characterize the work in a single word, that word should be clearness. We have never hesitated for an instant as to the meaning of a single sentence. In saying this, we say enough to condemn the book with a certain school. . . . The author has so cultivated the habit of looking at things in broad daylight, that his representations offer nothing to divert or distract the mind. The necessary result is beauty of diction; the style is achromatic. In the true acceptation of the term, he is an original writer.-ALEXANDER, J. W., 1846, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, Princeton Review, vol. 18, pp. 368, 374, 375.

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It ["Evidences of Christianity"] possesses great merits. The style is clear, forcible, not infrequently rising into eloquence and always marked by a business-like character, proceeding by the shortest way towards the main point, as if the writer were too much in earnest to waste either his own or other's time on matters of secondary importance. Having at the outset stated, with the good sense that characterises the whole volume, the precise object which he purposes to accomplish, he examines the question of the antecedent improbability of miraculous communication. from God, and then shows how far miracles are susceptible of proof, and how far they are the fitting evidence of a Divine revelation. PEABODY, E., 1846, Hopkins's Lectures, Christian Examiner, vol. 41, p. 218.

His peculiar tact in imparting instruction, his powerful influence over young men, exciting both their reverence and their love, his dignified yet affable manners, his kind and sympathizing heart, make him peculiarly fitted for the position he occupies. And when to these characteristics is added an intellect of great strength, as well as great breadth of view, combined with a rare fertility of illustration, we can readily conceive what an influence he must exert in giving "form and pressure" to hundreds of minds that are, in their turn, to take a leading part in moulding and directing public opinion. -CLEVELAND, CHARLES D., 1859, A Compendium of American Literature, p. 491.

Through and through Hopkins is a transcendentalist and anti-agnostic. His teachings illustrate the yielding, in America, of Reid and "common-sense" philosophy to the influence of Germany and spiritual intuitions. In Hopkins, a Trinitarian Con

gregational minister, in many ways a conservative, and sometimes following the Edwardsian statements, appears an optimism not less serene than that of Emerson himself. RICHARDSON, CHARLES F., 1887, American Literature, 1607-1885, vol. I, p. 316.

There have been few Americans worthier of praise than Mark Hopkins. He built himself into the mental fabric of two generations of men. They hold him in gentle, loving and grateful remembrance. He

erected in their hearts the "monument more enduring than brass." . . . Many great eulogiums will yet be pronounced upon the work and character of President Hopkins; touching pictures will be drawn of his person, his manner and his inspiring companionship; historians will dwell upon his gentle but mighty influence in helping forward and upward the intellectual activities of the nineteenth century.-KASSON, FRANK H., 1890, Mark Hopkins, New England Magazine, N. S. vol. 3, p. 3.

The lectures on the "Evidences of Christianity" delivered in January, 1844, the first important book of Dr. Hopkins, bear clear marks of the great influence that Bishop Butler had exercised upon his mind. It seems at first thought singular that the "Analogy," which was written with special reference to the unbelief of the last century, and had been published over a hundred years when Dr. Hopkins delivered these lectures, should have kept so firm a grasp on religious thought, and should leave its indelible marks on minds so different as, for instance, that of Cardinal Newman and that of Dr. Hopkins. . . . The one was indeed a Puritan, the other a Romanist. The one believed in the smallest amount of machinery in religious things and in the fullest liberty for a local church. The other was carried by his processes of thought to the acceptance of authority, to a profound hatred of schism, and to a fervent attachment to what he held as the one original Christian church. When Dr. Hopkins in conversation with one of the college professors regarding Robert Browning said, "I too am a mystic," he expressed the affinity that he had with all the great spiritual teachers of the age; and though he would have rejected with disdain much of Newman's sacramentalism, he accepted him as a brother in the higher region of spiritual thought, and with him emphasized always

the immediate relation of the soul to the things unseen. No work of Newman's shows more plainly or more beautifully the far-reaching effect of the great "Analogy" than these lectures by Dr. Hopkins on the "Evidences of Christianity." - CARTER, FRANKLIN, 1892, Mark Hopkins (American Religious Leaders), pp. 136, 137.

He wrote eighty-two books, pamphlets, and articles of very considerable merit, but the two which were most widely used and most influential were the "Outline Study of Man" and "The Law of Love and Love as a Law." These are great works.-WINSHIP, A. E., 1900, Great American Educators, p. 200.

PERSONAL

O genial Saxe, whose radiant wit
Flashed like the lightning from the sky,
But, though each flash as keenly hit,

Wounded but what deserved to die-
Alas! the cloud that shrouds thy day

In gathering darkness, fold on fold, Serves not as background for the play Of those bright gleams that charmed of old.

