Lady Jane Grey and The Friends being those which at the time won the most favourable suffrages. For above thirty years his life was passed in the discharge of the uneventful duties of a country parson, eking out a scanty income by taking pupils. But in 1836 he became somewhat more of a public character as Archdeacon of Derby; and in 1840, on the death of Dr. Goodall, who had been Provost of Eton for above thirty years, he was appointed to that office by the Minister, whom, in gratitude, we suppose, for that appreciation of his father's merits, the biographer calls the great Lord Melbourne'—an epithet certainly never before associated with his name. It was a most felicitous choice. Even those who remember with the most affectionate respect the stately figure and port of Dr. Goodall, every inch a Provost, will not deny that, though admirably fitted for his office by sound and extensive scholarship, set off by a manner which admirably combined courtesy with dignity, by a ready wit and a most liberal charity, he was somewhat too rigid in his adherence to old customs, too reluctant to believe that the system under which he himself had been trained in the eighteenth century, might not be altogether suited to the requirements of the nineteenth. But Hodgson was a reformer at heart, with a deep love for Eton, which was a sufficient security against reform in his hands becoming revolution. He was one of those few reformers who had distinct views of his own, not forced upon him by less judicious followers, and who knew when he had done enough. We could wish that of this the more important portion of his father's life, the biographer had given us a fuller notice than is contained in the two concluding chapters of his work. He enumerates indeed the 'introduction of the teaching of modern languages' as a part of the regular school work (ii. 263), the improvement and extension of the College buildings (ib. 278, 283), the restoration of the collegiate church (280), as he calls the chapel (280). But his chief enthusiasm is reserved for the abolition of Montem. Those of an older generation who remember the delight with which on every third Whit Tuesday hundreds and hundreds of old Etonians, not unaccompanied by wives, daughters, or sisters, collected in the schoolyard to see the boys march in procession in front of the head-master, and accompanied them to Salt Hill in the morning, to the Terrace, or, in the present reign, to the playing-fields in the evening, will hardly agree with him that the innocent incongruities, and, as Praed calls it, 'no-meaning of Montem,' which the Sovereign, following in this the example of her grandfather and both her uncles, did not disdain to hail as a pleasing holiday, 'provoked the indignant condemnation of all sensible men'-(ii. 284.) The railroads, with the flood of cockneys, and worse than cockneys, wholly unconnected with Eton, which they brought down, had indeed made the maintenance of Montem impossible; but the facts admitted by himself, that, even as it was, the majority of the Fellows voted against its abolition, and that it was only reluctant assent which was wrung from the Queen, might have suggested to the biographer a little more gentleness in his strictures on the time-honoured, if somewhat unintelligible festival. A son can hardly be an impartial biographer of his father; but even those unconnected with Provost Hodgson by blood will endorse the sentence in which the author sums up his character, and pronounces that his varied talents, agreeable and courteous manner, refined intellectual taste, genial, benevolent disposition, and sweet temper, formed together a winning combination which made him acceptable in every society'—(ii. 327.) Life of Anna Jameson. By GERARDINE MACPHERSON. (London: Longmans and Co., 1878.) THIS memoir of a gifted woman is by her niece and pupil, who did not live long enough to see her book in print. Anna Murphy, the eldest of the four daughters of a miniature-painter, was bred up in an atmosphere of art, and though her powers of drawing did not enable her to do more than make graceful etchings and characteristic vignettes, she had a wonderful appreciation of art, and wrote clear, flowing, and correct English. Thus she was eminently fitted to lead the way in that kind of literature that popularises art. Her four volumes of sacred and legendary art are the best introduction to the comprehension of the treasures of Italian and German galleries that we know. They do not presuppose too much knowledge in the reader, and are not too technical, and the legends were to many persons the first introduction to hagiology. The labour and research the collection must have cost must have been immense, and no pains were spared in making it as correct and complete as possible. It is the work by which the writer is chiefly known, though she also wrote Characteristics of the Women of Shakespeare, and several other works, of which the most useful was Lectures on Sisters of Charity and on Communion of Labour, which actual workers own as having greatly inspired and aided them. A letter from Miss Twining in the Guardian of December 18, ascribes much benefit to the suggestions of these writings, and to Mrs. Jameson's unfailing sympathy with good works. Indeed, her testimony to Sisterhoods