SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 1884. No. 609, New Series. THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript. It is particularly requested that all business letters regarding the supply of the paper, &c., may be addressed to the PUBLISHER, and not to the EDITOR. LITERATURE. patience the task he had taken up with un- struggle before the remains of a rude natureworship could be effaced from the minds of The work, as it now stands, consists of men; and how many of the pagan ceremonies eleven chapters, of which the first six may be long survived in the rustic superstitions of taken as representing his final plan, subject the peasantry-in the bonfires and May-day to some possible alterations in his introductory games, the mummings and maskings of description, and in his account of the origin Christmas, and the revelry of the harvestof the English shire-system, which might to feast. It is more important to notice the the advantage of the public have been some- change from the monastic system under which what further amplified. The two following the country was converted to the parochial chapters, on the rule of "the great ealdor- organisation by which English society was to men and on the breaking-up of English be penetrated. This part of the history is society in the course of the Danish Conquest, worked out with great skill. The three classes were left in an unfinished state; but, though of churches which we find noted in the laws The Conquest of England. By John Richard they are incomplete as a chronicle of historical mark so many stages in the religious annexaThe Conquest of England. By John Richard events, they are full of valuable information tion of the country. The great "minster" Green. With Portrait and Maps. (Mac-as to the social and industrial condition of the recalls the time when the monks went forth millan.) English and the causes of the Danish victory. as missionaries over the face of the land. The The three closing chapters are less complete. manorial church is part of the system under They appear to have been written some years which the private lords set up that ecclesiago, and to have been laid aside without astical system which, in course of time, has revision. The materials out of which they transformed the township into the parish. have now been reconstructed were partly This system was nearly complete about the printed for future correction and in part con- beginning of the ninth century; but the sisted of loose notes and memoranda. It had growing demands of the people soon led to been the author's intention to extend this part the building of a great number of churches or of his work by introducing a full account of chapels of ease of a subsidiary class to supplethe social history of England during the period ment the main parochial organisation. which immediately preceded the Norman Conquest; and we can only regret the more that he was unable to complete the work when we read the excellent descriptions of London and the principal trading towns which were, at his own desire, inserted in the chapter which deals with the reign of Cnut. Ir has been well said of Mr. J. R. Green that the great love which he bore to his country was "the true inspiration of his life," and that his single aim was "to bring home to every Englishman some part of the beauty that kindled his own enthusiasm in the story of the English people." These noble qualities appear in the indomitable efforts by which he succeeded in throwing into a permanent form the greater part of his work on The Conquest of England, though oppressed by heavy suffering and lying in the grasp of death. We learn from the touching Preface, in which his widow has described his purpose, that he had intended at first to have closed this volume with the account of the Danish Conquest, reverting to the method of his Short History, where the victory of Swein and the settlement of the kingdom by Cnut were taken as a chief turning-point; and a new period in the history of England began from the time when the English people first bowed to the yoke of foreign masters, and kings from Denmark were succeeded by kings from Normandy, and these by kings from Anjou.' It seemed to him, however, after printing the book according to this earlier plan, that it would be wiser to re-cast his work, and to make those changes in its order which appear in the unfinished volume before us. He wrote a new introductory chapter describing the England of Eegberht, and tracing the political and social changes which had followed the settlement of our forefathers in Britain, the gradual advance of civilisation, and more especially the mighty change in all departments of English life which was the necessary result of the conversion of the people to Christianity. Mrs. Green's account of his last labours recalls to the mind the pathetic scene of the death of the Venerable Bede as he finished his translaon of the Gospel. We are told that, as the hapter drew to its end, Mr. Green's strength Completely failed. "The pages which now close it were the last We know from Norwegian history what "the Friday fast was opposed by the thralls, work." Mr. Green has enlarged the subject by show- of conduct from the cradle to the grave. Now I am weary: I can work no more.' Mr. Green is very successful