Yet charms not now his blithesome lay,

Nor flowery mead "in verdure clad.' The world that laughed when thou wast gay, Now weeps to know that thou art sad. -PERCIVAL, C. S., 1886, To John G. Saxe, Century Magazine, vol. 32, p. 248.

One of the first things he did after moving to Brooklyn was to purchase a lot for family burial. At that time he was surrounded by an interesting family-a loving wife, one of the noblest women that ever lived, two sons, and three daughters. His fame was fast increasing and he was everywhere lionized and courted. Life to him then was all sunshine and smiles, but the shadows settled fast over that happy home, and to-day the mother and her three daughters sleep side by side in that Greenwood lot, and a son rests in our own Rural Cemetery. Sorrowing and suffering did their work, and the loved poet is now ending his days apart from the world, a brokenhearted man. He came back to this city alone, in 1881, shortly after his wife's death,

and is now living with his son on State Street, though few of the good people of Albany know of his presence in their midst. Sickness has bowed the rugged frame and enfeebled his step. Lines of care are furrowed across his brow, and age has sprinkled the silver in his hair. He sees no visitors and rarely leaves his room. Longfellow, Emerson, and other of the writers of his day lived to a ripe age and died in the midst of their work, but Saxe still lives on at the age of seventy, though dead to the world, dead to literature, and dead to the thousands of friends whose hearts yearn to comfort and cheer the man whose genius and wit have lightened so may homes as, in his declining years, he nears the evening sunset. HOWE, JOHN A., JR., 1886, John G. Saxe, Fort Orange Monthly, July.

Saxe was the author of some poems as witty as any ever written by Dr. Holmes, and some of his punning pieces are not excelled even by anything of Tom Hood's. In his younger days, as he began to be appreciated in society, he not infrequently exhibited something of natural conceit. A friend met him one morning as he was coming from the sanctum of the "Boston Post," to which paper he was a frequent contributor as well as to the "Knickerbocker," and upon asking him as to what he was doing, got this reply: "I have just left with Colonel Greene the finest sonnet that has

been written since the days of Sir John Suckling."-MORRILL, JUSTIN S., 1887, Self-Consciousness of Noted Persons, p. 42.

GENERAL

The two principal poems ["The Money King and Other Poems"] . . . have the characteristic merits and faults of the class of poems to which they belong. Their versification is smooth and easy, their humor is genial, and is good-natured. If they unfold only simple and obvious truths, they enforce those truths by well-chosen illustrations, and their tone is always healthful. —SMITH, C. C., 1860, Critical Notices, North American Review, vol. 90, p. 273.

Mr. Saxe writes with facility, is intent mainly on jests and epigrams, and amuses himself and his readers by clever hits at the fashions and follies of the time. His goodnatured satire does not cleave to the depths, nor is his humor of that quality which reaches to the sources of feeling, and which gives us the surprises of an April day. But he is level with the popular apprehension, and has made his name more familiarly known, in all parts of the country, than that of any of our comic versifiers.-UNDERWOOD, FRANCIS H,, 1872, A Hand-Book of English Literature, American Authors, p. 406.

Until his fame was somewhat overshadowed by Artemus Ward, he might have been called the most popular humorous writer of America. . . . Mr. Saxe excels in light, easy verse, and in unexpected, if not absolutely punning, turns of expression. His more elaborate productions are not so successful. In the general style and effect of certain of his comic pieces he strongly reminds one of Thomas Hood. Saxe, it must be observed, is one of the very few thoroughly national poets, in this sense, that his themes and the atmosphere of his verse are almost exclusively American.-HART, JOHN S., 1872, A Manual of American Literature, p. 341.

John G. Saxe owes his wide acceptance with the public not merely to the elasticity of his verse, the sparkle of his wit, and the familiarity of his topics, but to his power of diffusing the spirit of his own good humor. The unctuous satisfaction he feels in putting his mood of merriment into rhyme is communicated to his reader, so that, as it were, they laugh joyously together. WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1876-86, American Literature and Other Papers, ed. Whittier, p. 131.