of Mercy was the more valuable at the time she wrote, because it was a recognition of their value not coming from the Church party, and therefore the more independent and unsuspected, just as her Lives of the Saints won the attention of many who took them up merely as artistic mythology, and would never have touched them as religious examples. She was a kind of unconscious pioneer of the Church. Her own religion seems to have been somewhat eclectic. She had been taught in a dry way in her childhood by a governess who never gained her love. She thought dogma had been too much forced on her, and she thought for herself; but she must have had a deep fund of reverence, or she could not have dealt with sacred subjects as she has done. A most devoted and self-sacrificing daughter and sister, she was an unhappy wife, being one of the numerous literary ladies of the last generation who for one cause or another could not get on with their husbands, and as the biographers sincerely believe, entirely by the gentleman's fault--a question into which there is no occasion for us to enter. The Life and Letters of Dean Hook. By the Rev. W. R. WOOD STEPHENS, M.A., Prebendary of Chichester. 2 vols. (London: Bentley and Son, 1878.) THESE two valuable volumes have reached us at a date so near to that of our going to press that we can only give them a space very disproportionate to their real interest. This, however, is of the less moment, as we should hope that the mere announcement of them will be sufficient to secure them, from all our readers, that attention which their subject demands. Retired, as he had been, from public observation during the later years of his life, the part which Dr. Hook played in the great revival of Church feeling and Church work of the present century, was such as to secure him no common place in the history of our times. If Bishop Wilberforce set up a new ideal of Episcopal, so Dr. Hook set up a new standard of parochial activity, so far as our great towns were concerned. In these volumes of his son-in-law, Dr. Hook lives again, and, we should think, will long live. His somewhat quaint character, his sturdy honesty, his vigorous independence, his long struggle and final success at Leeds, and his peculiar geniality and humour, are all well displayed, and have been read by ourselves with hearty interest. The Life and Letters of Baroness Bunsen. By A. J. C. HARE. 2 vols. (London: Daldy, Isbister, and Co.) Two deeply interesting volumes, consisting almost exclusively of the letters of this truly remarkable woman. Differing widely, as we must, from the religious and theological specialities of her husband and herself, it is most pleasing to recognise the depth and reality of the religion which animated her whole singular and chequered career, while the number and variety of the topics touched upon in these letters give them a never-failing charm. It is the sort of book which would furnish materials for a long and interesting notice, had not all our space been more than fully occupied before it reached us. 1. For Percival. By MARGARET VELAY. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1878.) 2. Macleod of Dare. By WILLIAM BLACK. and Co., 1878.) (London: Macmillan 3. The First Violin. (London: Bentley and Son, 1878.) We have here classed together three novels as those which have for he past year been the chief attraction to the Magazines in which they have appeared, namely, the Cornhill, Good Words, and Temple Bar. The last of the three is to our mind the most complete work of its kind in the sense of fitness for its place and purpose, that purpose being to provide mild excitement, and keep up interest and curiosity from month to month, claiming a certain amount of pleasurable admiration for the hero, but keeping below the line where the qualities become too high for this world's comfortable appreciation. The mystery as to who 'the First Violin' may be is cleverly kept in reserve, and his generosity and paternal affection make him thoroughly interesting, while his friend, Friedhelm, literally playing second fiddle, is so loyally and undoubtingly constant to him, and so unshaken in confidence in his rectitude, as to make the story enjoyable. The drawback is the absolute negation of the religious side of life. The people are, and boast of being, mere children of this world,' prayerless, hopeless materialists, out of mere indifference to all but the interests of this life. The only religious person in the story is a melancholy countess, who is supposed to pass her time in reading Roman Catholic 'polemics;' and of the others, almost all the men, especially Friedhelm, have distinctly no religious belief at all. This might be accepted as the only too probable condition of the orchestra of a theatre in a little German town; but the heroine, an English clergyman's daughter, manifestly thinks them nothing the worse for it, and views Christmas-day as simply a time for family gatherings and amusements. She has left home to avoid an intolerable suitor whom she alone sees through; and her family are left utterly undeveloped, except the elder sister, who willingly sells herself to the undesirable baronet, and comes to misery and disgrace in consequence. Indeed the English characters are so inferior to the