dying burglar.  With “Agnes” she may plunge into more heroic self-abnegation.  Leaving the fair attractions of the world as utterly as the diver leaves the foam and surface of the sea, she may grope for moral pearls in the workhouse of Liverpool or train for her sombre avocation in the asylum at Kaiserwerth.  Such absolute dedication will probably have some effect on her “tone” as a lady.  She can no longer keep up with the current interests of society.  Instead of Shakespeare and Italian literature, which we have seen coloring the career of the district visitor, her life will take on a sort of submarine pallor.  The sordid surroundings will press too close for any gleam from the outer world to penetrate.  The things of interest will be the wretched things of pauperdom and hospital service—­the slight improvement of Gaffer, the spiritual needs of Gammer, the harsh tyranny of upper nurses.  “To-day when out walking,” says the brave young lady, as superintendent of a boys’ hospital, “I could only keep from crying by running races with my boys.”  The effect of a training so rigid—­training which sometimes includes stove-blacking and floor-washing—­is to try the pure metal, to eject the merely ornamental young lady whose nature is dross, and to consolidate the valuable nature that is sterling.  Miss Agnes, plunged in hard practical work, and unconsciously acquiring a little workmen’s slang, gives the final judgment on the utility of such discipline:  “Without a regular hard London training I should have been nowhere.”  Both the saints of the century are now dead, and these memoirs conserve the perfume of their lives.

Songs from the Old Dramatists.  Collected and Edited by Abby Sage Richardson, New York:  Hurd & Houghton.

Any anthology of old English lyrics is a treasure if one can depend upon the correctness of printing and punctuating.  Mrs. Richardson has found a quantity of rather recondite ones, and most of the favorites are given too.  Only to read her long index of first lines is to catch a succession of dainty fancies and of exquisite rhythms, arranged when the language was crystallizing into beauty under the fanning wings of song.  That some of our pet jewels are omitted was to be expected.  The compiler does not find space for Rochester’s most sincere-seeming stanzas, beginning, “I cannot change as others do”—­among the sweetest and most lyrical utterances which could set the stay-imprisoned hearts of Charles II.’s beauties to bounding with a touch of emotion.  Perhaps Rochester was not exactly a dramatist, though that point is wisely strained in other cases.  We do not get the “Nay, dearest, think me not unkind,” nor do we get the “To all you ladies now on land,” though sailors’ lyrics, among the finest legacies of the time when gallant England ruled the waves, are not wanting.  We have Sir Charles Sedley’s

  “Love still hath something of the sea
    From which his mother rose,”

and the siren’s song, fit for the loveliest of Parthenopes, from Browne’s Masque of the Inner Temple, beginning,