in his treatment of the development of the royal power as the small tribal kingdoms disappeared, and as the class of nobles by blood was superseded by the rich and rapidly increasing body of The causes of thanes or nobles by service. the ultimate predominance of Wessex over the Midland and Northern kingdoms are clearly explained, as well as the difficulties which prevented the existence of a really national sovereignty before the days of Dunstan. "The effort after such a sovereignty had hardly begun when it was suddenly broken by the coming of the Danes." And this was the beginning of a savage strife that was to last till the eve of the Norman Conquest. The life of the pirates in their Northern home is described in the vivid and picturesque style which might be expected from the author of The Making of England. Perhaps too much reliance is placed on the Sagas in Snorro's romantic history; and we must regret that the Corpus Poeticum Boreale had not appeared in time to illuminate the details of the history. It would have removed at any rate several difficulties in the account of the sons of Harold the Mr. Fair-haired. Green appears to have doubted whether Hakon the Good was the foster-son of the great Ethelstan, or of the Danish king whom Alfred conquered and to whom the same name was given on his baptism; and he follows Adam of Bremen in rejecting the notion that the king who was slain at York in 954 was the brave and unfortunate Eric of the Bloody Axe, the husband of the famous witch Gundhild, surnamed "the Northern Jezebel." There seems, however, to be little doubt, when one reads the Dirges of Eric and Hakon with the commentaries of their latest editors, that the older tradition should in each case have been accepted. After an interesting chapter on "the making of the Dane law," in which the author has traced with great skill and industry the abiding influences of the Danish settlement, he passes to the reign of Alfred, for which Asser's work is accepted as the main authority. An important passage is devoted to showing how the standing army was developed out of the class of " thanes, which about this time received a very wide extension; and good reasons are given for the belief that at this point in our history the class of small freeholders independent of a territorial lord was almost completely extinguished. In the long conflict with the Danes the English had not only lost their ancient freedom, but had sunk into the most degraded ignorance, till the good king "sought in Mercia for the learning that Wessex had lost,' and called the whole nation again to the knowledge which it had totally abandoned. English poetry, as the historian shows, had long before attained to a vigorous excellence. It is enough to mention the Miltonic stateliness of Cadmon, the grandeur of the Song of Beowulf, and the noble lyrics of Cynewulf preserved in the precious "Exeter Book." But Alfred, as we are here told, "changed the whole front of English literature;" and a national prose literature " into existence," which at that time was withsprang suddenly out an equal or a rival in the Western world. We owe to Alfred the existence of our national chronicle in its present form, and with it our history "became the heritage of the English people: " it served to put an end to the minor provincial annals in the Northumbrian and Mercian kingdoms "and to help on the progress of national unity by reflecting everywhere the same national consciousness." Mr. Green has shown how every power in Alfred's mind was bent towards the restoration of his wasted kingdom, and how his capacity for inspiring trust and love "drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre." The King desired above all things to leave a remembrance of himself in good works. "His aim has been more than fulfilled. His 66 the island-fort of Athelney where Alfred had paused to recover strength for his battle with the pagans of the Northern Sea. We are told of his happy youth, his love for a noble lady, his devotion to art and learning; we see him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, harping, painting, and designing." The jealousy of the King, with whom his youth had been spent, involved him in apparent ruin, when an accident suddenly restored him to power. “A red deer which Eadmund was chasing over Mendip dashed down the Cheddar cliffs, and the King only checked his horse on the brink of the ravine. In the bitterness of anticipated death he had repented of his injustice to Dunstan; and on his return from the chase the Young priest was summoned to his presence. 