FARRAR'S JULIAN ROM E.

" JULIAN HOME" is a companion volume to Eric. It aims "at giving a faithful picture of certain aspects of an undergraduate's career," as the earlier storT, aspired to " pourtray the life and temp-

tations of a boy at school. It is a tale of college life, written with certain prepossessions, and with a definite moral purpose. It is also a class-work : it has something clique-y in its tone ; it gives us types of character, rather than the flesh and blood em- bodiments of genuine humanity. Much of this abstraction and limitation is attributable to the author's point of view ; to his choice of scene, circumstance, and dramatis personte. No doubt a high genius for fiction can give a world-wide interest to college tutors, invest with individuality the representatives of University erudition and propriety, and exhibit with vivid peculiarities the ideal of the quiet and hard-reading or the fast and book-detesting undergraduate. The power of creating and intensifying life wheh the materials are trite and commonplace, is not, however, the privilege of average talent, however cultivated and accom- plished.

Julian Home is the production of a refined and scholarly mind. It is excellently written. Its diction would perhaps be improved if it were more careless : we do not mean more slovenly, but less ornate. Its moral tone is high and noble. Sympathy with honest manly endeavour, chivalrous aspiration, and purity of con- duct, with hatred for the mean and wicked in thought and act, are distinctive of the book. The piety which it advocates is one of practical earnestness, steady, but not formal church-going, and generous love ever ready to translate itself into action. Such a tale might find many a youth who flies a sermon and impress its fine teaching on his mind, if mere didactic utterance could except in rare instances, save any of us in our nonage from the fatal necessity of learning how to correct our errors, under the tuition and discipline of the severest and most expensive of schoolmasters —experience. Mr. Farrar's pattern youth is Julian Home, who has the honour of giving his name to the book. He is first introduced on speech_ day at Horton' evidently Harrow, where he wins golden opinions, obtains a scholarship, and whence he proceeds to St. Werner's College, Camford, the true name of the University being also transparent under this pseudonym. Julian is high-spirited and courageous, morally as well as physically courageous. He is poor, and strong-hearted enough to enter College as a Sizar, and so ex- pose himself to the taunt of dining on the Fellows' leavings. A clever, diligent, exemplary, and high-minded student, he achieves the highest academical honours, resists the numerous temptations of a college life, takes orders, and marries—" a happy and a con- tented man." The vain shallow, handsome Bruce, one of his old schoolfellows, accompanies him to College. He is idle, reckless, and dissipated, without convictions or principles. He seems to be aof a class of men less common twenty years ago than it probably is now, though even then not without its " representa- tives." " Error in itself," says Mr. Farrar, "is not fatal to the inner sense of right ; but Bruce's error was not honest doubt." Accordingly, Bruce proposes "to try the experiment of a saint's peccability on some living subject ; " inveighs against the mar- riage theory, and quotes the titles of various heretical German books of ill renown, not one word of whose contents he has ever read ; in fact, Bruce is the show-infidel of the dramatic exhibi- tion. Of course we all guess the end he comes to ? Not so exactly as we think, perhaps. His college career, it is true, is an utter failure. But though "the old book of his life is smutehed and begrimed, torn, dog's-eared and scrawled," be still thinks it worth while to turn over a new leaf, and, assisted by his old co- mates, settles in New Zealand, with a fair prospect of success and amendment.

Next to Bruce we must mention the particular friend of Julian Home, the brave, brilliant, erring Kennedy, a Marlbeian, trusting "in his own high principle, his own generous impulses, his own unstained honour," only to find them "snap under him in the hour of trial." Kennedy's first great fault—the almost accidental but clandestine and unacknowledged perusal of an examination paper, which he afterwards turns to account, is described as a kind of

offence "so common to mean men, that unless it were discovered, It would not trouble their recollections with a feather's weight of remorse," while the stately soul of Kennedy suffers the deepest abasement, for "it is the white scuteheon on which the dark stain seems to wear its darkest hue." Kennedy's painful secret is dis- covered by Brogten, also a Hartonian, who uses it with a subtle and fiendlike ingenuity, which helps to draw our radiant delin- quent more and more closely into the meshes of sin and dishonour.

• Julian Ilatne ; a Tale of College Life. By Frederic W. Farrar, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Ike. Published by Adam and Charles Black.

Brogten is not a pleasing variety of human nature. Yet, ill-con- ditkoned lad as he is, there is some spark of the divine particle even in him ; and he too learns the lesson " that for him who has sinned and suffered repentance is the work of life." The same lesson, too, is got by heart in a case almost as hopeless as Brogten's. Hazlet is a weak, self-deceived, pietistic pedant, a member of the Philadephus Society; addicted to "tea and hassocks," and who, when treacherously inebriated by his friend, Mr. Bruce, addresses his fellow bacchanals, to their great amusement, as "My Christian friends." Hazlet was not educated at Harton. A neighbour, Mr. Home, who no doubt here expresses Mr. Farrar's own opinion, could not persuade Mrs. Hazlet that the education of a public school is a far sounder preparation than the shelter of a home. With no wider experience than that allowed under the maternal

