BOOK REVIEWS


garding the effect of Central Park upon the popu-
lation of New York, when he said: "No one can
doubt that it exercises a distinctly harmonizing and
refining influence upon the most unfortunate and
most lawless classes of the city-an influence favor-
able to courtesy, self-control, and temperance."
  The editorial closes with a parallel which is most
interesting and apparently quite justified: "In his
work Mr. Olmstead resembled in some respects
William Morris. The two were utterly unlike in
temperament-one visionary and enthusiastic, the
other cool-headed and practical, but both were in-
tellectually akin to each other as master craftsmen
employing different artistic media for the attain-
ment of ends distinctly human. Both wrought to
divert men from the paths of sordidness and mate-
rialism: one avowedly, the other in silence. Both
sought something far more precious than fame or
riches, and achieved that place in the select com-
pany of the immortals which is the reward of those
whose greatness of heart and nobility of soul have
helped life to become sweeter and purer, and have
created a debt which the remembrance and grati-
tude of men can only feebly repay."

  THE CHAUTAUQUAw, always a leader in social
progress, contains "A Survey of Civic Better-
ment," in which Mr. D. C. Heath, the educational
publisher of Boston, gives utterance to sentiments
which should serve as an inspiration to the people
of every thickly populated area of our country.
He writes: "I consider the securing of public
play-grounds for children in the cities the best
work that has been done in the last five years in
the direction of civic improvement. It is because
the child is father to the man. Horace Mann once
said essentially 'one former is worth a thousand
reformers.' I believe in spending ten thousand
dollars on children where we spend one thousand
on adults. The older we grow the more and more
evident it becomes to us that our chief function in
life is the putting of the next generation upon the
stage."
  To the same branch of education and civic bet-
terment HARPER'S for September devotes a consid-
erable space occupied by the simple, clear account,
by Stoddard Dewey, of "A Paris Vacation School
Colony." It is an article which makes one better
for the reading. It offers an excellent portrait of
the happy, yet grave, philosophizing French child
of the people, and its attractiveness is greatly
increased by a series of illustrations from the pen-


cil of that inimitable delineator of children, Boutet
de Monvel.

   THE ARExA, in its last issue, contains five. ap-
preciations by eminent men upon John Ward Stim-
son's recently published book: "The Gate Beauti-
ful." Among these criticisms that of the Rev. R.
Heber Newton is, perhaps, the most sympathetic
and timely. In allusion to Mr. Stimson's return to
America after years of study in Paris, Mr. Newton
says: "The artist recognized our industrial inferior-
ity in all the manufactures wherein beauty is a use.
He noted our manufacturers importing trained
workmen for the handicrafts which seek to give
charm to life. He detected the presence of the
veins of wealth to be found in men and women
capable of such artistic work. He recognized that
the true democracy must make of the beautiful, as
of every other real wealth of life, a communal pos-
session of the people. He perceived the truth that
art can only flourish when it is not an exotic of the
salon, but a native product in the homes of the
people; when it is not the potted plant in the pal-
ace of the rich, but a sturdy out-of-door growth in
the yards of the poor, rooting in the common soil
of earth; that we can only have an art of the peo-
ple .when we have a people capable of art, living
neither in sordidness nor squalor, but in the modest,
honest riches which leave the'soul of man capable
of discerning that there is a wisdom more to be
desired than gold."


  HANDICRAFT for September publishes an article
upon "Stained Glass," written by Mrs. Sarah Whit-
man, the Boston artist, which is beyond all doubt
the best of the many upon the subject found in
the American magazines of the present year. It
shows the ample technical knowledge and the ex-
perience of wide travel necessary to the writer who
would attempt such criticism, joined to a fervor
which comes alone from the worker who has toiled
through difficulties to success. It has, withal, a
poetic quality in the "cut of the phrase" and the
choice of words which causes the pages to "read
themselves." It offers bits of criticism that de-
serve to be separately preserved by all students of
the history of stained glass, and it should be de-
veloped by the author into an extended monograph.
It contains a number of exceedingly interesting
statements, among which the following will be wel-
come to many readers:


103