'Saddle your horse,' said Eadmund, and ride with me!' The royal train swept over the marshes to Dunstan's home, and greeting him with the kiss of peace, the King seated him in the abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury.' It is from this time that, in the words of our historian, we must date the rise of the second Wessex, as the first had borne the stamp of English literature, which bears the stamp of Northumbria. Mr. Green's completed work ends with the scene at Glastonbury when that the Abbot's friend, King Eadred, lay news came in November, in the year 955, dying in his palace at Frome. The King wished to see once more the treasure that was stored in the Abbey: "but while the heavy wains were still toiling along the Somersetshire lanes the death-howl of the women about the Court told the Abbot that the friend he loved was dead; he found the corpse already forsaken, for the Thegns of the Court had hurried to the presence of the new King, and Dunstan was left alone to carry Eadred to his grave beside Eadmund at Glastonbury." CHARLES I. ELTON. In Upper Egypt, again, where he can find desert-salt in abundance, the fellah is nevertheless compelled to pay the Government salt-tax for every member of his family, down to the infant in arms. In other places, where desertsalt is not to be had, the Government-salt is either withheld or delivered in half-quantities, though the full amount of tax is rigidly exacted. The sheep-tax is so high as to be almost prohibitive, many small cultivators being unable to keep the sheep for the feeding of which they have sufficient refuse-produce. As an example of how local taxation is superadded to general taxation, Mr. Villiers Stuart adduces the case of a town called Benha-elAssa, in the Delta, where the river-traffic is actually saddled with a toll for liberty of passage under a railway bridge which spans the Nile at this point. As for the usurers, "they are at this moment extorting three, four, and five per cent. per month of four weeks for sums owing or claimed-i.e., from thirty-nine to sixty-five per cent. per annum. They have woven around the fellaheen a tangled network interest at exorbitant rates, sums advanced of debt which no Colenso could unravel-the moderate sum originally advanced, compound successively since, with their interests, the reckoning further complicated by sums paid on The final result being that the money-lender account, no receipts being given" (p. 57). goes on adding house to house and field to field, till he has absorbed all the land of the neighbourhood in which he lives. In numerous districts visited by Mr. Villiers Stuart the foreign usurer had become a wealthy landowner, while not one of the natives had more than a few acres left. The time, in short, cannot, in his opinion, be far distant when every peasant proprietor will be reduced to the position of a labourer on the Greek's all-devouring estate. And these, it must be remembered, are not the superficial notes of a merely casual tourist. Mr. Villiers Stuart's acquaintance with memory has come down to us with a living dis- Egypt after the War. By Villiers Stuart of Egypt extends over a period of nearly thirty The tinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time gathered round it. instinct of the people has clung to him with a singular affection. The love which he won a thousand years ago has lingered round his name from that day to this." The chapter dealing with the House of Alfred is distinguished by a learned and original essay on the beginnings of the English shires, which are attributed, after a cogent argument, to the customs of that oldest Wessex which lay between the Southampton Water and the great Forest of Selwood. Our system of county government began to exist, on this theory, even before Somerset and Dorset had begun to attain that "rude unity" which had already given importance to Wilton and Southampton as the centres of the oldest shires. The last of the finished chapters is devoted to the relations between Wessex and the Danelaw after the great fight at Brunanburh, "such a battle," as the gleeman sang, "as had never been seen by the English since from the cast Engle and Saxon over the broad sea sought Britain." The story of St. Dunstan is told so as to give us a bright view of the life of Englishmen in the west "at a time when history hides it from us beneath the weary detail of wars with the Danes." Dunstan's childhood was passed on his father's estate at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, not far from Dromana, M.P. (John Murray.) MR. VILLIERS STUART's important, impartial, and authoritative book is published not a day too soon, and, fortunately, not a day too late. Egypt after the War is the very guide which we are all wanting to enable us to take a just view of the Anglo-Egyptian situation. It tells us precisely what we require to know about the social and financial position of the country. It bares every sore and scar of the administrative system. It goes searchingly into the momentous question of the indebted ness of the fellaheen. It takes us into the provincial court-house, the Government prison, the sugar factory, the cotton factory, the oil mill, the rice mill, the luxurious home of the Christian usurer, and the miserable mud-hut of the bankrupt peasant. Of the wrongs and sufferings of that unhappy peasant Mr. Villiers Stuart draws a heartrending picture. Between the tax-collector and the money-lender, he literally bleeds to death. Some of the burdens imposed upon him are peculiarly exasperating. The date-tax, for instance, would be a legitimate source of State revenue if levied only upon the fruit-bearing trees and in proportion to their produce; but the young palms, which have six years to grow before they yield a date, and the male palms which never bear at all, must be paid for as heavily as the best. years; and it was in virtue of that experience, and in order to obtain for those on whom devolved the task of reconstruction in that country trustworthy information on a variety