chapter and verse in the Gospel and in Christ's own words for every statement in the Prologue; and though Jesus never calls himself the Logos, this sublime conception of his personality pervades the whole narrative."

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND GENERAL LITERATURE

The Cambridge Apostles. By FRANCES M. BROOKFIELD. 8vo, pp. 370. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, cloth, gilt top, $5.00 net.

The Cambridge Conversazione Society was founded in 1824 by George Tomlinson, afterward Bishop of Gibraltar. Its object was the absolutely free and fearless discussion of subjects theological, ethical, philosophical, literary, political, and scientific. Its meetings were secret and nothing said there was ever repeated outside. Because its members numbered twelve, outsiders named them The Apostles. In the twenties and thirties of the last century they were a brilliant group of gifted young men nearly all of whom afterward became illustrious; among them Tennyson and Hallam, Kemble and Buller, Maurice and Milnes, Alford and Merivale, Trench and Sterling, Kingslake and Venables. This club of notables met every Saturday night in the apartment of the one whose turn it was to read the essay. The essay was criticized by the members up to the limit of their ability; sometimes commended and sometimes torn in pieces; the hardest knocks given and taken in perfect good humor. The corrective discipline, the sharp stimulus, the educative effect of membership in such a club are beyond calculation. Such circles should not be limited to colleges. They should be formed in every neighborhood where aspiring and earnest young men of congenial tastes and common interests can come together for frank discussion, friendly criticism of each other, mutual discipline, and culture. To none are such societies more valuable than to young ministers, whose proximity renders such association feasible. A certain amount of congeniality is necessary for such a circle, but the greater the variety of individualities the broader and more valuable the culture. Nothing is more effective than such fellowship to save a man from crankiness, opinionated dogmatism, and self-conceit, or to develop his social capabilities and teach him to be a man among men, sensible, agreeable, acceptable, and influential in his intercourse with all his fellow-beings. Moreover, the interchange of information on a variety of subjects augments each man's knowledge by that of all the rest. The Cambridge Apostles were young men of good morals as well as gifted minds. Delinquencies of any sort came under censure. Alfred Tennyson, failing through lethargy to have his essay ready when his turn came, was promptly requested to resign his membership in the club upon which his negligence had put such disrespect. The intellectual stimulation of this fellowship was immense. Jack Kemble felt this when he said at one of the meetings, "The world is one great thought, and I am thinking it"; which recalls Kepler's solemn ecstasy when, after discovering the laws by which the planets roll, he exclaimed: "O God, I think thy thoughts after thee." Mrs. Charles Brookfield's book is really about William Henry

Brookfield and his friends, The Apostles, of whom, we find to our surprise, he was not one. He seems to have had an unusual genius for friendship of the intellectual sort, and to have been on intimate and confidential terms with all the set. He helped them with their business affairs, in which they were not very capable. Once Alfred Tennyson wrote from Somersby: "Dear Brookfield: the spring is burgeoning fast about us and the crocus pierces through the dark moist mold like a tongue of flame. You came to see us in winter when there was an utter dearth of beauty on meadow and hill. Perhaps we may see you some time in summer, when the shining landscape is crisp with woods and tufted knolls on wavy wolds." Brookfield did go again in summer weather; and when Tennyson, who was proud of his muscles, was exerting his strength in some athletic feat, Brookfield said to him: "It is not fair, Alfred, that you should be Hercules as well as Apollo." Brookfield came to be a famous London preacher, of whose sermons Lord Lyttelton said they were so easy and colloquial that one was tempted to forget that it was preaching and get up and answer him; and Greville wrote in his diaries: "A magnificent sermon from Brookfield. He is one of the few preachers whose sermons never weary me; and his elocution is perfect." When Victoria was a young queen, not out of her teens, Brookfield spoke of her as a very clever girl. Rogers said she was a theologian fond of reading the Church Fathers, while Carlyle said: "The queen is like a canary bird looking out on a tempest." When a brilliant company were breakfasting together in London, Gladstone being of the number, Sydney Smith said of a certain bishop: "He is so like Judas Iscariot that I now firmly believe in the apostolical succession." Having dined where Warren, the author of The Diary of a Late Physician, was present, Brookfield wrote of him: “I never was more bored than by his eternal volubility, unsignalized by one syllable of wit, mere volubility chiefly about himself; apparently feeling himself to be a bit of a lion but never saying one thing that could justify a claim to be so considered. May I never again meet a self-conscious small lion!" The freedom with which The Apostles themselves expressed their opinions is illustrated in what Spedding said of Edward FitzGerald: "He is the prince of Quietists. Half the self-sacrifice, self-denial, and moral resolution which he exercises to keep himself easy and placid would amply furnish forth a missionary and a martyr. His tranquillity is like a pirated copy of the peace of God." And also in Buller's saying to Monckton Milnes: "I often think how puzzled your Maker must be to account for your conduct." We are told of the effect produced upon a party of free-thinkers who, amid a crackle of jokes, were giving the reasons for their nonbelief, when Brookfield, after listening to their chaff for a while, rose and said with dignity, "I believe in God, gentlemen," and strode away. Brookfield takes us into his confidence thus about one of his painful efforts to write a sermon: "Thackeray wanted me to go riding with him. I declined because I had a sermon on my mind; and I stayed in every minute of a monstrous hot day trying in vain to write on, 'I reckon that the sufferings of this present time,' etc. The devil urged me to try to be very striking, after the fashion of Manning

