Books New and Old

IN looking over the material which the season offers for a final bit of rambling commentary to shelter under the above comfortable title, the writer has been pleased to find so many books related in one way or other to the irregular kind of prose literature for which he has a special weakness. No doubt the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing; yet so long as names like Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Lamb, and FitzGerald continue to figure actively upon our publishers’ lists, we may afford to wish peace to the Mahmud of the moment in his place of pomp at the head of the Best-Sellers.

I

The biographer’s apology for writing biography, now almost a formula, has an excellent English precedent: the earliest of English biographies, now sumptuously reprinted,¹ was written, its author modestly assures us, merely to set right the name of Wolsey against the “false rumours and fond opinions of the fantastical commonalty.” George Cavendish, trusted servitor to Wolsey during the last and most spectacular of his years, is a partisan of the partisans; but he has nothing to gain personally by defending the memory of his master. His book shows the sincerity and ingenuousness of a true labor of love; and great vigor and simplicity of style. Cavendish does not consider himself a special pleader. He really is not aware that his Cardinal had faults. His reverence for the king steps even with that lusty monarch’s indulgence of Wolsey; he is outraged that the vixen Anne Boleyn should have compassed revenge upon her bitterest rival and enemy. The chronicler is, in short, so completely engrossed by the spectacle of the prelate’s worldly magnificence as to resent whatever may have qualified it, whether a consideration of abstract morality, the obstinacy of a king, or the counter-intrigues of a woman. Wolsey’s gorgeous raiment, his equipage, his plate, the whole pageant of life in his princely household — the biographer never wearies of recalling these matters in detail; or of marveling that such grandeur should have proved so fleeting. “Who list to read and consider,” runs that brief and eloquent epilogue, “ with an indifferent eye,this history, may behold the wondrous mutability of vain honours, brittle assurance of abundance, the uncertainty of dignities, the flattering of feigned friends, and the tickle trust to worldly princes. . . . O madness, O foolish desire! O fond hope! O greedy desire of vain honours, dignities, and riches! O what inconstant trust and assurance is in rolling fortune!” . . . Little could the simple threnodist have imagined that his lament would continue to be heard, by however few ears, across nearly four centuries; that would have been a tickle trust indeed.

Out of Browne and Herbert of Cherburv one might construct, an imaginary English Montaigne. Lord Herbert would supply that activity in affairs which Sir Thomas lacked; and his vanity in little matters would sufficiently complement the more generous preoccupation of the other. The author of Religio Medici, like the writer of the Essays, admits that he is his own theme. He is as open-minded, as little insular, as Montaigne. “I have no antipathy,” he writes from France, “or rather idiosyncraey in diet, humour, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being among them make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. . . . All places, all airs, make unto me one country. I am in England everywhere and under any meridian. I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy to sea or winds. I can study, work, or play in a tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing.” But Browne altogether lacks the brisk humor of Montaigne. His mind has, if it is possible to say so, agility, but not vivacity. It makes its way, lanthorn in hand, into many odd corners of human experience and thought, but it does not open the windows and flash the light of day upon them. At his true point of inspiration. Sir Thomas is to be compared with George Cavendish rather than Montaigne; if the master of English elegiac prose is to be compared with a tyro who had struck, as if by hard chance, a single pure note. Browne was, as the assiduous and skillful Mr. Gosse, in his present monograph,² makes sufficiently plain, “ the laureate of the forgotten dead, of those who have discovered what he from the first divined, that this loud world is nothing but ‘a dream and mock-show.’ In the presence of a haunting sense of the fragility of time, of the faint mark we all make upon life, something less durable than the shadow of a leaf or a breath upon a mirror, Sir Thomas Browne decides that ‘restless unquiet for the diuturnity of our memories seems a vanity almost out of date, and a superannuated piece of folly.”' One fact about Browne Mr. Gosse brings out with especial distinctness: his extreme isolation. Many later writers, Cowper, FitzGerald, and R. S. Hawker, for example, have fled from the press of the “literary centre,” but nobody has equaled Browne in calm ignorance of what was going on there. Browne knew nothing of English prose as an art which had been or was being practiced by others. Yet, says Mr. Gosse, “in spite of his unaccountable attitude toward contemporary literature, and his scorn of its attempts, in his own person he was confident of conquering eternity with the delicious artifice of style.” That he felt such confidence need not be doubted. For the rest, we recall and turn back to an admirable definition of style which Mr. Gosse has just phrased: “not the mere melodious arrangement of beautiful words, but the manipulation of language with such art as to reveal a personal temperament and to illustrate a human point of view.” Browne had no such generous notion of style. Certainly his manner was studied; but, lacking standards, his study was often to no purpose. He invented a custom and tried to observe it; but it was more honored in the breach. “A work of this nature,” he says, of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, “ is not to be performed upon one legg; and should smell of oyle, if duly and deservedly handled.” It smells. Browne’s theory of “elegancy” is even more absurd than Pope’s theory of “correctness.” Fortunately his invoices from the Mediterranean found a limited market; and his cheerful prophecy that presently Englishmen would “be fain to learn Latin to understand English” is yet to be fulfilled. Without his Latinisms he would not be Sir Thomas Browne; but his finest passages owe their power to far deeper qualities of style. Recall the sounding fifth chapter of the Urn Burial, or that marvelously eloquent conclusion to the very dullest of his works: “But the quincunx of heavens runs low, and ’t is time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep; which often continueth precogitations. . . . Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odors; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose. . . . The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep ? or have slumbering thoughts at that time when sleep itself must end, and as all conjecture all shall awake again.” Is it not in the rich melancholy beauty of such lines, “elegancy” fairly forgotten and able to avenge itself but with a single “precogitations,” that Browne fairly achieves style? Yet a writer capable of this has caused himself to be remembered mainly as a master of verbal contortion.

