monuments of Ghent, but that he has fallen into many errors in his last work, ‘Gent van de vroegste tijden tot heden,’ is shown by M. Julius Vuylsteke's exhaustive refutation ‘Een Handvol Misslagen.’ In ‘De Sans-Culotten te Antwerpen’ M.J. Staes depicts in sombre colours the doings of the victorious French at Antwerp at the end of the last century. M. Aug. Gittée, in his book of tourist's impressions entitled ‘Bij onze Noorderbroeders,’ gives an original and picturesque account of Holland, and the manners and customs of its people. M. Pieter Geiregat, one of the pioneers of modern Flemish literature, has compiled, under the title of ‘Maatschappelijke Vraagstukken’ (‘Social Questions’), an interesting popular handbook composed of annotated extracts from familiar works by Edward Bellamy, Ch. Richet, and Émile de Laveleye. M. Max Rooses, who will be remembered as the author of able monographs upon Rubens and the Antwerp school, has published an admirable biography of Verlat, one of the finest colourists of the contemporary Belgian school, whose death occurred recently.
Noticeable amongst reprints of old writings are a volume of ‘Sermonen’ of the sixteenth century, couched in magnificent prose, and a collection of poems by rhetoricians of the same era, edited by M.J. Broeckaert. M.E. Soens has written an interesting essay upon the Devil as represented in Flemish plays of the Middle Ages.
In addition to volumes of verse from such of our younger poets as MM. G. de Mey and J. Noterdaeme, new works have been published by the two veteran poets Emmanuel Hiel and the Abbé Guido Gezelle, the latter of whom writes in the Western Flemish patois. The most important poetical publications of the year have been ‘Claribelle,’ by M. Pol de Mont, and ‘Verzen,’ by Mlle. Hélène Swarth, both equally remarkable for beauty of form and richness of imagery.
Our prose literature has been enriched by able works of fiction from the pens of MM. Is. Teirlinck, Aug. de Vreught, Fr. van den Bergh, and C. Lanckriet. The foremost Flemish prose writer, Mlle. Virginie Loveling, has collected several of her short stories in a volume entitled ‘Een Vonkje van Genie’ (‘A Spark of Genius’).
The book, however, which has made the greatest sensation of the past year is from the pen of M. Cyriel Buysse, a young writer of great talent. It is entitled ‘Het Recht van den Sterkste’ (‘The Right of the Strongest’). In it the author furnishes a painful and repulsive picture of the conditions under which the lives of beggars, thieves, and
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