NEW BOOKS. 611 not unfairly be accorded, to have been prone to make chief use of some that can hardly be called the most important or even, for effective and condensed statement, the most transcriptable. The consequence is that, after all editorial pruning, there are many pages (easily to be remarked) that are by no means wisely filled ; while from others much is found missing that should have been freely supplied. Take, in the way of omission, the single example of " Unconscious mental action," disposed of, p. 46, in two extracts from Carpenter's Mental Physiology and a few lines from Mill's Hamilton, followed as to " Subconsciousness " by another extract from Mill (not containing the word) and one from Sully 's Psychology : not a word from the long discussion in Hamilton's Metaphysics nor the slightest men- tion of Leibniz's 'obscure perceptions' ! But it seems ungracious to dwell further on shortcomings, when to have carried through the work at all, even within the narrow and artificial limits set, means no light amount of protracted and anxious labour. Though, neither in conception nor in execution, is this the Dictionary of Philosophy that one could desire for the use of English students, it brings together a multitude of passages from philo- sophical writers that cannot be read without great and varied interest and disposes them in a form that would if supplemented by a fully detailed index of subjects be found serviceable for some purposes of reference even by the most advanced. Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, Their Development, Causal Relations, Historic and National Peculiarities. By HENRY T. FINCK. 2 Vols. London and New York : Macmillan & Co., 1887. Pp. x., 424 ; viii., 468. These fascinating volumes are, as the title indicates, first of all an historical and comparative " monograph " on the sentiment of " Eomantic -or pre-matrimonial Love," which, in the author's view, "is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old ". " Not till Dante's Vita Nuova appeared was the gospel of modern Love the romantic adoration of a maiden by a youth revealed for the first time in definite language." " And even Dante was not entirely modern in his Love." " He became quite deaf to the fundamental tone of love, and heard only its overtones. And herein lies his inferiority to Shakespeare," for whom it remained " to combine the idealism with the realism of Love in proper proportions ". " Shakespeare's Love is Modern Love." Within the last two centuries the poets and novelists have caused love to assume gradually "among all educated people characteristics which formerly it possessed only in the minds of a few isolated men of genius ". The art of Courtship that springs out of Eomantic Love " is the latest of the fine arts, which even now exists in its perfection in two countries only England and America " ; for Eomantic Love depends " on the freedom and the intellectual and assthetic culture of woman " ; and in other civilised nations there is more or less complete suppression of one or both of these conditions. Although in de- veloping his historical thesis the author is sometimes perhaps "too sweeping" (as he himself remarks of a criticism of Schiller on the Minnesingers), this thesis is one to which no one can refuse a hearing who does not deny altogether that there is any historical evolution of emotions. And occasional exaggerations, such as what is said of " the absolute silence of Greek literature on the subject of prematrimonial infatuation" (i. 122) are corrected by the general exposition. According to the author's view in its full development, there are in antiquity the beginnings, but only the beginnings, of Eomantic Love. In the early Middle Ages, these disappeared under the asceticism of Church Fathers and the general barbarism of the period. Eenewed by chivalry, and above all by the German Folk-songs,
