Monthly Bulletin - Clpdigital.org

316 CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
Medici Prints
A number of the Medici prints have been framed and hung
in the Exhibit Room on the second floor of the Central Library,
where they may be seen during Library hours.
The following Medici prints have been added to the collection
in the last few months and may be seen by applying at
the desk in the Reference Room.
Horatio, Viscount Nelson, by Abbott.
The cornfield, by Constable.
Landscape, with the rest on the flight, by Claude Lorrain.
Madonna enthroned, by Giorgione.
S. Victor and a donor, by H. Van der Goes(?)
La Columbina, by Luini(?)
Serena reading, by Romney.
Duke of Norfolk(?) by Titian.
Portrait of Captain Bartolommaeus Borro, by Velasquez(?)
Portrait of the artist's mother, by Whistler.
Thomas Carlyle, by Whistler.
Reviews of Recent Books
Human Quintessence
By Sigurd Ibsen
"That Sigurd Ibsen is the son of the dramatist is a mere matter of
curiosity, but that he was formerly an attache of the Scandinavian
Legation at Washington and later Premier of Norway and Sweden
bears directly upon his book. 'Human Quintessence' is obviously not
the work of a closet philosopher, but of a public man who has done his
thinking at the vital point where philosophy touches morals, literature,
and legislation. With only a very few exceptions, the translation seems
to preserve a style of unusual lucidity and charm. One feels throughout
in the presence of a mind reassuringly skeptical, as if sobered by
experience with the stubbornness of established facts, yet resolutely
progressive in temper...
In the universe known to natural science he discerns no genuine
progress, nor conservation of values, nor unity of purpose, but brutal
cross purposes, blind chance, and everlasting change... In human
society, on the other hand, he detects an 'impetus,' unique in character,
which 'urges us to bring our existences and the conditions about us
into an agreement with an ideal picture we bear in our hearts'. . .
'What makes a human human,' says our author, 'is not the impulses
we share with other creatures; no, it is a special impetus that