Another of the recent additions to the English Men of Letters concerns itself with Browne’s contemporary, Andrew Marvell,³ and this in the year which has produced a satisfactory and accessible reprint of his poems and satires. Mr. Birrell’s biographical method is more buoyant and personal than Mr. Gosse’s. He is not what would be called a scholarly critic. He is of the school of Bagehot and Sir Leslie Stephen rather than of Pater and Arnold, he takes pains to conceal the traces of research, and dares to be lively in the presence of august persons. He is neither a mountebank nor a highpriest of criticism, but he has and shows, what Mr. Gosse has not or conceals, an irrepressible instinct toward self-expression, and a self well worth expressing. “The very canons of criticism,” he says in the present study, “ are themselves literature. If we like the Ars Poetica, it is because we enjoy reading Horace.” This is an utterance which your scientific critic may easily analyze into nothing; let us abandon it to him. Mr. Birred has, as usual, quoted very liberally, and to excellent effect. Quotation is an art the difficulty of which may easily be underrated by paragraph-writers or by persons who do not write at all. You may say no end of wise things about a writer, and yet fail to convey a sense of the peculiar flavor for which you really value him. To insinuate a phrase or verse of our author into the midst of our own readable (because ephemeral) discourse, is all most of us may do, without giving our readers an unpalatable suspicion that they are being seduced into the perusal of a real author. Mr. Birred quotes by the page, and we gratefully read every line because we are sure Mr. Birred, at least, is incapable of asking us to read anything inconsequent or dull. We have not space here to enter into his treatment of Marvell; it is admirable: we should end by quoting too much from Mr. Birred himself, as a delightful performer in the intimate style.

II

No one would more naturally be named in the connection than Lamb. The Life now put forth by Mr. Lucas ⁴ is likely to prove of more importance than the recent edition of The Works and Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, of which he was editor. It will not supersede the Life and Final Memorials of Talfourd, but it contains, mainly in the form of letter and anecdote, much of supplementary value, and some matter which is absolutely fresh. The volumes contain somewhat too large a mass of citations from former critics of Lamb; or rather, too many fragments of the kind, for they are not brought together into any sort of unity. Too many quotations from Lamb and his sister could hardly be included; even the probable apocrypha of personal reminiscence deserve a place in a biography whose alleged merit lies in its exhaustiveness. But we may easily tire of being told what certain well-nigh forgotten contemporaries of our author—footnote persons, we may call them — have thought of the man’s work. Mr. Lucas’s own critical attitude is respectable and conservative; it is not specifically a “contribution to the subject.” This was, in a sense, to be expected. There is no crux to be discovered by the most ingenious critic in connection with Lamb’s life or work. In two points of fact, the work does contribute to our knowledge of Lamb.

