ose
conditions sustained him while they disgusted him. If Heine fought,
scratched and bit with all his might among the convulsions of the
politics he was helpless to rearrange, he was equally mordant when
he turned his attention to society, and perhaps more frightfully
impartial. He hated the English for "their idle curiosity, bedizened
awkwardness, impudent bashfulness, angular egotism, and vacant delight
in all melancholy objects." As for the French, they are "les comediens
ordinaires du bon Dieu;" yet "a blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle
more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman." And Germany:
"Germany alone possesses those colossal fools whose caps reach unto
the heavens, and delight the stars with the ringing of their bells."
Thus shooting forth his tongue on every side, Heine is shown "in
action" by this little cluster of "scintillations," and the whole
book is the shortest definition of him possible, for it makes the
saliencies of his character jut out within a close compass. It can be
read in a couple of hours, and no reading of the same length in any
of his complete writings would give such a notion of the most witty,
perverse, tender, savage, pitiable and inexcusable of men.

* * * * *

Monographs, Personal and Social. By Lord Houghton. New York: Holt &
Williams.

Lord Houghton is one of those fortunate persons who seem to find
without trouble the exact niches in life which Nature has designed
them to fill. There probably never entered the world a man more
eminently made to appreciate the best kind of "high life" which London
has offered in the present century; and he has been able to avail
himself of it to his heart's content. The son of a Yorkshire squire in
affluent circumstances and of high character, Monckton Milnes was not
spoilt by finding, as he might have done had he been the heir to a
dukedom, the world at his feet; whilst at the same time all the good
things were within his reach by a little of that exertion which does
so much toward enhancing the enjoyment of them. From the period of his
entry upon London life he displayed that anxiety to know celebrities
which, though in a somewhat different way, was a marked feature of
his contemporary and acquaintance, Crabb Robinson; and the story
illustrative of this tendency which gained him the _sobriquet_ of "the
cool of the evening" will be always associated with the name he has
since merged in a less familia