27 JANUARY 1923, Page 23

The many friends of the late Sir Henry Jones will

be glad to have this delightful little book, which deals with his life up to the time when he succeeded Edward Caird as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. His friends will remember many of the incidents of his youth, for he loved to recall his humble origin and to tell how, as a boy, he worked at his father's trade of shoemaking in a little Denbighshire village not far from Llanrwst. But the full story deserved to be placed on record. It does credit both to the narrator and to his parents and friends, and it is, we must remember, typical rather than exceptional. Many of the great me rk of Wales, among whom Henry Jones must surely be reckoned, have come from the villages, largely because the poorest Welshman has a respect for education. Henry Jones left the workshop at eighteen to enter a training college, with a scholarship that he had won. Five years later he was able, with another scholarship, to enter at Glasgow University. Though ham- pered by a very imperfect schooling, he contrived none the less to win the blue riband of the University—the George A. Clark Fellowship in philosophy—in 1878, when he was twenty- six. Aberystwyth, Bangor and St. Andrews then claimed him in turn before he returned to Glasgow to succeed his old master and friend. Henry Jones's simple account of his boyhood in the little village is inimitable. It is worth noting that, as a child, he used to attend both chapel and church every Sunday and that, in Llangernyw at least, the " dissidence of Dissent " was less strongly marked than the intolerance of a tactless rector and his wife. The book is a fitting memorial to a most accomplished and attractive man, whom Scotland, no less than Wales, has reason to regret.