I wish its success on the continent of America could be so great
that it might replace in the hands of our millions the baleful
books which have lately been glorifying bloodshed in the private
and public wars of the past, if not present. The wars which "Lay
Down Your Arms" deals with are not quite immediate, and yet they
are not so far off historically, either. They are the
Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and
the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose personal
relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian
lady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of
soldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with
her own, whom she first marries, makes love to her just before
the outbreak of the war first named, she is as much in love with
his soldiership as with himself. But when the call to arms
comes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of war as she has
never known before. He is killed in one of the battles of Italy,
and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beau
sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fights
through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from
love of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that
he quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris.
There the third war overtakes him, and in the siege, this
Austrian, who has fought the Prussians to the death, is arrested
by the communards as a Prussian spy and shot.

The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of
the intense passion of grief which fills it. Neither does it
convey a due impression of the character in the different persons
which, amidst the heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth
and impartiality as pervade the effects of "War and Peace." I do