and Wilberforce. In consequence of this I could not get on at all. Next day at noon I resumed the churning of my brains. At 5 P. M. the butter began to come, and at 8 I finished. The next morning I preached, 'Be sure your sin will find you out.' Goodish, but ill put together. To take other men's sermons as a basis and work in portions thereof is a very bad plan. This was one of them; it was from Trench, but was neither like him nor like me. Memorandum: Never to do so no more." Of the dull and lifeless advocate of an important charity there is this criticism: "A stale pill dissolved in stagnant ditch water is a fit image of the manner in which he pleaded a most worthy cause." Brookfield when Inspector of Schools collected some choice answers given to questions in the written examinations. One boy wrote: "Dr. Johnson after trying many other experiments, married a widow with £800 a year." Another wrote: "Julius Cæsar was an eminent Roman Catholic descended from a high plebeian family." Another: "George the Third was the longest sovereign that ever reigned." Another: "Great advances in civilization were made in Queen Elizabeth's time, but poor Mr. Lee, a clergyman of Nottingham, broke his heart because not one person in a hundred wore stockings," while a young woman wrote: "Eve lived a life of innocence until she fell under the influence of Satin." When a Whig was elected bishop a clergyman of the opposite party said of the newly elected: "He is a man absolutely ignorant of Christianity, though not hostile to it." Brookfield once said to Greville: "Believe me that in our Church of England there is a great demand for dullness in the pulpit." President Eliot of Harvard once said that the pulpit of the Protestant Episcopal Church is characterized by "a frugality of intellectuality." The chapter on Frederick Denison Maurice is one of the most interesting as a study of character. A profound thinker, a hard worker, a man of conscience; one who sought all his life for truth in order to reveal it to others groping in the same search; a rare personality, of ascetic charm and philosophic culture; a teacher who founded a school, his influence has yet failed of its expected continuance. He had the disadvantage of Unitarian parentage. He was a groper after truth. In his search he no sooner adopted a fresh view than he began to reconsider with regret the view he had just discarded; hence hesitation and indecision, and no confident progress. Thus with all his commanding ability, he was a poor leader to follow. No wonder Gladstone said of him: "I tried hard, but I got no solid meat from him. I found him difficult to catch and still more difficult to hold." Maurice, when he was ordained in the Church of England seventy years ago, said: "I do not expect to find a bed of down in the Church. I am convinced that as an establishment it will be overturned, I know not how soon." This book says: "One is angered at Maurice because with gifts so great he did not accomplish more." Of Arthur Henry Hallam, one of The Apostles, upon whose death Tennyson's "In Memoriam" was written, Gladstone said: "There is nothing in the region of the mind that he might not have accomplished." Lord Grey referring to the dullness of the House of Lords, said speaking there was "like speaking to dead men by torchlight." When Milnes was seeking an office under Peel, Carlyle said to him: "The only

