Another shrewd and graphic book by Mr. Dark is his
analy- sis of five Deans, Colet, Donne, Swift, Stanley, and the present Dean of St. Paul's. (Five Deans. Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.) The book aims at being something more than sound, and it has at times the peculiar quality of Mr. Lytton Strachey's work. Two facts, however, stand in the way of a really noteworthy achievement. One is Mr. Dark'S provoking penchant for Anglo-Catholic propaganda. To meet with sentences such as " He himself " (i.e., Bishop Andrewes) " said Mass in his private chapel," or " Daily Masses were said in some churches " in James Il.'s reign, may satisfy a thirst for polemic here and there, but the words jar. They are anachronistic, and therefore unliterary, and, if uttered in the ages to which they refer, would, with the full approval of the Anglican authorities of the day, have hurried Mr. Dark towards Newgate, if not Tyburn. The other objection to Mr. Dark's sketches is that they fly at too high game. It is a giant's task to appraise the lowering and mordant geniu* of Swift, and, while we agree with the general estimate of Donne's character, to describe his sermons at St. Paul's (those immense and macabre discourses which held the CitY spellbound for two hours at a time) as " practical and homely " is little short of ludicrous. The sketch of Colet is the happiest of the series, that on Dean Stanley suffers from a persistent gibing note, for Mr. Dark is not in any sympathy with his subject. We are grateful for the tender and beautiful passage with which the chapter on Dean Inge concludes. But Mr. Dark never seems to be aware that Dr. Inge is, in scholarship and the life of letters, one of the great assets of the English Church, and that London is singularlY proud of its Dean.
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