LITERARY NOTICES. 



701 



strnction withont a test -book. This 

 looks fair, but it is deUisive. The method 

 does not remove the book that the pupil 

 may come at the phenomena, but it re- 

 moves the book that the teacher may 

 take its place. Oral teaching is class 

 instruction, in which information is im- 

 parted in a familiar manner, with the 

 view of awakening the interest of the 

 class. But, so far as real science is con- 

 cerned, it is doubtful if this method is 

 not worse than the one it replaces. , . . 

 The value of educational systems con- 

 sists simply in what they do to incite 

 the pupil to help himself. Mechanical 

 school- work can give instruction, but it 

 can not develop faculty, because this 

 depends upon self-exertion. Science, if 

 rightly pursued, is the most valuable 

 school of self-instruction. From the be- 

 ginning, men of science have been self- 

 dependent and self-reliant because self- 

 taught ; and it is a question whether 

 they have been most hindered or helped 

 by the schools." 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies. By 

 Walter Besant. New York: Long- 

 mans, Green & Co. Pp. 384. Price, $2. 

 The name of the subject of this book 

 may not be familiar to all the readers of the 

 " Monthly." An insight of the quality of 

 the man may, however, be given by the fact 

 that Mr. Besant started to write his life with- 

 out ever having seen him, and ended by call- 

 ing the biography a eulogy. Mr. JefPeries 

 was born in 1848, and died in 1886, only 

 thirty-eight years old, and in only ten of 

 those years did he do work suitable to his 

 powers and fitted to bring him recognition ; 

 but the work of those ten years has given 

 hira a place among students of Nature and 

 masters of English writing alongside of Gil- 

 bert White and Thoreau. We doubt if he 

 has ever had a rival as an accurate describer 

 of Nature in her various aspects and minute 

 details, who could at the same time com- 

 mand the sympathies of the reader in what 

 almost runs into " cataloguing." His early 

 surroundings and training were most favor- 

 able to the cultivation of those habits of 



close observation which he brought into play 

 in his later writings, and it was his misfor- 

 tune that he spent so many of his few years 

 in vain efforts to do what he was not fitted 

 for. Mr. Jefferies was born, being de- 

 scended from a long line of independent 

 farmers, at the farm-house of Coate, near 

 Swindon, in Wiltshire, in a country of downs 

 and abounding in ancient monuments. Of 

 the territory around the old house he knew 

 " every inch of ground, every tree, every 

 hedge," and the land of it which lies within 

 a circle of ten miles radius " belongs to his 

 writings," The family " seem to have inher- 

 ited, from father to son, a love of solitude and 

 a habit of thinking for themselves." Rich- 

 ard's father, who is drawn in his books as 

 Farmer Iden, and a man of this sort, " took 

 him into the fields and turned over page 

 after page with him of the book of Nature, 

 expounding, teaching, showing him how to 

 use his eyes, and continually reading to him 

 out of that gi'eat book." He early showed 

 an inclination to literature, and the position 

 as reporter on two or three of the local 

 newspapers enabled him to make a kind of 

 a living while he tried to write novels, work 

 for which he had none of the essential quali- 

 fications. The account of his life for sev- 

 eral years is a record of ambitious attempts, 

 high hopes, and bitter disappointments, as 

 story after story was submitted to publish- 

 ers and refused. His first success came in 

 1872. The relations of the farmer with the 

 agricultural laborer had become a living 

 question, and Jefferies, feeling that he knew 

 all about the subject, wrote a long letter 

 upon it, which was published in the " Times," 

 with an accompanying " leader," and was an- 

 swered and commented upon in other jour- 

 nals. In the next year he published an arti- 

 cle in " Eraser's Magazine " on " The Future 

 of the Farmer," and that attracted attention. 

 It was followed by two other papers of simi- 

 lar character; and in 1S76, Jefferies, having 

 discovered his true field, began that series of 

 papers which, afterward published in books, 

 bid fair to give him a permanent place 

 among the most famous descriptive writers 

 of rural nature and of animal and plant life. 

 The first book, " The Gamekeeper at Home," 

 secured him recognition at once, and brought 

 proposals from publishers. Among others, 

 Mr. Longmans invited him to write a book 



