SNAP SHOTS

...Consequently the author has added a chapter on this subject...

...Swinnerton points out that in regard to the temperamental studies he was more-concerned with abnormal people at war with their surroundings...

...When dealing with this particular phase of life he had few superiors...

...but he had a mind and much vision cramped as it was by the tragedy of his own life and temperament...

...I have tried," Professor Munro adds, "to do no more than to provide both for the college student of municipal government and for the general reader an introduction to the study of a very large and important subject...

...But a thing of art must, in the last analysis, be judged by itself alone and Mr...

...We generally associate a rank pessimism with his name and indeed, in many ways, he merits such a designation...

...Swinnerton has wasted little time on biographical details though the author of The Unclassed was one of the most autobiographical of writers and some knowledge of the sordid elements of his life, with its series of domestic tragedies and continual war with his environment, is really necessary to gain a comprehension of the man's work...

...Swinnerton points out, which makes him worthy of attention to any one interested in certain phases of the English novel...

...Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed, Demos and The Nether World are among his studies of the lower classes, while Isabel Clarendon, A Life's Morning, The Emancipated with New Grub Street belong more especially to the studies in temperament...

...We have heard so much in recent years concerning what the government of American cities ought to be that an apology is hardly necessary for the emphasis which this volume places upon what that government really is...

...Others call him a realist but Mr...

...THE AIM of William Bennett Munro's The Government of American Cities is to describe in a summary way the machinery of city government in the United States...

...Another development in dairy manufactures is the great extension of ice cream and its related products...

...Gissing cannot completely be neglected: he was a strange lone figure who reflected much of our diseased civilization...

...Gissing drew largely from himself in depicting these characters, and he was ever mental in his reactions from life though he lived impulsively—so much so, in fact, that his second wife was a woman he met on the street and whom he asked at once to marry him though he had known nothing about her...

...The dairy laws have been brought up to date...

...Gissing was a scholar who lived more in the past than in the present: yet, except for an unfinished posthumous novel and several books of travel he felt compelled to write of the life about him...

...The table of contents of the book is as follows: American Municipal Development, The Social Structure of the City, The City and the State, Municipal Powers and Responsibilities, The Municipal Electorate, Municipal Nominations and Elections, Municipal Parties and Politics, The City Council, The Mayor, The Administrative Departments, Municipal Officials and Employees, City Government by a Commission, Direct Legislation and the Recall and Municipal Reform and Reformers...

...It is but natural, therefore, that a large part of the additions should have to do with this subject...

...The discussions of the separation of cream and ripening cream have been wholly worked over, particularly in respect to the modern practices lately introduced with regard to the latter...

...even in England, where he lived most of his life, he had recognition but small success...

...Nor, must we forget in summing up his qualities his admirable study of Dickens—one of the best ever written...

...Throughout all these novels there is mueh sociological speculation both good and bad and if the pictures are generally depressing at least they are sincere and possess a. certain dignity which lifts them above the ephemeral phrase-making of the day...

...The ordinary observer might be inclined to doubt its being the same tree, so changed does it appear under the varying conditions of season and viewpoint, were it not for the fact that we have the authors' word for it...

...To use the author's own words in his preface, he has endeavored "to outline the growth of American cities, to explain the present day powers and duties of the city as a municipal corporation, and to make clear the relation which these bear to one another...

...There is charm in some of the travel books as one may find by glancing through The Ionian Sea and the posthumous novel, Veranilda...

...Yet he is not without a certain grim power both in psychology and in plot, which, coupled with a rare felicity of word and a vast culture, make him one of the best of the minor novelists of the decade before his death in 1903...

...And here suggests one of the dominant themes of his novels—a reflection of the difficulty he met, through his own fault, throughout life: the constant clash of two temperaments which do not understand each other...

...Certainly, this new life of George Gissing (Mitchell Kennerley, N. Y.) will do much to place him, for he was of sufficient importance to merit this "critical study...

...Throughout his two dozen novels these studies of femininity are continually to be found which make an indelible impression even though the rest of the stories fail to rest in the memory...

...Swinnerton, from this point of view, has shown a rare discretion as well as sympathetic understanding...

...The author has prepared special chapters on it, one dealing with the production of certified milk and another giving simple directions for making the ordinary bacteriological determinations in connection with it...

...ONE OF the most striking series of illustrations in Blakeslee and Jarvis's Trees in Winter shows eleven views of a sugar maple taken from different sides in summer, in winter and in the twilight...

...His men are not so successful for they are, as a rule, colored by mentality and self-conscious with introspection...

...The chief advances in dairy practice in the last ten years have had to do very largely with the production, handling and marketing of the higher grades of sanitary milk, including certified milk...

...The book deals with government rather than with administration, with the framework rather than with the functioning mechanism of the municipal organization...

...An extensive consideration of the dairy cow in which is presented the most important information that a novice would not be likely to have is numbered among the other additions, as are also the more recent tests used in connection with dairy manufactures, notably the butter moisture and fermentation tests...

...Literary Notes MILK AND ITS PRODUCTS (Macmillan), by Henry H. Wing, which is published this week is more than the new edition which the title would imply...

...This latter novel is one of the most merciless analyses of the literary life which has ever been written and the irony which lies in the success mere cleverness wins from life, where real genius is beaten, is brought out with a master's hand...

...So great have been the additions and so thorough the revision that it is, in effect, an entirely new work...

...And there is much else of penetration and capacity, as Mr...

...Perhaps Gissing excelled most in his portraits of women...