PROFESSOR CHURCH'S REMINISCENCES.* This very agreeable book of reminiscences could:.

only have been written by a scholar, because. a less well-cultivated mind would have failed to see how much the small things-matter.

Aggregations of small things in autobiography give the 'true picture; and there are some very true pictures here from a life in which careful observation has been served by long memory. Professor Church's knowledge of the " Humanities " bestows' an ampler meaning on that title than it commonly commands; he reckons nothing alien to him which concerns the human beings he has met, from tramps and unsuccessful anthorFs to Bishops andlirst-class cricketers. Our only quarrel with the book is that it sometimes withholds information where we particularly want it For example, Professor

Church tells us that he once went for a fishing tour with Mark Pattison. What happened on that tour, we wonder ?

We can hardly believe that it left no mark (if we may put it so) on the author's mind. Calverley is mentioned, but Professor Church does not even tell us who won the game of racquets they played together. We suppose that with Professor Church, who confesses to having reviewed forty thousand' books, condensation has become a habit; or it may be that the modesty which he more than' once repudiates after all prevented him from writing at greater length.

Still, we do wish that we knew on Professor Church's authority what Mark Pattison was like on a fishing tour. To go fishing with a man is at least as great a test, in a different way, as to go tiger-hunting with him. And 'we would have consented to be told what we wish at the cost of losing, if necessary, the pages on a College election,—for has not Mark Pattison himself given us an account of a Lincoln election written with a positively lurid cynicism ? But we must stifle our cry for more, which is, by. the way, a true compliment to the book, and indicate the good things.

Professor Church remembers the days when his father moved with his family out of London to Kentish Town for the annual summer holiday ! That simple fact suggests vast changes, and the record of them is everywhere accept- able in this book, because the author does not think we are going to the dogs, but that on the whole we are further away from the dogs than when he was a boy. As a baby he was kissed by the young Princess Victoria before she became Queen, which perhaps accounts for his gracious view of life. He writes kindly of his puritanical training and of his schooldays. We have often thought that a very puritanical early life, forbidding though it always sounds when recounted, turns out to be a very softening. thing for those who are strong enough to have the sympathy of their experi- ences. As for the author's school life at Stanmore, it was surprisingly enlightened—quite Pestalozzian.—for a period when Blimbers had their academies all over the country. But even the most puritanical days were legitimately relieved by jollity on Twelfth Day, and the author's memory yields the following anecdote about two of his cousins who were celebrating that feast in London :—

" They shared a lodging- somewhere in our neighbourhood, and a country friend sent them up a sucking pig to improve their Christmas cheer. Somehow, possibly through the abundance of London-hospitalities, they lost sight of it, till it-recalled itself to memory by appealing to another sense. What was to be done with it ? They sallied forth when the night was somewhat advanced, and dropped- it down into an area. Some two hours afterwards they were roared by a bell—a policeman wanted to speak to them: They had wrapped-it up in the paper in, which it had come, and their address was on it. What was their relief when the policeman said : If you don't want this, gentlemen, I shall be very glad to have it."

The issue of that episode has certainly the virtue of un- expectedness. Oxford has changed since Professor Church's undergraduate days almost as much as London. Those were the merry days when brains were not the only passport to academic position,—the days of which a former complacent

Fellow of All Souls is said to have exclaimed "We used to be sui generis" 1 One very curious reminiscence of Oxford is Professor Church's adventure with a prize poem :— "In 18B1, or thereabouts, some anonymous donor gave 1,000/. to the University, the interest of which was to be given every third year to the best • Poem on a Sacred Subject.' It was to be open to all' graduates, whatever their standing. I always intended Memories of Men and Books. By the Rev. Alfred John Church, )LA. With a Portrait. London: Smith, Elder, mud-Co. [Ss. 65. net.] to compete for it, but never could finish my piece. In 1870, how- ever, when the subject was • The Lake of Tiberias ' I did manage to complete my exercise, and sent it in—unluokily a month too late. The appointed day was December 1; my poem went in on December 31. /bi minis effusus labor, I thought to myself. But fifteen years afterwards the same subject was set again under the title of the Sea of Galilee.' I revised my poem, added a couple of stanzas, and won the prize. I hope it was not undeserved; but good fortune had, as I have said, much to do with it. Has snail a thing ever happened before ? "

