smiling remark, some odd touch of humor, some pleasant reference, perhaps to something the other had done or made himself famous by, broke down at once the barrier of non-acquaintance. Peace be to the memory of a true and noble soul! Brave, frank, open-hearted, steadfast, generous, unselfish-a soul which had, perchance, in its abounding energy, over-weighted itself with too much and too many things, and failed because at last it came up against the impossible.-BROWN, JOHN TAYLOR, 1901-03, Dr. John Brown, a Biography and a Criticism, ed. Dunlop, pp. 41, 73.

GENERAL

The tone of the book, its true unsectarian

liberality, its scholarly taste and feeling, and the unobtrusive and unaffected piety which breathes over its pages, are exactly what we would expect from such a culture. . . . The “Horæ Subsecivæ" indeed not infrequently recalls the "Religio Medici;" there is the same quaintness, clear insight, genial heartiness, and recondite research. ... The story of "Rab and his Friends' is a veritable gem. It is true, simple, pathetic, and touched with an antique grace which, in such vicinity, charms and surprises. If any pre-Raphaelite aspirant would learn how Doric homeliness may be united with the utmost perfection and symmetry of form, let him read this beautiful episode. SKELTON, JOHN, 1859, Professional Sectarianism, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 59, pp. 448, 450.

Will you tell Dr. John Brown that when I read an account of "Rab and his Friends" in a newspaper, I wished I had the story to read at full length; and I thought to myself the writer of "Rab" would perhaps like "Adam Bede." When you have told him this, he will understand the peculiar pleasure I had on opening the little parcel with "Rab" inside, and a kind word from Rab's friend. I have read the story twice-once aloud, and once to myself, very slowly, that I might dwell on the pictures of Rab and Ailie, and carry them about with me more distinctly. I will not say any commonplace words of admiration about what has touched me so deeply; there is no adjective of that sort left undefiled by the newspapers. The writer of "Rab" knows that I must love the grim old mastiff with the short tail and the long dewlaps-that I must have felt present at the scenes of Ailie's last trial.ELIOT, GEORGE, 1859, To John Blackwood,

Feb. 13; George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, ed. Cross, vol. II, p. 60.

I am much obliged to you for introducing me to Dr. Brown's book, which I like very much. There is a soul in it somehow that one does not find in many books, and he seems to me a remarkably good critic, where his Scoticism doesn't come in his way.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1862, To James T. Fields, Aug. 2; Letters, ed. Norton, vol. I, p. 322.

One very obvious characteristic of these papers ["John Leech and Other Papers"] is their appearance of ease and spontaneity. They impress us as the work of one full of his subject, delighted with it, and expressing quite naturally and of necessity his delight to his readers. We can believe that they were composed with something of the rapidity with which "Rab and his Friends'' was written-between twelve and four of a summer morning, as the author tells us in one of his pleasantly garrulous prefaces, in which, in true essayist's fashion, he buttonholes his reader and talks with him as fa

miliarly as with a friend.-GRAY, J. M., 1882, John Leech and Other Papers, The Academy, vol. 21, p. 169.

He was essentially an essayist of the type of Addison and Charles Lamb, blending humour and pathos and quiet thoughtfulness, not inferior to theirs, with a power of picturesque description which neither of them had. For though city-bred like Lamb, his delight was not "in the habitable part of the earth," but in its lonely glens and by its quiet lakes, on Minchmoor, or in the Enterkin, or where Queen Mary's "baby garden" shows its box-wood border grown into trees among the grand Spanish chestnuts in the Lake of Menteith. How it was that he came to find his right vein, I cannot tell; but its first "lode" produced the touching story of Rab and Ailie and Bob Ainslie, which at once gave him a foremost rank among our English humorists.SMITH, WALTER C., 1882, Dr. John Brown, Good Words, vol. 23, p. 448.