With regard to one of them a minor degree of knowledge might have been a comparative bliss. The" Confessions of a Drunkard ” is, it seems, less a dramatic exercise than it has been painted. Our present access of information is, however, mainly due to Lamb himself; for a disconcertingly large number of the letters or fragments of letters here first adduced have to do facetiously, apologetically, or remorsefully, with his lapses in drink. The familiar remark comes at once to mind: that in those days hard drinking was the rule, and it was considered a pretty thing for a gentleman to end his evenings coiled up under the festive board. But it is not pleasant to be forced to view our “Saint Charles” in such case. We could find it in our hearts to wish that lie and his chronicling friends — that his assiduously culling biographer, at least — had been something more sparing of detail. Yet Lamb might have been the first to denounce such a feeling as merely squeamish and sentimental. He was never an applicant for canonization, and, as strongly as Montaigne or Browne, wished to be known for what he was. Drink gave him ease from shyness, and loosed his stuttering tongue; it was “the social glass” of which he was the occasional victim. He had a weak head, and did not always “know where to stop;” but his excesses were attended by no such mental and moral dismemberment as fell to his beloved Coleridge from the use of opium.

The other point of fact has to do with Lamb’s second and more serious impulse toward matrimony. His first love appears to have been a Hertfordshire beauty, one Ann Simmons, subsequently celebrated in a series of fairly bad sonnets as Anna, and in the essays as “ Alice W—— This affair Lamb seems later — not much later — to have looked back to as a species of calf-love soon extinct; though, as representing his sole adventure in that kind, not unworthy of posthumous celebration. More than that might be said; for, whether his passion was unrequited, or whether, as some may think, he was judged ineligible by the proper authorities, he paid (as he might have put it) the last honors to blighted first love by going mad. The singular thing is that he should have had no second attack of the malady to which his sister Mary, in so many senses the saner of the two, so often succumbed. His later disappointment was perhaps too deep for lamentation: he did not go mad, nor write verses. He was by this time a middle-aged man, settled in mind and habit, provided with the most admirable of sisters, long a celebrant of the comforts of celibacy. That his feeling was deep cannot be doubted. Its object, Fanny Kelly, was a reigning actress, and, more than that, a charming and estimable woman. Lamb, after long admiration, got to know her, and eventually, in a most manly and simple letter, proposed marriage. Miss Kelly’s heart was already hopelessly engaged; and she replied to that effect in a manner as straightforward as his own. Her friendship with the Lambs survived; but the rejected suitor’s rejoinder closed the correspondence and the subject: —

“Dear Miss Kelly,— Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisical no-how-ish kind of a humour. I believe it is the rain, or something. I had thought to have written seriously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere fun; puns and that nonsense. You will be good friends with us, will you not? let what has past ‘break no bones between us.’ ” We suspect Thackeray called Lamb a saint because he was so unmistakably a gentleman. Lamb was a warm admirer of Marvell, and placed Sir Thomas Browne almost at the head of his ancient cronies. He owned to a special fondness for quaint or obscure writers; he was, after all, antiquary more than critic: he “had a taste.” His judgment of contemporaries is often erratic. He discovered more than one mighty genius who came to nothing, and breathed contempt upon more than one name held then and since in critical esteem. He valued Southey, thought little of Shelley, and despised Byron. With Byron, indeed, he had nothing in common but a love for Pope. The Greeks have probably lost little by Byron’s death, he intimates, just after the event: “He was best as satirist, — in any other way he was mean enough. I dare say I do him injustice, but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it.” Well, tears enough were squeezed in other quarters, and the glamour is not yet gone from his memory. Critics still busy themselves with him as a power in letters; and if maidens no longer sigh over The Bride of Abydos, it is certain that schoolboys still sniggle over selected passages from Don Juan. Those boasted naughtinesses of his: it is, alas, their memory which the gross world most fondly cherishes.

III

And to what other interest in him is the title of the latest book on Byron addressed ? The Confessions of Lord Byron⁵ is simply an abridgment of matter already printed, as the sub-title shows. It might be expected to consist exclusively of “racy” and “piquant” passages; but Byron’s poetry is rather more vulgar than his letters: these excerpts give a rather more favorable impression of him as a man and a man of letters than he desired to give his contemporary public. He wished to be admired as a taking mixture of aristocrat, broken-hearted misanthrope, Bohemian, “rooter” for Liberty, perfect gentleman, and casual dabbler in poetry. He had his wish; but not with posterity. We now perceive that he was more nobleman than gentleman (as Lamb was more gentleman than bank-clerk), more flâneur than libertine, and nothing if not a man of letters. He takes a perverse pleasure in fouling his own nest; but always, it is plain, with an uneasy sense that it is his own. “Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a scribbler, see what lam.” “I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect.” “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” He affects the amateur, and protests complete indifference to adverse criticism. Reviewers are nothing; yet even a Scotch reviewer may be pronounced a fine fellow when, in lucid moments, he shows a proper appreciation of the proper English bard. He professes to fling off his little things almost at random, yet plainly expects them to be taken with the utmost seriousness. “Histrionic” is the adjective commonly applied to him; but a shorter would suffice.