German, that we should think the book must be the work of a person who had lived so long abroad as to have nothing of home but ease in the use of the language. However, as we have said, it is a clever story, quite according to the promise of its Magazine, and thus giving the subscribers what they have a right to expect. But we are obliged to say that we think families who take in Good Words ill-used by the insertion of such a story as Macleod of Dare. The periodical is freely given to young people and servants. Now we are far from saying that every book or paper we lend ought to be of our own way of thinking, and we have always thought Dr. Normań Macleod's original principle of inserting whatever is good and earnest of its kind a right one; but in several cases it has led to the acceptance of what is not good of its kind, only clever, and therefore the more mischievous. Mr. Black has two perfections-the description of scenery and the description of passion; and it is an evil sign of the times that the beauty of his pictures of scenery and the vigour of his writing is allowed to bear down all scruples as to its soundness and morality. A Daughter of Heth is the mere sport of circumstances, and on the very verge of ruin. In the Three Feathers, Wenna is for ever resolving the right and doing the wrong, yet we are called on to admire her. Even Bell, in the Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, is encouraged in her inconstancy and ill-treatment of her honest English lover, and in Madcap Violet, the ungovernable temper and unchecked impulse lead to the overthrow of the intellect, as well as to utter desolation and despair. And 'Sir Keith Macleod' is, as he certainly tells us from the first, a Highland savage, as ferocious and revengeful at heart as ever were his ancestors. The tragic effect is increased by his surroundings-the noble old lady mother, who has lost all her sons on battle-fields, save this, her youngest-the sweet, generous-hearted cousin, and the devoted clan: the interest is sustained, and the word-painting wonderful; above all, the picture of the Western Isles covered with snow at sunrise. Keith, too, appears at first so fine a creature that we feel it as piteous as it is in Hamlet to see his endowments like 'sweet bells jangled.' But it is neither fine nor manly to be so completely under the dominion of passion for an inferior being, as to brood on her and nothing else, until his mind falls into a morbid state, in which the hereditary ferocity of his Celtic nature gains the upper hand, and leads him to an atrocious and treacherous murder and suicide, all the more hauntingly horrible because only inferred from hints, not described. Now when we remember the tendency to plead as an excuse for everything 'Thou knowest that Thou hast formed me when we remember the sympathy shown in some instances by the crowd with murderers, as if being crossed in love were a plea for any desperate deed, we cannot but think such a novel as this utterly unjustifiable and demoralising. And, further, it is Mr. Black's own concern if he chooses to work out such a morbid study as how far civilisation is capable of prevailing over a Highlander's fiendish propensities to revenge; but the editor of Good Words is not justified in beguiling thousands of readers into dwelling on such an injurious contemplation, without knowing what they are coming to. It is like taking our children to see a museum and finding ourselves in La Morgue. Per The other story we have named is of very different tone and tendency. It is not professedly a religious tale, but religion is its backbone, as it were, for its great motif is truth. Here things stand on their real merits. Truth is the one thing worth self-sacrifice; lying, revenge, and self-gratification sink into unutterable meanness. cival, the hero, is ready to suffer anything so that he may preserve his integrity, and he does suffer severely. When a wild tomboy of a girl takes his good-natured patronage for love, and shows her feeling, his genuine dismay, though manifested only by his countenance and by his restraint of manner, leads the young lady to a revenge in which we are not taught to see anything glorious. In like manner, his uprightness and honour ruin his worldly prospects, and reduce him, an easy-going idler, to become a copying-clerk in a little country town. The central interest is, however, on Sissy Langton, a very sweet and -winning creature, whose home is in the house of Mr. Thorne, grandfather to Percival and Horace. The former is the heir-at-law, but owing to an old quarrel, his father had been disinherited, and Horace had been regarded as the heir. A young lady, with whom Horace had been suspected of flirting, has an appointment with a brother in trouble, and asks Percival to take care of her on her way to the spot. On her account, Percival tells Sissy not to mention his having gone out of the grounds that evening. A farmer mistakes him for his cousin, whom he accuses to his grandfather of secret meetings with the young lady. Sissy is appealed to, and 'for Percival' utters her untruth, declaring that he had been with her all the evening. The ordinary heroine would think this a most venial transgression, if indeed she would view it as wrong at all; but Sissy is namelessly |