tances of the stars from our sun are such, that though the motion at that number of miles per every second of time has been going on more or less, ever since the earliest epochs of astronomical observation, no appreciable effect from that cause on the brightness to us of any of the stars concerned, has yet been made out.

Such then is the overwhelming distance of our sun from any star, and generally of any true star from every other true star. Each of them so distant from its nearest neighbor as to appear from thence an almost vanishing speck of light, and yet existing in majestic grandeur and brilliancy surpassing imagination in its own locality; one of them, Sirius, having been proved to give out as much light as sixty-three of our suns; and we know what Sol can do at our terrestrial distance of ninety-two millions of miles. Some too, if not all of the stars are further accompanied by their own systems of planets, many of them far larger than our earth; and if we may judge by what is burning, or rather rendered incandescent in the photospheres of their suns, furnished with untold wealth of gold, silver, iron, calcium, magnesium, and almost every other known metal. One of these mighty though distant orbs then is a true star, and no one can be found fault with for calling it a star; but has such a stupendous amount of mass, matter, light, energy, and glory ever been really lost; and does its former place consequently know it now no more?

'Yes,' answers with the utmost confidence a young scientist of the day; often, often! Many of them have been lost, and are lost to this very hour.'

Here is rather a startling assertion to be met with. But on proof being quietly asked for, it is stated by the asserter and his friends that divers and sundry stars observed by former astronomers, and entered by them very accurately in their long since published Catalogues of Stars, are no longer to be found in the heavens; for when the places assigned in such a Catalogue are now recovered by instrumental measurement, they are found to be absolutely and perfectly va

cant.

This last part of the tale is true enough; but what is the testimony that

the Catalogue places ever were occupied ? Never is it a case of a star so large and bright and permanent in our heavens as to have been seen generation after generation by lord and peasant alike; seldom a case where even two or three telescopic observers agree to having noted its actual and separate existence among the crowds of similar small stars amenable only to telescopic vision; but in place of such witness there is merely a simple numerical entry of the measured place of an alleged small star in the Catalogue, containing the similar places of several thousand stars, by some astronomer of repute in his own day, but now no more. To what extent then are we to rely upon that?

Even granting that such astronomer has not-though most of them have, when observing in a wholesale, manufacturing sort of way large numbers of small telescopic stars-catalogued inadvertently as a star some faint planet, or planetoid then unknown (such as either Uranus or Neptune, or some one or other of the hundred and sixty-seven planetoids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now known to be circling for ever through the heavens, and any. one of whose then places is of course vacant now); have his observations been always computed correctly to obtain their final results, and have these been printed also without typographical error?

When Sir William Herschel in the last century examined the heavens, with the celestial atlas and stellar Catalogue of Flamsteed, the first British Astronomerroyal, in his hand, he found so many of the stars marked there to be missing in the sky, that a laborious reference was made to the manuscripts of Flamsteed's original observations; and no fewer than a hundred and eleven cases were thereby discovered of imaginary stars, caused by errors of transcribing, calculating, or printing; while from five hundred to six hundred real stars accurately observed, had been omitted! Flamsteed himself, we should say in justice to him, did not live to calculate and print his own observations; but other astronomers, and careful literary compilers, and even societies of the best scientific men of the day, can seldom produce anything extensive without error somewhere or other. Hence, when the late Captain W. S. Jacob of the

Madras Observatory sent a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1854 describing his examination of one thousand four hundred and forty star-places selected from the supposed accurate Catalogue of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, published only fifteen years before, he shewed that he had discovered discrepancies between the position of many of the catalogued stars and their exact positions in the heavens; and that there were no less than forty-three of the objects numbered in the Catalogue of which he could find no trace whatever, even in the clear and transparent air of India.

Were those then really lost stars? The newspaper reporters present at the meeting seemed to think so; and their abstracts next morning evidently spread the idea. And the author of this paper was asked by some-in furtherance of prophetic studies concerning the last days-whether it was really true that forty-three stars had actually disappeared from the firmament of heaven in the course of the last fifteen years only!