The present series of extracts is conveniently classified. Here is a seventypage chapter on “Byron’s Estimate of Contemporary Poets.” “Estimate” is rather too neat a word to fit the case; notions would be more suggestive of the fact. His judgments lack, we will not say consistency, but integrity. For Scott he had something like enthusiasm (Scott, we recall, laid down his harp upon the first notes of Byron’s French horn); Rogers, Campbell, and Moore, as poets who might be met in the best circles, be approved of. Shelley he somewhat more than condescended to, for Shelley was a social nonconformist, and, though visionary, bad a remarkably good opinion of the works of one Lord Byron. Wordsworth and Coleridge were an offense to his nostrils; and of Keats, poet of sensuousness, this poet of sensuality uses the vilest language. What strikes us most in this attitude of Byron toward others is that, taken together, they constitute simply an attitude toward himself. Many of his selfaccusations are merely “histrionic” and for effect; this, the most damning of them all, is, we believe, sincere. It occurs in a letter probably written to Shelley’s widow shortly after his death; “As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel anything that deserves the name. All my others are men-of-the-world friendships. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed him; so that you see not even vanity could bribe me into it, for, of all men, Shelley thought highly of my talents, — and, perhaps, of my disposition.” Such a passage may fitly bring us back to our epitaph; “ He did not like the world, and he has left it.”

After unwillingly witnessing the gross catastrophe of Oscar Wilde’s delicate career, and listening somewhat less unwillingly to his final lialf-stifled cries, we may well draw a long breath and turn back to the essays he wrote while he still lived, and for which he should be (but, alas, will not be) remembered. Disciple-wise, the editor of the present reprint⁶ is rather zealous than judicious in his manner of introducing the text. When, after quoting Wilde’s remark that “Life is itself an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it,” Mr. Pollard proceeds to the assertion, “His life was as complete a work of art ... as was ever composed,” — we know, at least, where we are. We are prepared to hear things said about “the taint of Puritanism;” and to be instructed to value Intentions because “as a book, it has splendidly the sincerity of Wilde’s insincerity.” There is also a good deal of talk about the relation of Life and Art, ending in the somewhat ineffectual observation, “You see, do what one will, one proceeds in circles, issuing always upon paradox.” Paradox is, it seems, a commodity upon which Mr. Pollard sets a high value; he seizes the present occasion for one or two not unsuccessful experiments of his own in that somewhat simple art. One of the essays has gained an adventitious interest since its first publication on account of its oddly prophetic character. I mean the paper on Thomas Wainewright, painter, writer, friend of Lamb, forger and poisoner. Wilde says that his career as a poisoner improved the quality of his art: “ The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.” Wainewright was “keenly sensitive to the delight of beautiful surroundings; ” loved green, and cats, and antique bronzes. He poisoned various persons because he did not fancy them, or because he fancied their money. He was finally run down, tried, and sentenced to transportation. “The sentence now passed on him was, to a man of his culture, a form of death. . . . The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner,” Wainewright seems to have had a fairly comfortable time of it in Van Diemen’s Land, though complaining much of the necessity of associating with inferiors. He kept up his pursuit of painting, and, in a half-hearted way, his avocation of poisoning; and died of apoplexy, like a gentleman. Wilde’s sentence was death itself, by lingering torture; he was in one aspect a mountebank, in another a monster to be loathed; but he had a heart to break.

As a writer Wilde was what it is now fashionable to call “ an artist in attitudes.” So was Whistler; so, they say, is Bernard Shaw. So, in a delicate personal way, was Lamb; and, in a loud melodramatic way, Byron. The thing is common enough; some men will always express themselves best by uttering a mood or addressing themselves to a mood. Wilde’s mode of escape from mere inconsequence lay (as Shaw’s does not seem to me to lie) in turning to the dramatic method. At least one of his plays is likely to live; and his prose attains true distinction only when cast in the form of dialogue. The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist seem to me masterpieces in their kind.