office you are fit for, Milnes, is that of Perpetual President of the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society." Monckton Milnes was in the habit of saying that "fresh country air and exercise gave him more indigestion and uncomfortableness than London dimness and doziness." Milnes and Carlyle were warm friends. Milnes describing Carlyle's lectures wrote, "There he stands, simple as a child, and his happy thought dances on his lips and in his eyes, and takes word and goes away, and he bids it God-speed whatever it be." James Spedding was one of the brightest of The Cambridge Apostles. Tennyson spoke of him as "the Pope of the set," and professed to be "overawed by Spedding's calm personality and dome." Spedding went bald early and had a protuberant forehead. FitzGerald once wrote a friend, "Of course you have read the account of Spedding's forehead landing in America. English sailors mistook it for Beachy Head." Later in the years he wrote: "Spedding was the wisest man I have ever known and not the less so for the plenty of boy in him." The Cambridge Apostles knew Tennyson as a forgetful and informal man of many moods and eccentricities. Douglas Heath once mustered courage to tell the poet that a clean shirt would improve him; the poet replied, "H'm, yours would not be as clean as this one is if you had worn it a fortnight." Blakesley once wrote, "Alfred Tennyson has been with us the past week. He looks well but complains of nervousness. How can it be otherwise when he smokes the rankest tobacco out of a dirty old black pipe on an average nine hours every day." At one time Tennyson's favorite pet was a tame snake which he liked to fondle. Arthur Hallam used to contend that young Alfred Tennyson was even then a greater poet than Milton. Tennant wrote of Shelley, "He was an incomplete character; his fiery passions prevented him from creating. He would have been a great poet if he had been a good man." When the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson, he consulted with his friends for a few days, among them some of The Cambridge Apostles. He afterward said playfully, "After consideration I accepted the honor because Venables told me that if I became Poet Laureate I should always, when I dined out, be offered the liver wing of the chicken." Old Mrs. Tennyson was beside herself with pride at the honor that came to her son. Once, in an omnibus, she remarked smilingly to her fellow-passengers, "It may interest you to know that I am the mother of the Poet Laureate." Tennyson held the doctrine of personal immortality, and indignantly repelled the suggestion that our present existence is simply to bring in more perfect beings who will come after us. He said, "I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made merely a means of ushering in something higher than myself." When his first child died Tennyson wrote,

Hallowed be Thy name-Halleluiah!

Infinite Ideality!

Immeasurable Reality!

Infinite Personality!

Hallowed be Thy name-Halleluiah!

Nearing the end of life his faith became more positive and his trust more

peaceful. In a letter he wrote, "Whatever pseudo-savants may say, I believe that the dead live." Even in this book written by a cultivated woman about a brillant group of university men occurs that incorrigible and inexcusable blunder in grammar, the use of whom for who—"friends whom he felt were exposed to danger." Whom were! (An editorial in The Outlook of April 6th sins in the same unpardonable way by saying, "Whom *** are being canvassed for the Presidency.") When Wilberforce asked Richard Chevenix Trench what book outside the Bible he would choose if he could have but one, Trench replied, "I should choose St. Augustine." Almost the finest thing in The Cambridge Apostles is the helpful and steadfast life-long friendship between them from the early associations of student days.

The Letters of One. By CHARLES HARE PLUNKETT. 12mo, pp. 179. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Price, cloth, $1.25.

This is called a study in limitations. The letters purport to be those of a man to a woman, in a long correspondence which people expected would result in marriage but which ended finally in separation. The woman's letters can only be inferred as they are reflected in his. In one letter he says: "I love you too well. You have too potent an effect on me. If I should come to see you, there is nothing you could not make me do. I should probably beseech you to marry me, and there are many reasons against that-my health, my poverty, my temperament. It would be the worst thing that could befall us. You know it yourself, and yet you are so compassionate, so romantic, that you would run the risk. But I will not. I am not made for marriage, and you are not made for marriage with me; the wear and tear of life, the daily intercourse, the anxieties, the constraint of matrimonial bonds, the fixed engagements and routine, would make havoc of our love. I am not capable of much in the way of hate, but I think I should be capable of coming to hate a wife." After such a letter as that, no one would expect her to marry him. Our only interest in his letters is in incidental passages, no way essential to the business of courtship. One letter refers to Burne-Jones's great picture of a mermaid who has fallen in love with a man whom she saw bathing in the sea. Throwing her arms around him she clasps him close, and bears him down among the clear eddies in the pebbled sea-cleft. She looks in the pale face of the drowning man, she sees his closed eyes, and colorless lips, as his expiring breath floats up in glittering bubbles. She wonders why he makes no response to her love. She does not realize that she has dragged him down to death. But he cannot live in her realm, and he is the victim of her love. Here is an opinion on a poet: "I don't think Browning was an artist. He was full to the brim of tumultuous ideas; he enjoyed life and all the stir, thrill, emotion, and complexity of it; it all came bubbling to his lips like a great full-fed fountain, but he was far more concerned with what he had to say than with how he said it. Of course he had some care for the form; but I imagine that his heavy, rough, tumultuous metres were to him like the heels of a great powerful horse galloping in a pasture. A friend of mine