts and home of the Doones. It is a beautiful glen, with a certain wildness and brooding desolation quite in keeping with its associations; but it is less bold and its sides are less precipitous than the descriptions in "Lorna Doone" suggest. The hillsides are steep and barren save for the bell-heather which softens their outlines, and the narrow valley has an atmosphere of remoteness and desolation. The waterslide, when it is reached, seems much less alarming than it appeared to John Ridd when he made his perilous ascent; and the Doone Gate is a rocky mound which is easily accessible.

It must not be forgotten that John

Kidd's imagination was filled for years with an almost superstitious dread of the Doones, whose recklessness, audacity, quick intelligence, and long defiance of law had deeply impressed the whole countryside with a sense of terror, so that the Doone Valley became an accursed place, full of all manner of known or unimaginable terrors. Moreover, it is more than two centuries since the spell of the Doones was broken and their nest burned over their heads, and every year in that long period has softened and subdued their old haunt. The Exmoor of to-day is a very different landscape from that upon which men looked in the time when

valley has exchanged its inaccessible savagery for a wild loveliness which is somewhat secluded but quite within reach of the pedestrian. In the novel we see through John Ridd's eyes; and, honest and literal as the slow-thinking but stouthearted lover of Lorna was, his imagination was not untouched by the wild tales and superstitious fears of his time.

Coming out of this lonely valley, with its tragic legend of ancient wrong rudely avenged, and its tender story of old-time love transmuted into lifelong happiness, one is prepared for the noble ride across the summits of the hills, splendid beyond words with the purple of the bell-heather,

Judge Jeffreys was holding the "bloody assizes." A century later Exmoor was "a land of freedom and solitude, haunt of the bittern and red deer, intersected by many a silent tomb and brawling river." The red deer are still there, and the wild, lonely beauty of the heaths and of the Valley of the Doones is untouched; but Mother Melldrum no longer hides in the Valley of the Rocks, the old superstitions have become pleasant legends for the entertainment of tourists, the Doones have ceased to be terrible and become romantic; and their

mile upon mile of unbroken color against the sky, with long contrasts of yellow gorse; the great cliffs green or bare to the water, and the sea softly blue in the long summer twilight; a noble country, molded on large lines, with a richness of verdure which has its roots in unnumbered centuries; lonely heaths, great hills shouldering one another to the line of the sky, and a valley sacred to the memory of a beautiful romance and of a novelist who touched the heart of his generation.

P

ROMINENT among the finest illustrated books of the year stands Mr. Baldry's "Hubert von Herkomer," a work authoritative in text and sumptuous in illustration. The volume's worth as biography is less than its worth as criticism. We know something about this master's portraits, as they have been extensively exhibited, but we do not know as much as we might and ought about his other activities. Chief among these is his early work as a painter of figure-pieces. Of these, probably the best known is "The Chapel of the Charterhouse," a reproduction of which appeared in The Outlook for November 16. The painting now hangs in the London National Gallery. This and the other Herkomer figure-compositions betray Frederick Walker's influence; but there is in each a dramatic quality coming from the artist himself it is as if we read in each a phase of his early years when he was struggling with poverty and illness. At all events, "At Death's Door," "The Last Muster," "On Strike," "God's Shrine," and the rest gave to their painter a freedom for the exercise of his fancy impossible of attainment in the work by which he will probably be best known, portraiture. While the illustrations of his portraits are noteworthy, by far the most interesting illustration is that which shows the Herkomer

work in black-and-white, and this subject also forms the second salient merit of Mr. Baldry's admirable text. The black-andwhite work is not so well known, either in England or in this country, as is that in color, because to a great degree it was the achievement of the artist's earlier, not of his later, years. It shows ever-increasing distinction in style, markedly true in the etchings and specially in the small etchings. Professor von Herkomer himself acknowledges that his earlier attempts were on plates of disproportionate size. Mr. Baldry reports him as declaring: "My sins of size lie heavy on my conscience. One glance at a Rembrandt etching would have set me right." The most interesting of all the Herkomer attempts in black-and-white, as Mr. Baldry also admits, lies in the process of autographic engraving. The artist was moved to this invention by noticing the charm of monotypes, namely, prints from unengraved plates. He is also a draughtsman on wood, a lithographer, and has arrived at an ingenious reproductive process now known as "Herkomergravure." The book as a whole is a notable contribution, not so much towards the knowledge of a remarkable personality as towards the greater illumination of art itself. (The Macmillan Company, New York.) Tourists in the Engadine, and espe