'I did not say stars,' replied Captain Jacob; 'I took very good care to say numbers; such and such numbers in the list of the British Association's Catalogue. Those numbers ought, no doubt, each of them to represent or designate a star; but there is no positive security that they do, gathered as they have been from all sorts of sources, until they have been examined, re-examined, and certified by subsequent and most thoroughly independent observers: and if the British Association for the Advancement of Science desires to maintain its ancient unexceptionable fame, rather than its present specious popularity, the sooner it curtails its dinners, and spends the proceeds on preparing a new edition of its Catalogue of Stars, the better.'

Well! but for all that, urges one of the new school, there are cases of real stars certainly known to have existed once, and as certainly known not to be visible now, such as the following example, extracted from Arago's Astronomy: The fifty-fifth star of Hercules, placed in the neck of the figure, has been inserted in the Catalogue of Flamsteed as a star of the fifth magnitude. On the roth of October 1781, Sir William Herschel saw

it distinctly, and noted that it was red. On the 11th of April 1782, he perceived it again, and inscribed it in his journal as an ordinary star. On the 24th of March 1791, there no longer remained any trace of it. Repeated attempts on the 25th and on subsequent occasions led to no other result. Thus the fiftyfifth of Hercules has disappeared.' All this account may be accepted freely as describing correctly what was seen at the dates of observation concerned; and as there are probably not a few more socalled lost stars, yet no more necessarily or actually lost than this one, let us explain what its position is now generally considered to be.

Fitful changes of color and specially red scintillations have been long remarked as highly characteristic of an extensive and well-known class of stars termed variable stars,' or stars variable in their brightness and consequent visibility through periods of time, extending in the different cases from a few days to many years, and occasionally it is believed to several centuries. Thus the star termed by astronomers Algol or ẞ Persei, varies in brightness from the second to the fourth magnitude, and back again, in the short period of two days twenty hours and forty-eight minutes. Bẞ Lyræ varies from the third to the fifth magnitude and comes back to the third again in six days nine hours. Omicron, or Mira Ceti, varies from the second magnitude to complete invisibility and reappears and comes up to the second magnitude again in three hundred and thirtyfour days. 7 Argus varies from one of the very brightest of the stars of the first magnitude in the whole heavens down. to a most inconsiderable one of the fourth magnitude, and blazes out again up to the first magnitude in about forty-six years; while R Cephei varies from the fifth magnitude down to the eleventh magnitude, or visible only in a very powerful telescope, and returns to the fifth (which is visible to the naked eye) in about seventy-three years.

Now these stars, no matter how much they may vary in brightness, are no more lost and perished in space when they fade away and disappear to us, than our sun is when hid from our view at night by the intercepting body of the earth. Neither are they moved out of their

fixity of place, nor deprived of any of their mass and gravitation governing power over their attendant planets, any more than our sun is, when at times, now known to be periodic and subject to law, his bright surface is dimmed by many dark spots. Hence the simplest supposition to explain the observed phenomena of the star fifty-fifth of Hercules is, that it is one of those variable stars.' In which case it still undoubtedly exists in its own place, and will again appear to view there at some future time.

But mere telescopic details can affect only the few; while the general public is rather thirsting for a case of some good big star, which all can see. 'Was there not such a star,' they ask, 'brighter than any of the orbs we have before us now, to be seen once in the constellation of Cassiopeia; and did it not burn and blaze through several years in varied colors, just like a world on fire, and then disappear and leave its place absolutely vacant?' Such a star was certainly seen by all the northern world in 1572, 1573, and 1574, but not previously to that; until, at least, you ascend the stream of time to 1264, when a temporary apparition of the same sort appeared in the same part of the sky; and again the same thing is reported in history to have occurred about the year 945 A.D. So that here again we have merely an extreme case of a 'variable' star, with an intense though short-lived maximum of light and a long-continued minimum. But so far from being now-because its minimum is below human visibility-a lost, lapsed, or destroyed star, it may be, and probably is, going on in its own place according to laws which it has followed in the

