At the Zoo.

When you see the lion, he looks at you as if he sez, "think as you can fight, don't yer, little boy, just coz you no I can't get out all coz of this bloomin kage. If I could only skweez through, I'd swallow you and yer mother too." I said to my mother "I should like to hear the lion aroaring." When she said "why that was aroaring just now when the keeper looked in at him." Then I nearly cried, I was so wild; why, it wasn't like thunder and lightning at all.

"Martha and I," by R. Andom (Jerrold, 1s.), illustrated by Alec Carruthers Gould, is a book reminding us at every turn of Mr. W. Carter Platts'. There is even a Tuckleberry family in "Martha and I," and the book is as like, or unlike, Mr. Platts' as Woodford, in Essex, is like the West Riding of Yorkshire. The illustrations would seem to suggest that artistic talent is hereditary. Alec C. G. will, if he goes on like this, make his initials as famous as those of "F. C. G." of the "Westminster Gazette."

"A Feast of Fun" is the title of the little volume containing the first six numbers of the Pennyworth Series, edited by David Macrae, one of the best of our Scottish humourists. The contents are varied, consisting of puns, parodies, blunders, epitaphs, chestnuts, and repartees.

Professor J. S. Nitti, the editor of "La Riforma Sociale," who is perhaps the ablest student of political and economic problems of Italy to-day, contributes a strong and thoughtful article to his review on the position of affairs. While fully realising the gravity of the crisis through which the country is passing, he condemns emphatically a policy of panic and repression. The price of bread he states to have been the immediate cause of the recent riots, but there are other and more far-reaching reasons. Discontent is rife in every part of the country. "After thirty years of peace, we have to-day a high rate of exchange, an enormous national debt, heavy taxation, customs which crush all industry and commerce, and, what is still worse, a cumbrous and costly administration." the Professor maintains that the Chamber of Deputies is not specially to blame for this state of affairs: it is more liberal and more enlightened than the country at large; but thousands of persons are ever struggling to obtain administrative berths, and Deputies are frequently constrained to vote expensive public works merely to provide for their clamorous supporters. The State is founded on a radically unjust and undemocratic basis, and in self-defence is obliged to combat every wide aspiration towards liberty. In other countries religion and authority buttress each other; in Italy they are in constant antagonism. The State has done its utmost to eradicate the Catholic faith of the nation, and so to-day it cannot fall back upon the Church in its need. Professor Nitti points out that not only has the people been deprived of its religious ideal, but it has not even been given material prosperity. Protection has favoured the North at the expense of the South, and, in spite of all Luzaatti's assurances to the contrary, the present financial year will still show a grave deficit. In spue of this severe indictment of his country, Nitti is no pessimist. He believes in United Italy, and in the House of Savoy; he pleads for no persecution, whether of Catholic or Socialist, but for a large retrenchment of unproductive expenditure in public works, and he urges fiscal reform, the abolition of the hated Dazio, a wide scheme of decentralisation, and the abandonment of vain dreams of national aggrandisement.

"Gentleman's" for August is very readable. Macaulay's ancestors are traced by W. C. Mackenzie to the Norse clan of that name in Lewis, and are shown to be "a fighting, a writing, a preaching, and a political stock." One whom Macaulay hated intensely, John Wilson Croker, is set in a more favourable light by P. A. Sillard. A concise and chatty history of Oxford is given by Mr. C. J. M. Allen. Mr. Henry Attwell tells the story of the French epigrammatist Chamfort, with many of his most striking apothegms. T. S. O. attempts a bold bit of Browningesque, entitled "Victory," purporting to be "by the heroine of Browning's poem, 'The Worst of It.' "F. G. Walters' "Tudor Garden" is a pleasant piece of writing. Mr. Pendleton engages in a seasonable chat about railway passengers and tunnels, and wonders why, with so many contrivances for improving railway travel, nothing effective has been done to ventilate tunnels. Mr. Arthur Smith's "Brain Power of Plants" requires special notice.

"Macmillan's" for August has a pleasant sketch by H. C. Macdowall of the character and career of the historian Michelet.