Shakespearian students who do not care for the larger and more exhaustive concordances of Mrs. Cowden Clarke or of Dr. Schmidt, and of the greatest assistance to the students who do possess those invaluable works. For, although in one aspect of the Index it is a concordance to the more important passages in Shakespeare, and so but a condensation of the labors of Clarke and Schmidt, it contains distinctive and original features. For example, it is a dictionary of Shakespearian characters, from Hamlet and Othello down to the nurses and lackeys who make but a single appearance, with references to all the scenes and acts in which they are on the stage, and with critical notices (not always selected with the nicest discrimination, yet useful and interesting, so far as they go) on the most important. Under the title of each play, also, critical notices are appended and a short résumé is presented of the history of the play,—the dates of composition, performance, and publication, the sources from which the plots have been derived, and other data of literary interest, in which the results of the most careful and recent Shakespearian researches have been turned to account.
Perhaps "The Yoke of the Thorah" may put an end to the criticism which has been fond of comparing Sidney Luska with Hugh Conway. The criticism was not only unjust in suggesting that an author of striking originality was an imitator, but also in subordinating him—as the imitator must always be subordinated—to a distinctly inferior writer. Sidney Luska is an artist, which Hugh Conway never was, though in "A Family Affair" he gave promise that he might become one. Luska's descriptions of phases of emotional feeling are unique in modern literature. His characters love, enjoy, and despair with a heartiness and an intensity that send the same thrill of emotion through the reader. When, for instance, he pictures his heroes under the spell of exquisite music, even the traitor, the strategist, and the despoiler to whom the concord of sweet sounds is an unknown tongue cannot help feeling strangely moved. He is almost the only writer now left who really respects a lover, who is willing to leave him to his illusions, who paints him in his divine innocence, naked and not ashamed in the Garden of Eden, without whispering to the spectator that the Garden is a fool's paradise after all. These excellent qualities are manifest—more strikingly than ever, in fact—in "The Yoke of the Thorah," and the gruesome or sensational plot which made the unthinking liken "As It Was Written" and "Mrs. Peixada" to the works of Conway has been abandoned. "The Yoke of the Thorah" is a realistic story of modern life in New York. The scene is principally laid among the Jews, and the interest is furnished by the unsuccessful attempt of the hero to throw off the yoke of the Thorah—i.e., of the Mosaic law—and marry a Christian. Elias Bacharach is only conventionally speaking a hero; his weakness and superstition prove his ruin; but he is always lovable, and is drawn throughout with a firm, strong hand. His uncle, the Rabbi, is delightful,—in his calm, remorseless bigotry lending a touch of unconscious comedy to the tragedy for which he is mainly responsible. The Background of Jewish life is carefully studied, and to many people will let in new light upon the domestic manners and customs of a peculiar and picturesque people.
One of the literary authorities of Chicago, that Athens of the West, in a recent notice of Miss F. C. Baylor's "Behind the Blue Ridge" (J. B. Lippincott Company), thinks that "anybody who can read the story of poor old simple-hearted, shiftless 'Pap' without tears, better go sell himself for hayseed at once."