of points," that he was last year commissioned by the British Government to undertake that tour of official inspection the results of which are recorded in the present volume. Of the thoroughness with which he performed his work there can be no second opinion. He traversed the Delta literally in all directions, visiting the towns and villages, interrogating the notables, interviewing the peasants in their own homes, enquiring into popular grievances, and ascertaining the general temper of the agricultural classes towards Arabi, the Khedive, and the English. The evidence thus carefully collected was embodied, it will be remembered, in those admirable official Reports (Egypt: No. 7, 1883) for which Mr. Villiers Stuart last summer received the thanks of Her Majesty's Government, and which were quoted by Lord Dufferin in his celebrated despatch. Parliamentary papers, however, are not generally attractive; and to most of Mr. Villiers Stuart's readers the facts which he relates in Egypt after the War, with their incidents of local colour, of humour, and of pathos, will be as fresh as if his previous Reports had never been published. Want of space forbids me to do more than refer those who are interested in the fortunes and misfortunes of Egypt to various other important points in Mr. Villiers Stuart's narrative. For instance, to his description of the forced-labour system, as he saw it as I have myself seen it—in actual operation, and to his excellent suggestions for its better regulation; to his account of the existing abuses of the conscription-system, and of the universal dishonesty of the official classes; to his evidence in regard of the dangerous antagonism which everywhere subsists between Arab and Copt; to his frank and far-sighted opinions upon the necessity for a prolonged military occupation and a vigorous, though temporary, substitution of English for native As we looked down from the desert with me, and, on setting fire to it, found that it cumference, and supported at their outer edges As regards the bone problem, it is to be re- English Comic Dramatists. Edited by Oswald government; lastly to his very remarkable and constructed for the storage of provisions, booty THE fact that this little volume is entertaining somewhat startling estimate of the character "that the fellahs are so docile and unresisting Mr. Villiers Stuart need not cite four thousand years of history in support of the justice of his views. The Alexandria massacre is yet fresh in the public memory; to say nothing of isolated, and still more striking, cases of unprovoked barbarity. It ought not to be forgotten that a European family was deliberately crushed to death under the wheels of a locomotive at one of the provincial railway stations in Lower Egypt, and that this was but one incident among many. The ninth chapter of Egypt after the War is devoted to the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, of which Mr. Villiers Stuart gives a succinct and spirited account, illustrated with sketches and sections of the trenches, and with a capital plan of the field, showing the lines of earthworks, and the relative position of the Egyptian camp, the English forces, and the Sweetwater Canal. propos Chap. viii. contains an interesting deription of the site of Pithom (Tel-el-MasLootah), which the author visited during the course of M. Naville's excavations in February 1883. It is strange that Mr. Villiers Stuart should have something to tell à of this ancient Biblical "treasure-city" which is new to myself, and, I presume, to my cosecretary, Mr. R. Stuart Poole; but the folwing curious details do not, to my knowdge, occur in any other description of these remarkable ruins that has hitherto been pablished. "Among the articles which I saw in the Core-chambers was a beautifully made bronze razier for holding fire; soon after its discovery, however, it fell to pieces from the action of the r. In one of the chambers near the river, Naville showed me an immense collection of tones of various quadrupeds, birds, and even h; they were fragile from age, and we could ot account for their presence. I saw also, in other chamber close by, masses of a species of For resin; the mark of the sacks in which it ad been contained was still stamped on the tside, although the sacks themselves had long ee fallen to dust. I took some of this away and munitions of without being unsatisfactory or tantalising speaks as ill for the structure of our English comedies as it speaks well for their wit. The ideal comedy should be one and indivisible. When we can take pleasure in a series of fragments, each introduced by the briefest possible account of the work to which it belongs, it is clear that these works must contain much irrelevant dialogue and episodic situation. In most cases, indeed, the ordinary reader has a fuller knowledge of the dramatic context than can be given in the introductory note, but his pleasure does not, as it should, depend on such knowledge. Comedy should Like all the works of this author, Egypt be like a mosaic, in which each fragment acafter the War is printed in large type upon ex- quires value and meaning from its relation to all cellent paper, and is abundantly illustrated. I the rest, and, when out of its setting, is a mere do not think, however, that Mr. Villiers