“ Don’t let us discuss anything solemn ly,” says Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist. “I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and 1 live in terror of not being misunderstood.” The sentence might have been written by Gilbert Chesterton; it would figure admirably upon one of his numerous title-pages. Not that his happiness really depends on his being generally misunderstood, but because it is his habit to challenge, rather than to buttonhole, all comers. “En garde, or you are pinked; and you probably wall be anyhow,” is his cheerful salutation. It “means business;” and if his rapier turns out to be a crowbar, we who have survived the bare bodkin of a James and the blunderbuss of a Shaw may hope to be not too seriously discommoded. Heretics,⁷ goes farther than any of its forerunners toward convincing us that the humorist really has something worth saying and worth understanding. The trouble with his method is that while it is infallible for getting the attention, it is not well calculated to keep it. “There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers,” he says in his own defense, “but there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers,” and it is the fault of the latter class that everything detestable is kept going. It will be perceived that this is not exactly a syllogism; the middle may be distributed, but so, for that matter, are both ends. Yet we perfectly understand what Mr. Chesterton is driving at, that he counts upon the fantastical style to get a leverage upon the inert mind of some hypothetical “average reader.” He must be fully aware that it is the common sense which underlies his uncommon nonsense that people look for. This fact affords a key to a flat contradiction which is to be found in two passages here: the first asserting that one man listens to another because he “expects him to say what he does not expect him to say;” the second protesting with equal force that people only wish to hear the commonplace. The ordinary opinion in extraordinary form is the real desideratum; Mr. Chesterton has some fresh thoughts, but much of his work is interesting not because it suggests a novel view, but because its brilliant setting gives novelty to an old one. Herein lies his appeal for people who shrink from the plodding prose of ordinary essayists. If he were to state his philosophy baldly it would come to something like this: “To be useful in the world a man should be honest, religious, determined, independent, firm in his own opinion and tolerant of the opinion of others, vigorous and uncompromising of speech, capable of humor and of wrath.” Well, we should say, this is a very good working philosophy; and we should yawn and pass on. Mr. Chesterton has no notion of permitting that, He tells us what we expect, but he says what we do not expect. His peril is to be self-intoxicated into saying many things which are in no sense telling, but simply the parlor antics of an excitable performer.

Mr. Nevinson belongs to the same general type as Mr. Chesterton; both are men of the day addressing themselves to men of the day: are in that sense journalists. Mr. Nevinson, however, is content with a simpler mode of address. He wishes his criticism to be “the broad and simple statement of the delight felt in certain books and certain winters by men who do not pursue literature as their business, but keep their love for it in the midst of other occupations and adventures.” We do not know whether Mr. Nevinson “pursues literature as a business,” but there is nothing in the character or manner of his work to prove the contrary. Most of the twoscore brief studies in this volume⁸ are reprinted reviews of books issued during the past year or two. They are for the most part reviews in that older and better sense of the word which is still cherished in England: not scientific analyses of certain current books, but essays on themes suggested by them. Anything, as Wilde’s “ Gilbert ” suggests, will serve the purpose of such a critic: “There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.” A few of these papers appear too slight and hasty to deserve a place between covers; but only a few. They deal with a surprising range of themes, from Aristophanes to Aubrey Beardsley; from Heine to De wet. Mr. Nevinson has the fortunate temperament which discovers something of truth, or something suggestive of truth, in everything he reads: even in Thomas Hardy’s Dynasts, even in Le Gallienne’s hapless version of Omar via FitzGerald. A few undisguised essays are included in the volume, of which the paper on Heine is most valuable as a critical study, and The Faith of Literature contains the purest essence of Mr. Nevinson’s own philosophy. Of the reviews proper, those on Maeterlinck and Meredith are among the best. The final sentence of the Maeterlinck paper perhaps most fairly represents the quality of the critic: Maeterlinck’s power, he says, is “the terror of commonplace reduced to abstraction. The ordinary situations of life are raised to a higher power by the very simplicity of their setting, and we are compelled to realize the poignancy of emotions which are generally stifled out of consciousness by the unimportant details of existence.”

