delightful illustrations, its charming anecdotes, its excellent
advice. Mr. Alan Cole deserves the thanks of all who are interested in
art for bringing this book before the public in so attractive and so
inexpensive a form.

Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest
Antiquity to the Present Day. Translated and enlarged by Alan S. Cole
from the French of Ernest Lefebure. (Grevel and Co.)

THE POETS' CORNER--VIII

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)

A few years ago some of our minor poets tried to set Science to music, to
write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural
Selection. Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem,
if we may judge from Miss Nesbit's remarkable volume, to be the new theme
of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry. The change has some
advantages. Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly
defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate
into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science. At the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the
cosmogony of Darwin. To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not
a greater ape. Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly
concrete things. We find their incarnation everywhere and, as we are
discussing a matter of art, we have no hesitation in saying that they are
not devoid of picturesqueness. The etcher or the painter finds in them
'a subject made to his hand,' and the poet has admirable opportunities of
drawing weird and dramatic contrasts between the purple of the rich and
the rags of the poor. From Miss Nesbit's book comes not merely the voice
of sympathy but also the cry of revolution:

This is our vengeance day. Our masters made fat with our fasting
Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong:
Old wrongs shall give might to our arm, remembrance of wrongs shall
make lasting
The graves we will dig for our tyrants we bore with too much and too
long.

The poem from which we take this stanza is remarkably vigorous, and the
only consolation that we can offer to the timid and the Tories is that as
long as so much strength is employed in blowing the trumpet, the sword,
so far as Miss Nesbit is concerned, will probably remain sheathed.
Personally, and looking at the matter from a purely artistic point of
view, we prefer Miss Nesbit's gentler m