Stuart piece of gaudy enamel. Our comic dramatists was well advised when, instead of issuing a have often been too careful of their material, second edition of The Funeral Tent of an Egyptian and too careless of their design. They have Queen, he embodied nearly the whole of that worked in jewels instead of in enamel, and have work in his present volume. The reproduc-produced not pictures, nor even patterns, but tion of so many familiar plates has the effect conglomerations of formless brilliancy. It is of making the whole book look like a reprint, this defect which renders possible and tolerwhile the interpolation of old matter adds able such a selection as the present. enormously to the bulk and cost of the whole. Mr. Crawfurd is rash enough to start with Again, that which is new in Egypt after the an exact definition of comedy. It is to "furWar appeals to a class of readers whose tastes nish cause for mocking but not ungenial and sympathies are altogether distinct from laughter;" it is to deal with real life and not the tastes and sympathies of those who ex-be clothed in "the glamour of romance; hausted the first edition of The Funeral Tent is to eschew "exaggeration and caricature" on of an Egyptian Queen. Politicians are not pain of sinking into farce; and it is not to be generally archaeologists; and archaeologists are still more rarely politicians. Readers who are interested in the Egyptian question, and who will most appreciate the important facts brought to light by Mr. Villiers Stuart in the course of his official tour (the first of its kind ever made in modern Egypt), will care not at all for the leather canopy of Isi-em-kheb, or the identity of Khoo-en-Aten, or the revised texts of the tomb of Rames. All these, together with some new and curious observations made by Mr. Villiers Stuart at Gow-elGharbieh and Sakkarah, would have been more acceptable, and more accessible, in a book by themselves. For information about the pyramid of Unas, Egyptologists will of course turn to Prof. Maspero's learned and exhaustive series of articles now in course of publication in the Recueil des Travaux; but Mr. Villiers Stuart's discovery of the remains of a funerary chapel built apparently of alabaster" in enormous blocks," such as those employed in the famous chapel of Khafra called "The Temple of the Sphinx," and his simultaneous discovery of ten large alabaster basins, "each measuring fifteen feet in cir "it cynical and contemptuous" on pain of deepening into satire. A definition, this, to which no one will object who admits the wisdom of defining at all. But definition, the necessary preliminary of an argument, is by no means so necessary in introducing an Darwinism is finding its way anthology. into aesthetics, and we are beginning to recognise the impossibility of drawing hard-andfast boundaries in the debatable border-lands of literary species. For purposes of exposition the impossible must be attempted, but Mr. Crawfurd's purpose is not expository. The sole result of his definition is to provoke cavil at a selection which is in itself judicious enough. If all that is cynical and contemptuous is to be excluded as satire, why include the grim sarcasms upon human nature embodied in Sir Epicure Mammon and the courtiers of Volpone? If we are to distinguish exactly between comedy and farce, how can we admit the humours of Bessus from “A King and no King,' "" or the scene of the terrified servants from Addison's "Drummer"? Can "The Beggar's Opera" rank as pure comedy any more than "H.M.S. Pinafore" or how can "Iolanthe "? And if the laughter called forth by comedy is to be "not ungenial," we include anything from the saturnalia of cynicism which bears the names of Wycherley and Congreve ?-names which in this respect, at least, must be bracketed, in spite of Mr. Swinburne's protest. A selection of English comedy with these writers unrepresented would be glaringly incomplete; but why adopt a definition which ought to exclude them? His definition apart, Mr. Crawfurd has dealt judiciously with his embarrassment A scene from Massinger might perhaps have replaced one of the three from Ben Jonson, Colley Cibber might have been shortened to make room for a passage from Steele, and Cumberland scarcely deserves a place in a selection from which Macklin is omitted. Any other faults one might find rest on mere differences of personal taste, and are not worth dwelling upon. of riches. Mr. Crawfurd's critical remarks are sometimes so suggestive as to make one regret their extreme conciseness. A fuller contrast between the comedy of types and the comedy of individuals would have been especially welcome, as this selection amply illustrates it. As we pass from Falstaff to Sir Epicure Mammon, from the Foibles, Frails, and Froths of Congreve to Honeywood, Miss Richland, and Mr. Hardcastle, we feel strongly the superiority, for us Teutons at any rate, of the comedy of men over the comedy of masks. Lessing, who discusses at great length the tendency of comedy, as compared with tragedy, to deal in personifications rather than characters, does not recognise the distinction of schools within the sphere of comedy itself. The tendency he notes is, indeed, unquestionable. Comedy deals with physiology rather than pathology, with normal rather than abnormal conditions. When