By constitution, no less than by circumstances, Dr. John Brown was unfitted for large and continuous works, and was at home only in short occasional papers. One compensation is the spontaneity of his writings, the sense of immediate throb and impulse in each. Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a moment of himself, and

we can read his own character in the collected series. . . . These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of art are expounded or applied in them. All that the critic does, is to stand, as it were, before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen, some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,-exclaiming, "How good this is, how true, how powerful, how pathetic!" . . . His most elaborate paper of Art-criticism is that entitled "John Leech." It is thoroughout a glowing eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man, on his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed incorporating reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been supplied him by a friend of both as material for a projected Memoir of Leech on a larger scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here and there in some of the others, the query may suggest itself whether the laudation is not excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good Dr. John was not carried away by the amiable fault of supposing that what happens to be present before one of a decidedly likeable kind at any moment, especially if it be recommended by private friendship, must be the very nonsuch of its kind in the whole world. -MASSON, DAVID, 1883, Dr. John Brown, Edinburgh, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 47, pp. 283, 288.

Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way of compositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage. His studies are usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced with singular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the tradition of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who, themselves, had listened attentively to those who went before them. . . . Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie" holds the highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly composed when speaking of this fairy-like little girl, whose affection was as

warm as her humour and genius were precocious. "Infant phenomena❞ are seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and who died very soon after she was thus made immortal.LANG, ANDREW, 1883, Rab's Friend, Century Magazine, vol. 25, pp. 245, 246.

Dr. John Brown (born in 1810) is one of the writers whose fame greatly exceeds the amount of their productions. It is built upon a few sketches-scarcely a substantial volume among them. Indeed it may be said to rest almost exclusively upon the little brochure entitled "Rab and his Friends," by which he is known almost wherever English is spoken. The tenderness and insight of that little book,—though its hero is a dog and the attendant figures those of a homely and aged pair without any beauty but of the heart, or romance save that subdued and profound and everlasting romance which attends the footsteps of devoted love even in the humblest tracks has gained, with scarcely a dissentient voice, the interest and affection of every reader. The author had a great personal popularity wherever he went, of the same character as that gained by his book, the appreciation of all who knew him of a singularly kind and amiable nature. Of such a reputation the critic has nothing to say, books and man being equally raised above the usual measurements and balances of literary criticism. OLIPHANT, MARGARET, O. W., 1892, The Victorian Age of English Literature, p. 582.

The keenest interest in his own profession was found in close alliance with the widest literary outlook; the liveliest humour, and appreciation of it in others; a poet's and a painter's eye for the loveliness of scenery, and a deeply religious and sympathetic nature. . . . His style, imitated from no one model, is the easy, unstudied style of a good letter-writer and talker, yet rising often into a singular beauty and eloquence when some deep moral emotion possesses him. Again and again we feel that with him, as with Samuel Johnson, his wisdom was "the Wisdom of the Just." John Brown is already a classic, because he has made himself loved much. He is yet one

more witness that it matters little for an essayist what are his themes, if only the personality of the writer is delightful, and is diffused and discernible through all his work. AINGER, ALFRED, 1896, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. v, pp. 540, 541.

Brown wrote a style of very high merit. In the miscellaneous collection of his writings, which he entitled "Horæ Subsecivæ." there is much to remind the reader of Lamb. Yet he was guiltless of imitation and the resemblance which exists because he had the same fine humour and the same sensitiveness of perception as the earlier writer. No one has written better than Brown about dogs; and his comprehension of them and his power of depicting them are seen even better in "Our Dogs" than in the famous essays on Rab, where the human figures divide the interest with the great mastiff. Brown's critical papers are few, but they show that he knew how to get at the heart of his subject.-WALKER, HUGH, 1897, The Age of Tennyson, p. 210.

Never was an author more deeply or more justly loved. His many friends recall with a peculiar softening his exquisite qualities of mind and heart-his delicate infancy and frolicsome humour, his earnest pleading for downrightness and intensity of character and life, the sweetness of his charity, his unselfish thoughtfulness for others, and his childlike freshness, simplicity and honest impulsiveness. All loved him for his sunny nature; those who knew him best were still

more endeared to him by the mysterious cross which this sweet and gentle spirit, in long intervals of gloom, was called upon to bear.-GRAHAM, RICHARD D., 1897, The Masters of Victorian Literature, p. 448.

