The title of this book is due to the fact that it is made up of thirty articles which did duty as editorials in The Dial. They are studies and criticisms in literature, education, and biography. The author modestly says that they make no pretense of doing more than touch the skirts and fringes of their great subjects. Some of the subjects are as follows: The Ibsen Legend, The Cult in Literature, The Literary West. The Critic and His Task, Anonymity in Literary Criticism, The Approach to Literature, Democracy and Education, The Teaching of Education, The Use and Abuse of Dialect, Reading and Education, The Summer School, Alfred Tennyson, Ernest Renau, John Addington Symonds, John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, Oliver Wendell Holmes. From Benan this rhapsody is quoted: Heroes of the unselfish life, saints, apostles, recluses, cenobites, ascetics of all ages, sublime poets and philosophers, whose delight was in having no heritage here below; sages who went through life with the left eye fixed upon earth and the right eye upon heaven; and thou above all, divine Spinoza, who chooses to remain poor and forgotten, the better to serve thy thought and adore the Infinite, how much better you understood life than those who take it to be a narrow problem in self-interests, the meaningless struggle of ambition and of vanity! It had doubtless been better to make your God less of an abstraction, not set upon heights so dim that to contemplate him strained the vision. God is not aloue in the sky, he is near each one of us; he is in the flower pressed by your feet, m the balmy air, in the life that hums and murmurs all about, most of all in your hearts. Yet in your sublime exaltation how much more clearly do I discern the supersensual needs and instincts of humanity than in those colorless beings upon whom the ray of the ideal never flashed, and whose lives from their first day to their last were unfolded, precise, and trim, like the leaves of a book of accounts. This is from the authors essay on J. A. Symonds. Professor Tyrrell, in a satirical sketch of the modern methods of classical study, says: To study the works, for instance, of the Greek dramatists is no longer a road to success as a scholar or as a student. No, you must be ready to liken AEschylus to an Alpine crevasse, Sophocles to a fair avenue of elms, and Euripides to an amber-weeping Phaethontid, or a town pump in need of repairing. This is clearly a reference to such books as Symondss Studies of the Greek Poets, and yet that book has done more to rouse an enthusiasm for Greek poetry and foster a desire for its acquaintance than all the unromantic tomes of the grammarians. This from the essay on Huxley: Huxley represented English science in the sense that he gave a large part of his life to the subject of comparative anatomy, and made some fairly important contributions to our knowledge of that subject. But this work was not comparable to that, in their respective subjects, of such men as Faraday or Lyell or Maxwell, to say nothing of Darwin. It was good work, without doubt, but it was equaled by a score of Englishmen of his own generation, and surpassed by a respectable number. But the author says Huxleys tombstone should bear the inscription, Veritatem dilexi, that Renan asked to be cut upon his own.
-The Methodist Review, Vol. 78