it touches on the morbid, it confines itself to those developmental diseases which all flesh is heir to. Hence its characters are apt to be generalisations rather than individual studies. This tendency, however, is to be struggled against, not elevated into a principle. The typical character-the allegorical figure of avarice, or envy, or jealousy, or hypocrisy -gravitates towards farce, and often towards grotesque and cruel farce. An abstract presentation of a human passion, even of one in itself noble, awakens the lurking cynic in our composition. A man all love or ambition, even a woman all charity or chastity, tends to show the pettiness of human nature at its noblest. Only when the passion is rooted in a conceivable, credible, manysided human organism does it become sympathetic. Again, the comedy of types is apt to lose all relation to nature, and to exist, like the Indian art denounced by Mr. Ruskin, as a thing apart, revolving endlessly on its own axis, interpreting nothing but worn-out conventions, revealing nothing but the cleverness of its manufacturers. Such is the comedy of Congreve. His figures are mere masks, not even of universal-human characteristics, but of artificial vices. His world of self-conscious wits is if possible more painful than the American novelist's world of self-conscious psychologists. How refreshing to pass from it, through the reviving naturalism of Farquhar, to the genial humanity of Goldsmith. In such a collection as "The Parchment THE ACADEMY. Series," absolute correctness of typography So true a thought was worthy of more careful WILLIAM ARCHER. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. To most Christians, in default of special historical study of what may be called the milieu of the Gospel story, the chief actors therein stand out in a kind of heroic or superhuman isolation against the dim background of a little-known contemporary world. Their severance from the flow of the common life that constituted their real environment is ideally absolute. We do not say that the Gospels, rightly understood, justify this imthe Gospels are misunderstood. Dr. Ederspression. The impression prevails because heim's work will undoubtedly do much towards the diffusion of correct conceptions about those conditions of Jewish life and thought which determined the outward form By and manner of the teaching of Christ; and in achieving this it will also furnish, as he desires, a vindication and illustration of the Gospel narratives, as presenting "a real historical scene" in a form wholly characteristic of the times. All English readers may now know what hitherto has been too much the peculium of a select body of scholars. They may become acquainted with "the leading personages in Church and State in Palestine at that time, their views, teaching, pursuits, and aims, the state of parties, the character of popular opinion, the proverbs, the customs, the daily life of the country." And not only this, Alfred Edersheim. (Longmans.) or they can, in imagination, enter their dwellings, associate with them in familiar intercourse, or follow them to the Temple, the Synagogue, the Academy, or to the marketplace and the workshop. They may know what clothes they wore, what dishes they ate, what wines they drank, what they produced, and what they imported: nay, the cost of every article of their dress or food, the price of houses and of living-in short, every detail that can give vividness to a picture of life.” It is hardly necessary to add-it will have already been inferred-that the author by no means ignores the question of questions, with which, in fact, every writer claiming serious attention in this subject is bound to grapple. He is especially careful to consider the arguments advanced by supporters of the so-called "mythical" theory; and he labours, often with striking effect, to establish the thesis underlying his own work, which, shortly stated, is thisthat, while the forms of thought and speech, the theological dialect of the day, were the same for Christ as for the Rabbis, the inner spirit and entire tendency of His doctrine were absolutely antithetical to those of the Synagogue. To say that Dr. Edersheim's standpoint is orthodox might raise in some minds a prejudice against the result of his arduous labours. We shall, therefore, be doing him mere justice in setting before our readers his own account of Little space remains for points of detail. the dominant idea of his work. Deprecating at We have noticed a great want of uniformity the outset the assumption of any pretence on in the transliteration of Hebrew terms; occahis part to write a life the materials of which sionally, also, an interpretation or an etymdo not exist, he proceeds in the next place toology such as would approve itself to a mind disavow" any predetermined dogmatic standpoint." "I wished," he says, "to write, not for a definite purpose, be it even whose Hebrew scholarship was rather of a Here and there the nological inaccuracies are not entirely absent. [esting question what he would set himself to Life and Letters of William Ballantyne Hodgson. Edited by Prof. J. M. D. Meiklejohn. (Edinburgh: David Douglas.) This work will not be considered quite satisfactory by persons who knew, and even by persons who knew much of, the late Dr. Hodgson, of