[Review of Frederick Douglass]

Small, Maynard & Co.'s Beacon Biographies, of handy size, gratifying typographical excellence, and neat cover, are successfully accomplishing the publisher's aim, to furnish trusty men and women brief, readable and authentic accounts of the lives of those Americans whose personalities have impressed themselves most deeply on the character and history of their country. Charles W. Chesnutt modestly calls his contribution to the series "a brief sketch" of Frederick Douglass, but it is much more. The writer's avowed heart-interest in the records of the great man's life and his "profound and in some degree a personal sympathy with every step of Douglass's upward career" breathe from every page of the little book, giving color and life to the record, tastefully treated, of that existence called by Henry Wilson "an epic which finds few to equal it in the realms of either romance or reality." A fine frontispiece portrait of the subject and a calendar of the important dates of his life add to the value of the book for the general reader as well as the student, and are attractive features of a biography which no library should lack. Price 75 cents. Published by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston; for sale in Rochester by Scrantom, Wetmore & Co.