The abundant verse of Mr. Saxe belongs almost exclusively to the least poetical of the several orders into which poetry is sometimes classified-viz., the satirical and homiletic, which is made palatable only by natural lyric flow and grace, and by the frolic and gentle humor of its begetter. He ranked below Tom Hood and Dr. Holmes as a maker of light, often comic, ballads, pentameter satires, etc., and he had no claims as their rival in the more serious

and imaginative composition of higher moods, on which something more than a passing reputation is founded. A few of his ditties, such as the "Rhyme of the Rail" and "The Briefless Barrister," will long be found in the collections. For the most part he was a popular specimen of the collegesociety, lecture-room, dinner-table rhymster, that may be set down as a peculiarly American type and of a generation now almost passed away. His unsophisticated wit, wisdom, and verse, were understood and broadly relished by his audiences; his mellow personality made him justly a favorite; and his printed poems obtained a large and prolonged sale among American readers. That this should have been the case, when poetry of a higher class-like Dr. Parsons's for example-failed of a general market, shows that, while good wine in the end may need no bush, its dispenser often must wait till the crowd have filled up the hostel that has the gayest sign.STEDMAN, EDMUND CLARENCE, 1887, John Godfrey Saxe, The Critic, April 9, p. 79.

John Godfrey Saxe is a genius by himself. . . . The verses by Saxe excel by virtue of plain, honest statement, and are even sometimes wanting in literary finish. SIMONDS, ARTHUR B., 1894, American Song, p. 171.

A poet who wrote society verse of not a little sparkle, although not equal to the best in that kind by Halleck and by Holmes.MATTHEWS, BRANDER, 1896, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature, p. 224.

He came far behind Hood and his other British models, but it was not discreditable to his countrymen that they should have bought and laughed over his numerous volumes. "The Proud Miss McBride," "Rhyme of the Rail," and "The Blind Men and the Elephant" have not lost their sprightliness.-TRENT, WILLIAM P., 1903, A History of American Literature, p. 531.

he shrouded his life; a man of retired habits, of few friends, he stood outside and apart from the whole circle of literary society. This aloofness is fully reflected in his writings, for in his general manner of thought and expression he resembles no other author, and appears to be indebted to no other; his faults and his merits are equally peculiar and distinctive.-SALT, H. S., 1891, Richard Jefferies, Temple Bar, vol. 92, p. 223.

Reposing in one of the double transcepts of the most symmetrical of English cathedrals, the ancient fane at Salisbury, is a marble bust typifying a face remarkable for its strength and charm in repose, at once the effigy of a poet, artist, and thinker, in whom the perceptive quality of beauty and inherent love for the beautiful are revealed by every feature. Calm and majestic, thoughtful and serene, it is a countenance that arrests the beholder, and haunts him, like some sweetly cadenced strain, long after the richly dight spire and hallowed Close of Sailsbury have receded from the view. Upon the pedestal is graven this inscription:

To the Memory of Richard Jefferies, Born at Coate in the Parish of Chiselden and

County of Wilts, 6th November, 1848. Died at Goring in the County of Sussex, 14th August, 1887.

Who Observing the Work of Almighty God with a Port's Eye,

Has Enriched the Literature of His Country, And won for Himself a Ploce Amongst Those who Have Made Men

observer of Nature and as a literary artist, have received many tributes since his decease. He has been praised, in fact, like probitas in the well-known line of Juvenal, and unhappily it would seem with much the same result.... Of the real meaning and the real charm of "The Gamekeeper" and "Wild Life" it appears to me that the class of readers I am speaking of have never got so much as an inkling. To make anything of these books than mere collections of "Stories about Animals" or "Wonders of the Woods," or, at any rate, to get their full value out of them, and to recognize them as books to be kept by us, and read again and again, as we keep and read, or are supposed to keep and read, the works of our favourite poets, it is necessary that the reader should study them in that peculiar posture of the mind and will which . . . is the sole, the indispensable, condition of finding an enduring charm in the country. -TRAILL, HENRY DUFF, 1887, In Praise of the Country, Contemporary Review, vol. 52, pp. 477, 480.

In Jefferies' later books the whole of the country life of the nineteenth century will be found displayed down to every detail. The life of the farmer is there; the life of the labourer; the life of the gamekeeper; the life of the women who work in the fields, and of those who work at home. . . . He revealed Nature in her works and ways; the flowers and the fields; the wild English creatures; the hedges and the streams; the wood and coppice. . . . But this is not all. For next he took the step-the vast stepacross the chasm which separates the poetic from the vulgar mind, and began to clothe the real with the colours and glamour of the unreal; to write down the response of the soul to the phenomena of nature: to interpret the voice of Nature speaking to the soul. Unto this last. And then he died; his work, which might have gone on forever, cut off almost at the commencement.BESANT, SIR WALTER, 1888, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies, pp. 228, 229.

The truth is that Richard Jefferies's work, his wonderful descriptive faculty, his minute and sympathetic observation of nature, can only appeal to a small circle. The general public will probably continue to hurry past him. But his place in English literature may be considered assured; and, of the small band of English writers who have laboured in the same field, he not