past, and will continue to follow for countless millions of years, without a moment's cessation at any time. And in fact the sequence of the numbers 945, 1264, 1572 lead astronomers to expect its reappearance at some time previous to 1890. And if it does shine forth. again at that time, and prove itself in the scientific age of the world to be 'a variable' with a period of more than three hundred years, it will not only get the physical nature of its light well examined by spectroscopic analysis, but will strengthen that variable-star explanation' for the benefit of many other temporary stars with still longer periods of time; and longer, we say advisedly, because only one of their maxima of brightness is known to have been witnessed yet through all the human period.

Such were the intensely bright star in Serpentarius in 1604 A.D.; the bright star in Scorpio in 900 A.D.; another in Aquila in 388 A.D.; and another still in 130 A.D., not to say anything of the still more celebrated and classic case of the the Lost Pleiad,' which the poets affirmed to have disappeared in grief after the siege and taking of Troy about 1200 B.C., leaving thereby the primeval group of the seven stars' to be six only, ever since; but with the asserted destiny of the seventh one shining forth at some future time brighter than ever. A sort of early poetical prophecy, which the recent progress of practical astronomy on one side and archæological research on the other, especially at the Great Pyramid, have been lending remarkable confirmation to within the last very few years.-Chambers's Journal.

THE portrait in our present number is of Mr. W. D. Howells, who, as poet, novelist, and essayist, has won for himself a foremost place among what may be called the younger generation of American authors. The popularity of his own writings, together with his position as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, has enabled him to exercise a decided influence upon current literature; and he is perhaps the leading exponent of a school whose principal characteristic is a refinement of method and a finish of style surpassing anything hitherto known in our national literature.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS was born in Martinsville, Belmont County, Ohio, on the 1st of March, 1837. When he was three years old, his parents removed to Hamilton, Ohio, and there, in the office of his father, who was a printer and publisher, he learned the printer's trade, and worked at it for twelve years. At the end of this period he became assistant editor of the Ohio State Journal, and subsequently was connected with the Cincinnati Gazette, contributing during the time six poems to the Atlantic Monthly. In 1860 he published a life of Abraham Lincoln, and wrote, in conjunction with John James Piatt, a volume of verse entitled "Poems of Two Friends." In 1861 he was appointed

by President Lincoln United States consul at Venice, where he remained until 1865, making researches and observations which subsequently bore fruit in the two delightful volumes of sketches entitled "Venetian Life" (1866) and "Italian Journeys" (1867). On his return home, in 1865, he joined the staff of the Nation, and shortly afterwards became assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, then under the management of Mr. James T. Fields. In July, 1871, the magazine passed into his sole control as editor, and he has held the position until the present time, though in the interval the magazine has changed publishers.

Besides those already mentioned, Mr. Howells's published works are: "No Love Lost," a poem (1868); “Suburban Sketches" (1869); "Their Wedding Journey" (1872); "A Chance Acquaintance" (1873); "A Foregone Conclusion" (1874); "Private Theatricals" (1875); and a "Life of Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes" (1876).

His editorial contributions to the Atlantic Monthly are numerous and varied, and he has also written copiously for the North American Review, Putnam's Magazine, the Saturday Press, and other periodicals.

THE LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, Queen of France, By Prof. Charles Duke Yonge. New York: Harper & Bros.

