MY devotion to American biography has been rewarded and exhilarated by Mr. M. R. Werner's "Brigham Young."
In the production of a classical work, we are told, everything depends on the choice of a subject. This is Mr. Werner's subject: An impecunious Vermont boy with only a few weeks of schooling rises to be prophet, priest and king, head of a church, general of an army, governor of a territory, possessor of an estate worth $2,000,000, husband of twenty-seven wives and father of fifty-six children. I should like to say that this subject is of "epic sweep"; but since critics have got the habit of describing every midwestern novel which shows a section of cornland under cultivation as of "epic sweep," the phrase has become a little colorless. What one has in mind about Mr. Werner's subject is, that it begins in Vermont, ascends to heaven, descends to western New York, and traversing the great West to the Rocky Mountains presents such events as the councils of God, the revelation of laws to man, the founding of cities, the martyrdom of saints, the building of temples, the waging of wars, the massacre of infidels and the establishment of civilization in the wilderness.
To whom hitherto have most "Gentiles" been in-