IV

Of late fiction has so often taken the form of letters, and gravely denied that it is fiction, that we may have become a little suspicious of such a book as The Upton Letters,⁹ The allegation in the present case has a kind of novelty which might as well as not have been thought up. These we are to take as the letters of a surviving friend published at the instance of their dead recipient and of his widow. They are compositions, little essays, rather than personal communications; but there is no reason why they should not have been considered delightful, and worth publishing, by the fortunate person to whom they were addressed. T. B., taken at his face value, is not only a schoolmaster at Monk’s Orchard, Upton, but a writer of experience. It would be a simple matter to run him to earth, to make out whether there is such a person in such a place; but the question of fact is not really an important one. The book is delightful enough to stand on its own merits. Many of the letters deal, naturally and properly, with matters in some way connected with the writer’s profession; but, blessedly, they are schoolmasterish rather than pedagogical. They are, that is, the utterances of an enthusiastic lover of boys rather than of an educational theorist. These are English boys, and it is a method differing in many respects from our own upon which he comments; but it is mainly a matter for astonishment to the American reader who may also have chanced to deal with American boys under similar conditions, to know upon credible testimony that the schoolboy type and the teacher’s problems are so nearly identical upon both sides of the intervening water. The English schoolboy is, it appears, like the American boy of the same age and class, hard to deal with, not because he is insubordinate or dull, but because he is conventional and indifferent. The question of schoolboy honor, too, is the same burning question there as here. “ In the moral region I think we have much to answer for,” says our schoolmaster; “there is a code of morals among boys which, if it is not actively corrupting, is at least undeniably low. The standard of purity is low; a vicious boy does n’t find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social success. Then the code of honesty is low. A boy who is habitually dishonest in the matter of work is not in the least reprobated. I do not mean to say that there are not many boys who are at once both pure-minded and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. And then comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honor; the one unforgivable offense is to communicate anything to the masters.” It all sounds terribly familiar, dishearteningly like what we teachers of a crude republicin youth have had to confront. We should like to be able to intimate to that youth, for his soul’s discomfort, that things are not done after this fashion in the England of its ancestors. Are these young savages, after all, worth the tears and labor they occasion us? Is teaching the “ noblest of professions,” or simply and flatly an inexorable and useless drudgery ? Such questions our schoolmaster asks himself; and it cannot be said that the answer is always clear or reassuring. Still, we can but tolerate, at worst, a profession which is capable of engaging the services of men like T. B.

V

Boyhood and youth, — those days conventionally held to be the happiest which fall to humankind: what cheap sentiment, what real tenderness, they inspire. Has any one ever really wished “to be a boy again?” to “live it all over?” Yet it should be a good moment; our Upton correspondent sees the beauty of it; but there are moments when he feels helpless to deal with it, when the system of education which he is bound to stand for seems not only inadequate, but absolutely futile. To get the romance of English university life, we must go to some such work as Euphranor, uncomplicated as it is by questions of professional technique. To possess Euphranor in the present convenient form will give pleasure to many lovers of the famous letters and the more famous quatrains.¹⁰ This dialogue, we reassure ourselves, is as animated and graceful as The Decay of Lying, and how much more gentle, more genuine, more homefelt ! There are no hard touches in it; no concrete problem is solved. It is simply a celebration of youth: its phases, its ideals, the service done it by hard tasks and hard knocks; the doctor is a strong advocate of athletics, with all its risks. “What, after all, is the amount of danger in all the hunting, wrestling, boating, etc., that a boy goes through ? Half a dozen boys are drowned, half a dozen shot instead of rabbits by their friends, half a dozen get broken arms or collar-bones by falls from ponies, in the course of the year; and for this small toll paid to death, how large a proportion of the gentry of this country are brought up manfully fitted for peace or war.” It is only fair that, wdien we direct our sons to Arnold’s remark about the “young Barbarians at play,” or to Kipling’s “flanneled fools,” or to the latest football casualty, we should also put this passage in their way. One sentence, at least, in Euphranor they are certain to come upon sooner or later,— that lovely and plaintive valediction with which the scene closes. Perhaps their college days will have been long past, and their memory of them have grown all too dim; and they wall only feel that they too must have been of that quiet party which, after the good talk of the day, the good dinner, and the pleasant excitement of the boat race linked arms, and “walked home across the meadow that lies between the river and the town, whither the dusky troops of gownmen were evaporating, while twilight gathered over all, and the nightingale began to be heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus.”