cially in the Maloja district, have been, naturally, the most appreciative admirers of the late Giovanni Segantini's pictures. He lived near the Maloja Pass, and spent his too short career in depicting Alpine scenes. Most of his landscapes were painted directly from life; but, when the weather was too rigorous for working outof-doors, the others were done in his chalet-studio. Almost all his landscapes have animals in the foreground, and some critics even consider him as good a painter of animals as he was of landscapes. That which lent a peculiar impressiveness to his pictures, however, was the fact that he generally put in some human figures which he sought to invest with a subtle symbolism. Their effect was heightened by the painter's use of unusual effects of light and shade-a habit which in some of his works, as viewed for the first time, seemed almost to approach the eccentric. Taking him all in all, however, Segantini was a remarkable painter, uniting some of the qualities of Troyon and Millet. We are glad to see that no less a biographer than Signora Linda Villari has undertaken to tell the world about the artist's life and work. This account is accompanied by reproductions of seventy-five of the master's paintings. We are glad that these illustrations are on a sufficient scale also to reproduce Segantini's peculiar technique, one which has often been adopted by Mr. Watts in his great allegorical pictures. Instead of mixing colors to the desired shade on the palette and then lay ing them on in even tints, the colors appear in small points and fine streaks. Such text, illustration, print, and paper might have received more appropriate binding. (E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.) In point of book-making and illustration, Mr. Sadakichi Hartmann's volumes "The History of American Art" are models; in point of text they are hardly as satisfactory, owing to certain slight inaccuracies. We also regret to find the work incomplete in that the subject of architecture is omitted. The book's title, therefore, would be more exactly expressed by "A History of American Painting and Sculpture." Mr. Hartmann gives an interesting review of American painting before 1828, dwelling particularly on Copley, Trumbull, Benjamin West, and

on

Gilbert Stuart. He then reviews the school of American landscape-painters, of which early pioneers were Thomas Cole and Asher Durand. The "Hudson River School," of which Kensett, Sandford Gifford, and Cropsey were notable examples, is treated at considerable length. The last part of the chapter on landscape artists is the more noteworthy, as it contains some particularly acute and clever criticisms on the work of Robinson, Inness, Platt, and Chase. Mr. Hartmann's idea of the Old School as applied to American art might have been inserted earlier in the book, so it seems to us. At all events, it is a considerable leap from Copley and the rest across many pages devoted to landscape-painters, only again. to come back to the earlier artists. However, what we read is full of interest. The Centennial Exhibition marks a line between the old and the new. We applaud Mr. Hartmann's criticism of American sculpture in that it has not as yet done justice to the American woman. "It is not merely in cold, beautiful form that the American woman excels; she also possesses Lord Bacon's highest beauty,' the beauty of decent and gracious motion.'" America is far better known in Europe by painters than by sculptors; the latter have produced strongly individual works like the Macmonnies statue of Nathan Hale, for instance, or Mr. French's "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor," or the works of St. Gaudens; but our paintersnotably Messrs. Whistler and Sargenthave arrived. They and others, like Messrs. Homer Martin, Abbot Thayer, Winslow Homer, Dewing, and Tryon, for instance, have rolled up a debt which the American Nation can never repay, not only because, as Mr. Hartmann points out, they were insensible to mercenary temptations and faithfully accomplished the ideals of their youth, but because "their genius proved powerful enough to struggle against the indifference of a whole Nation, and thus has bequeathed to us, in this very era of commercialism, a proud and self-reliant native art." (L. C. Page & Co., Boston.)

No work on pottery has appeared in this country of such compelling interest as the recent publication by the Riverside Press, for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of its catalogue of the Morse Collec