roof, Hazlet joins our Hartonians at Camford, where he "carries

his chin in the air like an acted representation of I am holier than thou," inquires after Julian's immortal soul as if "souls were liable to stomach aches," objects to his friend's favourite pictures, in particular to one of "this young, young person," the St. Mary of Egypt ! "veiled in the long night of her dark hair," and the Virgin Mother of Fra Angelico. The former he pronounces not quite a modest picture ; the latter is quite papistieal, and calcu- lated to produce dangerous results "on the perhaps unregenerate mind of your bedmaker, for instance." Hazlet, we find in the sequel, after a course of sanctimonious dissipation, gets plucked for his "smalls," takes it into his stupid head to go out of his very little mind (a procedure, by the way, of which no man, however shamefully denuded of his intellectual plumes, ever furnished an example in the day when we walked by the banks of the "reedy Cam "), and finally becomes "reformed and sin- cere." In addition to these "dramatis perscnte " we shall men- tion only among the men the somewhat shadowy character of the sweet-natured, morally brave, and loyal gentleman, Lord de Vayne.

The academic life has its monotony relieved by an occasional run up to Town, or a glimpse at the country ; and term-time is followed, in one instance, by a pleasant tour in the "long," in which Violet and Eva, "bright creatures of the clement," live in the colours of the rainbow, Fancy, for two of our Alpine travellers, and not without purpose, "play in the plighted clouds" of their various life. Among the incidents of the story-, we may number a "screwing in "—which we think just possible ; a rescue from drowning to which we only object because the pur- pose of the fiction seems to require it ; an unintentional poisoning, which we are inclined to think clumsily managed ; the employ- ment, more than once, of the natural-supernatural ; and a some- what melodramatic adventure—a "Night of Terror," in which one of our heroes is happy enough, it would seem, to save from death one of the lovely constituents of the faery vision, which we passed above.

Such are the materials out of which Mr. Farrar weaves a moral tale of some interest and beauty. It will probably have been inferred that University life is de- scribed as a sort of ordeal. Such it is, and in our opinion a most trying ordeal, not merely to men of the Brogten and Hazlet stamp, men of villainous low foreheads, but to men of more than average ability, fine social tendency, or even, like Kennedy, of accomplish- ment, intellect, and generous aspiring nature. How comes it that such men are led the downward. way ? Mr. Farrar thinks that home-education is ineffective. It may be so ; but we are quite sure that a week at school suffices to open up a dangerous vista of impurity to many a youthful mind. A certain prudence and wide- awakeness may characterize the public-school undergraduate. He knows better how to take care of himself than the youth fresh from his mother's apron-string, but that he is really more virtuous than the latter we are disposed utterly to deny. Men ehristianly brought up, men of a sceptical disposition, men of talent, and men of no talent, seem alike to go on the broad flowery road, as it were, under the influence of the sorcery of circumstance. We indicate the evil ; we leave others to furnish an explanation and a remedy. Only we would hope that the old theory of "the worse the sinner the better the saint," may be soon and for ever exploded.

"Oh, if we held the doctrine sound, For life, outliving heats of youth, Yet who would preach it as a truth a To those that eddy round and round."

After sad transformations and grievous wallowing in the "honey-mud" of that brutish life, the degenerate companions of the divine Ulysses do recover their old shape, put off the swine, resume the man, and escape from the stye of Circe. They learn wisdom in the school of life, and become, in after days, useful, excellent, it may be even heroic or saintly men. Pity only that they have to pay so heavy a bill to that old and severe school- master whose terms are so high ! Mr. Farrar shows us all his peccant undergraduates reformed, or on the way to reform. We think the moral sound. The surest and indeea the only way to encourage amendment in the wrong-doer, is to give him, what a large-hearted divine of the English Church thinks God may have given the Canaanites, in a future life,—one chance more—for- giveness for the past, and hope with conditional aid for the future. Even saints and heroes err as well as frailer men. In- deed the sins of genius—of David, of Coleridge, of Byron—is a subject so well handled in Mr. Farrar's tale, that as a rebuke to censorious intolerance, we will overhear a fragment of the con- versation in which the topic is discussed : "Mr. Admer, who was one of the circle, chuckled inwardly at the dis- cussion. I was once, he said, at a party where a lady sang one of Byron's

Hebrew melodies. At the close of it a young clergyman sighed deeply, and with an air of intense self-satisfaction observed, " Ah, I was wondering where poor Byron is flow!" What would you have said to all that.' Detesting Byron's personal character, I should have said that the very wonder was a piece of idle and meddling presumption,' said Owen. "'And I should have answered that the Judge will do right,' said Suton, " reverently. " Or, if he wanted a text, who art thou that judgest another?' said Lillystone, contemptuously. "'And I, said Julian, should have said,— " Let feeble hands iniquitously just Rake up the relics of the sinful dust. Let Ignorance mock the pang it cannot heal,

And Malice brand what Mercy would conceal—

It matters not.'

"'And I', said Kennedy should have been vehemently inclined to tweak the man's nose.'

"'But what did you say, Mr. Admer,' asked Lillystone. " I answered a fool according to his folly. I threw up my arms and said, Ah, where indeed ! what a good thing it is that you and I, sir, are not as that publican.'"