It is difficult to characterise the "Horæ Subsecivæ" as a whole. They range over a great variety of topics, and vary not a little in tone and manner of treatment. But apart from this, there are some incidental points in them which cannot fail to strike the reader, and make him feel the charm at once of a remarkable intellect and of a very attractive personality in the writer. We discover at once that he is full of keen but quiet and measured enthusiasm, dwelling with delight on all that is beautiful and true, and best and greatest, either in human character or in inanimate nature. You recognize in him also a man of unfailing sense and intelligence, with a peculiar power of insight-a widely-read man, an accurate thinker, and possessing what I would call an original gift of style. It is curious how he throws his whole nature into his literary work-not merely his intellect, as most men do, but his tastes, his loves, his whims, his hobbies, and the pervading flavour of his humour. Perhaps I might say that the strong personal element in the book, if not to be regarded as its main characteristic, is that which first attracts the attention.-BROWN, JOHN TAYLOR, 1901-03, Dr. John Brown, a Biography and a Criticism, ed. Dunlop, p. 103.

PERSONAL

He had many stories of our dear old friend, which would have amused you, showing that he was on his death-bed what he had been throughout life, the same gro

tesque mixture of deep devotional feeling, with a levity of expression which scandalized those who did not understand him, as if, having been forced into seriousness for a minute or two, the pent-up animal spirits

must have their fling, and kick up their heels a little! Manning, he told us, used to pull awfully long faces at the French novels he found on the shelves of the Fat Friend's study; and then the Fat Friend began to reason with him that novels and the opera were his way of getting his amusement, just as "you get yours by going down to the House of Commons and hearing 'debates."" I prefer Carlotta Patti, and Trebelli to all your great statesmen and orators.GOULBURN, EDWARD MEYRICK, 1882, Letter to Lake, Dec. 25; Memorials of William Charles Lake, ed. his Widow, p. 261

How Mr. Ward, being what he was, and beginning as he did, should have ended as he did, will be a matter of speculation to many. How a man with such justifiable confidence in his own intellectual power and professing, moreover, to trust so largely in the Shechinah of his individual conscience -"that image of God in the soul, that witness to God and to the law of God in man" -should have been the servant of so many successive masters, and at last, wearied out, should have submitted himself unreservedly to the one whom he had learned to regard as Infallible, has the puzzle of an apparent contradiction. How, delighting as he did, with exceeding delight, in dramatic literature and performances, a man of so much geniality and so humorous should have resolutely closed his eyes to the ever-changing drama of life throughout the centuries, is not easy to understand; yet perhaps therein partly lay the explanation of his life. Man, the whole man, with all his powers, must dedicate himself to the service of life, if he would avoid error and attain his highest.--TENNYSON, HALLAM, 1889, Noticeable Books, Nineteenth Century, vol. 26, p. 344.

There were curious gaps in Ward's character, both moral and intellectual. He was very affectionate and felt coldness, but he did not feel deaths. He asked naturally, without finding an answer, why we should have any special affection for relations. His notion of patriotism did not include any admiration for the fatherland. It was limited to special grief at national vices and special pleasure in national virtues. His intellect which, though he thought little of it, he truly declared to be, in certain directions, almost infinite-was curiously capricious, and he never emancipated himself from its caprices. He understood pure

mathematics and indulged his detestation of applied mathematics; he was a great dialectician, but he indulged his distaste for history. One effect was that he had to take his facts at second-hand, in a way which astonished Bonamy Price; another, that he had to discuss much without any clear view of the facts.-SIMCOX, G. A., 1889, William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, The Academy, vol. 35, p. 387.

There was something to smile at in his person, and in some of his ways—his unbusiness-like habits, his joyousness of manner, his racy stories; but few more powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, and he has justified his University reputation by his distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian and professor, and as a profound metaphysical thinker, the equal antagonist on their own ground of J. Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. But his intellect at that time was as remarkable for its defects as for its powers. He used to divide his friends, and thinking people in general, into those who had facts and did not know what to do with them, and those who had in perfection the logical faculties, but wanted the facts to reason upon. He belonged himself to the latter class. He had, not unnaturally, boundless confidence in his argumentative powers; they were subtle, piercing, nimble, never at a loss, and they included a power of exposition which, if it was not always succinct and lively, was always weighty and impressive. Premises in his hands were not long in bringing forth their conclusions; and if abstractions always corresponded exactly to their concrete embodiments, and ideals were fulfilled in realities, no one could point out more perspicuously and decisively the practical judgments of them which reason must sanction.-CHURCH, RICHARD WILLIAM, 1891, The Oxford Movement, p. 207.