In his first curacy Mr. Church came face to face with those conditions of the Wiltshire agricultural labourer which Richard Jefferies probably. had always in mind :—

"The average wage was nine shillings a week, with an allowance of beer. With bread at 8d. the quartern—and it was seldom less during the period 1853-56--this meant very spare living indeed. Bacon was very seldom eaten ; even tea was not for every day, water coloured with burnt bread being a common substitute for it. The chief luxury of the cottage was dripping, which was sold at the kitehen'of the great house. Coal was obtained at some- thing like half the retail price. It was bought in the summer, hauled free by the farmers, and stored in a place specially pro- vided. The.wages'were helped- out by piecework, such as turnip hoeing, and by extra work it the hay and corn harvests. Some of the women earned a little by field work. Such was the place into which I was tumbled, so to speak, some four months after I had completed my twenty-fourth year."

Writing of the magnate of this district, Professor Church says :—" It is not a bad test of a gentleman that he should give as good wine to a poor curate as to a duke." That depends, we should say, upon which of them-really appreciates the wine. From the pages which record Mr. Church's experi- ences as a master at Merchant Taylors' School we must quote the mock translation of Virgil which Dean Manse' in an after-dinner speech applied to the proposal to appoint a double Commission to consider the relations of the public schools and the Universities :—

"Ter centain regnabitur annos—qt shall be ruled for three cen- turies'; genie sub Ilium= under the Merchant Taylors' Com- pany'; donec regina sacerdos—' until the Queen's Government': Marie gravis=pressedi by, a• hostile opposition' ; geminam partu dabit Ilia prolent---` shall give birth to a double Commission.'" After leaving the Merchant Taylors' School, Mr. Church became curate to F. D. Maurice, for whom he naturally conceive& a great admiration. Experiences as Head-Master at Henley-on-Thames and at East Retford followed, and then he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College. He was Dean of Arts at University College, when he helped to secure for the College the appointment of Sir William Ramsay. The objection raised to this brilliant man of science, whose chemical researches have already ensured immortality to his name, was that he was "too much of a physicist, not enough of a pure chemist." The neatest anecdote in the book, to our mind; is that of James Martineau :— " He hadlieen set one day, at his own request, to top and tail' some gooseberries. Hewes then four years of age, and the task exhausted his childish patience. Still, he stuck to it, and his cousin overheard him murmuring to himself the lines of a hymn : 'flat which my gracious Master bore

Malt net His humble servant bear P"

Of Mrs. Wilde, who was born a Martineau, Professor Church relates that a few hours before her death she made a humorous allusion to something in Jane Austen. Her daughter failed to understand, whereupon Mrs. Wilde said to another of her daughters : " Ah ! X. never knew her Jane Austen,"—a regret, we must say, which. was. not so inappropriate to the occasion as some people might suppose.

On the subject of reviewing Professor Chitrah gives very frankly what may be called the apolegy or the confessions of an arch-reviewer. If the reader's impression of this chapter corresponds to our own, he will feel that not a single book has passed through Professor Church's hands that was not honestly submitted to proper tests, and as honestly judged by them. An explanation such as Professor Church gives disposes entirely of the charge that a book cannot be fairly criticised, even within certain limits, because not every line of it has been read. We must end with the quotation of a misprint which, though not one of the diabolically ingenious class, has none the less given us real pleasure :—

"The little yacht by the capsizing of which Shelley lost his life seems to have been the outcome of some rather crazy notions of its owner about boat building. I quoted from- Lycidas ' the lines:

'that perfidious bark Built in the eclipse, and rigged with ClInati dark:

Curses dark became the Union Jack."