584 



The Review of Reviews. 



country the most to blame, or the Suffragette 

 question, for he was an ardent advocate of the 

 enfranchisement of women. 



Mr. Wilham Meredith gives us in a few words 

 some details of his father's birth and up-bring- 

 ing, and throughout seems to have made a most 

 judicious selection of the letters. His father's 

 correspondence with Mr. John Morley and 

 Admiral Maxse is especially interesting, the two 

 men, to both of whom he was so strongly bound 

 in brotherly affection, being so entirely different 

 the one from the other. 



Gravely funny is the letter to Mr. William 

 Hardman on his elevation to the Mayoralty of 

 Kingston-on-Thames : — 



Garrick Club, Dec. 26th, 1870. 

 My Dear Lord Mayor, — All Christmas honours and 

 delights to you ! The other day I quietly informed 

 Morley of your elevation. Looking at him (about one 

 minute subsequently) I saw him collecting his editorial 

 fragments with a hand pressed hard on his fore midriff. 

 He faintly expressed his amazement, but, as became a 

 hero, his first thought was for his friend. Morrison, 

 he said, must not swallow this unheard-of pill without 

 due preparation. It would be too much for him in his 

 sad state. We agreed to concoct a rigmarole, and write 

 an account of a Kingston pantomime-^" Tuck Trans- 

 formed " — telling him at the end of it that all was 

 true. 



Full of curious interest are his occasional 

 references to his novels, pathetic indeed the last 

 letter in the volume written to Theodore Watts 

 Dunton upon the death of Swinburne. Scarcely 

 more than a month afterwards Swinburne's 

 passing was followed by his own. 



In the poems we are given the later version of 

 the well-known " Love in the Valley," as well as 

 the first published in 1851, commencing: — 



Under yonder beech-tree standing on the green sward, 



Couch'd with her arms behind her little head, 

 Her knees folded up, and her tresses on her bosom, 



Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. 

 Had I the heart to slide one arm beneath her ! 



Press her dreaming lips as her waist I folded slow, 

 Waking on the instant she could not but embrace me — 



Ah ! would she hold me, and never let me go ? 



MR. BALFOUR AS THINKER.* 



This volume of Mr. Balfour's non-political 

 writings and speeches has been selected and 

 arranged by Mr. Wilfrid Short, his private 

 secretary for many years. Mr. Balfour himself 

 has had nothing to do with the matter beyond 

 giving his consent and helping with material. 

 It is a severe test to put to any man to collect 

 matter spoken extempore or from rough notes, 

 and it therefore largely owed its acceptation to 

 the manner and method of the speaker. We 



* Arthur James Balfour as Philosopher and 

 Thinker. By W. M. Short. (Longmans and 

 Co. 7s. 6d. net.) 



have here, however, a volume of enduring in- 

 terest, and which will only increase our admira- 

 tion for a man whose many-sided character 

 shows best when away from the turmoil of party 

 strife. 



Space will not permit even a catalogue of the 

 contents of a volume consisting of some 550 

 pages, prefaced by one of Russell's fine photo- 

 graphs of Mr. Balfour. One quotation we should 

 like to put on record. It is taken from a speech 

 to the Pan-Anglican Congress of June, 1908 : — 



The issue I wish to put before you is this. Has the 

 growth of science or has it not made it easier to believe 

 that the world had a rational and benevolent Creator, 

 or has it rendered that belief entirely superfluous — to 

 be added, if you please, by the theist or the deist, but 

 an addition in any case superfluous and wholly un- 

 founded upon any rational or philosophic ground? 



For my own part I cannot conceive human society 

 permanently deprived of the religious element; and, 

 on the o^her hand, I look to science far more than to 

 the work of statesmen or to the creation of constitu- 

 tions, or to the elaboration of social systems, or to the 

 study of sociology. I look to science more than any- 

 thing else as the great ameliorator of the human lot in 

 the future. 



FREDERIC HARRISON ON HIS 



BOOKS.* 



Mr. Frederic Harrison's literary interests 

 are extraordinarily wide. In addition to his 

 recent articles in the English Review on classic 

 poetry, prose, biography, drama, and general 

 literature, which created such widespread in- 

 terest, and of which we welcome a reprint, his 

 new volume of essays contains deeply interesting 

 chapters on such diverse themes as the Byzan- 

 tine Empire, Chatham, Tennyson, Ruskin, and 

 Rodin; and on all these subjects he has some- 

 thing to say at once illuminating and provoca- 

 tive of thought. Though he protests that the 

 varied interests of a very busy life have pre- 

 vented him from being a great reader, most men 

 would be proud to have merely a bowing 

 acquaintance with one-half of the books of which 

 he writes so intimately and so well. To his ripe 

 scholarship and sane critical judgment are united 

 the keen youthful enthusiasm and the clear, 

 simple style which have long made his books 

 things to read and treasure. Mr. Harrison's 

 sympathies are with the old books : " As an old 

 man," he writes, *' I stand by the old books, 

 the old classics, the old style." So in the 

 greater part of this volume he ranges at large 

 through the centuries, from Sophocles to Swin- 

 burne, as a book-lover roams up and down his 

 shelves, dipping lovingly here and there into old 

 favourites. 



* Among My Books. By Frederic Harrison. 

 (Macmillan. 438 pp. 7s. 6d.) 