Edinburgh. Prof. Meiklejohn is enthusiastic, indeed, even to provincialism of style, as when, in his Preface, he laments his style, as when, in his Preface, he laments his inability to reproduce for the public the earnest and intense presence, the quick thought, the steady judgment, the powerful eye that flashed at sense of smallest wrong; the clear, vivid, and firmly knit speech; the argument that seemed to develop itself as by an innate necessity, the glowing eloquence that caught fire as it went on, and kindled fire in the listeners." do. Capital milk, and oat-cakes, with a lectual" existence. in the autumn of 1880. At the time of his But he has not fulfilled his own desire to build up an intellectual portrait in mosaic of the man from his letters at different periods." There is, in fact, no life-like sketch of Dr. Hodgson in this volume except a representation of him as teaching his class of political economy in Edinburgh by Mr. Eric Robertson, the warm colouring of which is due to a student's pardonable enthusiasm. The impression of Dr. Hodgson that is too likely to be carried away by people who make his acquaintance for the first time through the Dr. Hodgson was born in Edinburgh in medium of Prof. Meiklejohn's biography will be that he was a restless and indeed rather 1815, and died of angina pectoris in Brussels self-conscious and priggish man, who was per-death he was Professor of Political Economy Detually writing letters on the ephemeral subjets of the day, lecturing his friends, and and Mercantile Law in the University of ndeavouring to say smart things. This is Edinburgh, and he was an enthusiastic exat the Dr. Hodgson of fact, the active educa-ponent of what may be termed the Turgot nist of Manchester and Liverpool, much Economics. But he gave the best of his life the kind host of Bonaly Tower. and thought to education. He was, in a Prof. Meiklejohn's biographical method is, sense, a martyr to it; for his death was at in truth, far from good. His book is built least hastened by hurrying to attend an By p too much on what is known in naval educational conference in Belgium. hitecture as the compartment principle. far the most readable chapters of Prof. Thus, instead of associating a number of Dr. Meiklejohn's book are those which tell of Dr. Hodgson's letters with different periods of Hodgson's teaching, and still more of his → life, he reserves them for special chapters organising work, as an educationist in Liverring such imposing titles as "Religion," pool and Manchester. He was, in the first Politics," "Education," "The Encourager," instance, as has been already noticed, ap"Glimpses of Places, Books, Friends, and pointed secretary to the Liverpool Mechanics' Aquaintances." Letters, dealing necessarily Institute in 1839. Having been eminently h matters of controversy, may be interest- successful as secretary, he was, in 1844, 22 as showing the mental growth of the appointed principal of the Institute. It was ter of them; but, when they are printed in this position, and in the office which he er separate headings, they invite judgment subsequently held, of principal of Chorlton their positive as distinguished from their High School, in one of the suburbs of ManMany letters here given by chester, that he showed his great powers of d. Meiklejohn will not stand such criti- organising and managing large schools. His It may be doubted if much good can views on education, which were associated done at this time by letting the world with the phrenology he had learned and Low that Dr. Hodgson wrote, lectured on earlier in life, were not original, but he showed much enthusiasm in applying them. In 1851 he left Manchester and spent a rather wandering life for some years. Such of the letters he wrote at this time indicate quick-wittedness and capacity for intense absorption in the interests of the moment rather than reflectiveness, although some of the observations he made in Paris at the time of the coup d'état are not devoid of Putive value. We all suffer for others' transgressions as well sagacity. In 1858, Dr. Hodgson came to London as assistant to the Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the state of Primary Education in England, and found his work thoroughly congenial. In 1871 he was elected to the Chair of Political Economy in Edinburgh; and three years later removed finally to Bonaly Tower, which had been previously occupied by Jeffrey's friend, Lord Cockburn. Dr. Hodgson came across some of the more he visited London rather than when he lived eminent of his contemporaries apparently when in it; his accounts of his meetings with such are fair examples of bright reporting of the visit to Carlyle: personal kind. In 1854, he thus describes a "Mr. C. had been asleep on the sofa, tired with a journey from Lord Ashburton's. Tea and rather indifferent miscellaneous talk, with strong denunciations of the Glass Palace, and many things beside. He and I then smoked two pipes each in the little garden_behind, en- WILLIAM WALLACE. NEW NOVELS. Hester. By Mrs. Oliphant. In 3 vols. (Macmillan.) Sweet Mace. By Geo. Manville Fenn. In 3 A Late Remorse. By Frank Lee Benedict. The Philosopher's Pendulum, and other Stories. Aleriel; or, a Voyage to other Worlds. By She is at her best in Hester. There, from first to last, she is the |