WE have received a handsomely-bound copy of a military biography which is the production of a Southern writer and bears the imprint of a Southern house. It revives familiar memories of the Southern struggle for independence and relates with scholarly exactness, in a clear and brilliant style, and with no touch or trace of partisan bitterness or exaggeration, the story of a Southern soldier's life; the strange, eventful history of a Confederate leader who in all that he did and all that, lucklessly, he tried to do, seemed, like the Virginian hero, to be directed by an inexorable destiny and to become, in spite of instinct and volition, an unconscious helper in founding an Empire greater than the one he lost. "Every man," says Alzac, "takes the color of his time." Of this historic soldier it may be said that if he took from his surroundings a touch of contemporary color, he was also moulded in no small degree by formative influences from the past. To comprehend the conditions he was called to confront, we must consider, in each instance, the historic influences which created the conditions he found to exist. His military career, splendid and inspiring as it was, must be regarded as a mere episode in, a vast and comprehensive movement, or migration, of a conquering race. The sweeping and resistless advance of a branch, or of branches, of the great Teutonic stock across the North American continent has been characterized by a modern writer — himself a daring and sagacious explorer — as the most dramatic spectacle in the history of man; a march often interrupted, but never checked, by desperate struggles with alien or aboriginal races, by inter-current civil conflicts, and by international rivalries and ambitions which to this day have not ceased to disturb the social and political amenities of a common race. Very recently, as we know, they have provisionally adjusted a diplomatic difference over the line of the Chilkat pass.