I remember well the first time that I saw your father-it was, I think, at the second or third meeting of the Society. He came into the room along with Manning, and the marked contrast between them added to the impressiveness. I remember thinking that I had never seen a face that seemed so clearly to indicate a strongly developed sensuous nature, and yet was at the same time so intellectual as your father's. I do not mean merely that it expressed intellectual faculty.

I mean rather the predominance of the intellectual life, of concern (as Matthew

Arnold says) for the "things of the mind." I did not then know your father's writings at all; and though from what I had heard of him I expected to find him an effective defender of the Catholic position, I certainly did not anticipate that I should come-as after two or three meetings I did come to place him in the very first rank of our members, as judged from the point of view of the Society in respect of their aptitudes for furthering its aim. The aim of the Society was, by frank and close debate and unreserved communication of dissent and objection, to attain-not agreement, which was of course beyond hope-but a diminution of mutual misunderstanding. For this kind of discussion your father's gifts were very remarkable. The only other member of the Society who in my recollection rivals him is curiously enough-Huxley.-SIDGWICK, HENRY, 1893, To Wilfrid Ward, Will iam George Ward and the Catholic Revival, p. 313.

As a quick-witted dialectician, thoroughly acquainted with all the weak points of his antagonist's case, I have not met with Dr. Ward's match. And it all seemed to come so easily to him; searching questions, incisive, not to say pungent, replies, and trains of subtle argumentation, were poured forth, which, while sometimes passing into earnest and serious exposition, would also, when lighter topics came to the front, be accompanied by an air of genial good-humour, as if the whole business were rather a good joke. But it was no joke to reply efficiently. . . . He was before all things a chivalrous English gentleman; I would say a philosophical and theological Quixote, if it were not that our associations with the name of the knight of La Mancha are mainly derived from his adventures, and not from the noble directness and simplicity of mind which led to those misfortunes.-HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY, 1893, To Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, pp. 314, 315.

There was a flavour of comedy in Mr. Ward's view of himself, in his almost dogmatic definitions of his own ignorance and limitations and incapacities, and in his equally dogmatic self-confidence, which it would have been bad art and worse taste to keep out of view. A large element in the engaging side of the man was the gusto with which he laughed at himself and the frankness with which he took all his friends

into his confidence on that head. . . . Few people ever enjoyed a laugh at themselves as did William George Ward. Certainly in all my experience of life I have never come across another person who found a far greater spring of amusement in analysing, proclaiming to the world, and even caricaturing, his own want of knowledge, his own want of courage, and the child-like incapacities which he discerned or fancied he discerned in himself, than he ever found in doing the same disservice for anyone else. In his judgments of others he was the personification of wise and charitable agnosticism. In his judgments of himself he was not half agnostic enough. He supposed that his knowledge of his own weaknesses was absolute, whereas hardly any man knows accurately, and certainly Mr. Ward did not know at all accurately, where his weaknesses ended and suddenly passed into unique strength.— HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT, 1894, Noticeable Books, Nineteenth Century, vol. 35, pp. 227,

228.

Mr. Ward's Catholic life, so far as his intellectual work is concerned, divides itself naturally into the period of his teaching at St. Edmund's, his writings (especially his writings in this Review) on the controversy which culminated at the time of the Vatican Council, and his philosophical and metaphysical polemic against such men as Professor Huxley, John Stuart Mill, and Dr. Alexander Bain. It is when analysing these latter controversies that our author displays the striking clearness of his style. To master such subjects at all is no light task. But to state the various sides to a long and intricate controversy upon abstruse questions of speculative philosophy, and to do so with even-handed justice and temper, and at the same time with such limpid clearness that the whole reads like a simple narrative of facts, is an achievement so considerable that it raises its author far above the average level of English descriptive and analytical biographers. WILBERFORCE, WILFRID, 1894, William George Ward, Dublin Review, vol. 115, p. 23.

For the next ten years, from 1835 to 1845 he was certainly the greatest conversationalist and (excepting always Newman) the greatest centre of intellectual life of that description in Oxford. There was no subject he was not ready to discuss, from politics and moral and metaphysical philoso