Few stories are more familiar to modern ears than that of Marie Antoinette, and perhaps none is more interesting; but, often and well as it has been told, Professor Yonge makes it plain that the attractions and instruc

tiveness of the subject are as yet far from being exhausted. In the preface to his work, Professor Yonge enumerates a score or more of authorities that he has consulted in its preparation, but by far the most important of these, and the use of which has given its peculiar value to the biography, are the two collections of correspondence published by M. Arneth and M. Feuillet de Conches at

Leipsic and Paris, between 1866 and 1875. These two collections fill no less than ten large volumes, and contain "not only a number of letters which passed between Marie Antoinette, her mother the Empress-Queen (Maria Theresa), and her brothers Joseph and Leopold, who successively became emperors after the death of their father; but also a regular series of letters from the Imperial embassador at Paris, the Count Mercy d'Argenteau, which may almost be said to form a complete history of the Court of France, especially in all the transactions in which Marie Antoinette, whether as dauphiness or queen, was concerned, till the death of Maria Theresa at Christmas, 1780." The correspondence with her two brothers, the emperors Joseph and Leopold, only ceases with the death of the latter in March, 1792; and there are numerous letters exchanged by the queen with various friends, including several of her most intimate associates. Many of the letters, especially those to her mother, reveal the very inmost and most secret recesses of Marie Antoinette's character, motives, and conduct; and, taken as a whole, the correspondence throws a perfect blaze of light upon the history of France during the most striking period in the annals of modern Europe. Not a few great public characters are seriously damaged by the ordeal to which they are thus subjected; but, as Professor Yonge says, "it is but recording the general verdict of all whose judgment is of value to affirm that Marie Antoinette has triumphantly surmounted it, and that the result of a scrutiny as minute and severe as any to which a human being has ever been subjected, has been greatly to raise her reputation."

Making use for the first time of this extremely valuable material, Prof. Yonge's work possesses more of the charm of novelty than could reasonably have been expected in a story so often rehearsed; and though the author is confessedly a eulogist rather than an historian, his life of Marie Antoinette easily surpasses and supersedes any previous achievement in the same field. As a narrative of vitally interesting and important facts, it could hardly be more brilliant and fascinating than it really is, and it only misses being a great work because of the author's lack of sober judgment, and the unreasonable lengths to which he is carried by his partisan prejudices and predilections.

HAROLD. A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

In his new drama, Mr. Tennyson has put into the compendious form of a five-act ragedy the noble portrait of Harold, "the

last English king of England," which Mr. Freeman draws with such painstaking care in his "History of the Norman Conquest," together with the substance of the picturesque narrative which the same historian gives of the closing years of the Saxon monarchy. Many of the great historical characters of the period are introduced, including William, Count of the Normans, and Edward the Confessor; and the background of incident is so adjusted as to bring into view nearly all those political and religious complications which prepared the way for what Mr. Tennyson regards as the lamentable tragedy of the Conquest. Patriotism is the theme of the drama, and the public rather than the private life of the leading characters is dealt with. The figure of Harold is a very noble onesomewhat cold and austere, but truly heroic in his devotion to his country and to his conception of duty. He secures the respect and sympathy of the reader at every stage of his career, and the catastrophe of Hastings will doubtless henceforth be looked upon with different eyes by those who have drawn their impressions of English history from the popular historians who have been too apt to assume that whatever has happened in England has been for the best.

To this extent that of rescuing one of the heroes of English history from misconception or oblivion-Mr. Tennyson has been successful; but in other respects "Harold" can hardly be regarded as an advance upon "Queen Mary." It exhibits greater experience in the playwright's art, and is far better adapted for representation on the stage; but it is less poetical, less strong in its appeal to the feelings, less impressive as a psychological study, less varied in the emotions depicted, and decidedly less brilliant and affluent in style. There is nothing in it approaching in power to the last two acts of "Queen Mary;" and careful as the author is to unify and concentrate the interest, the impression left upon the mind is, after all, confused and inchoate in

the extreme. "Harold" is by no means a "closet drama," and it is probable that many of its apparent deficiencies would disappear in a stage representation. Still, it cannot be denied that on reading it appears tame, and tamer on a second reading than at the first.