23 MAY 1908, Page 23

Parerga. By Canon Sheehan, D.D. (Longmans and Co. 7s. 6d.

net.)—Dr. Sheehan gives us here, arranged under the headings of the four seasons, some four hundred meditations or refleetions. Some of these stand single ; in some a theme is carried on. These themes are of all kinds, literary, metaphysical, tofiching on practical life. Our author has the courage of his opinions. In " Winter," for instance, Sections XXXI.-LIV. are de;toted to a criticisin, not unfrequently depreciatory, of Shake- speare. (He writes to the same effect elsewhere.) " I cannot, strive as I may, take much delight in Shakespeare. I suppose it is the Celtic temperament." Will his brother Celts be pleased ? we wonder. As we read we do not feel so much surprise as at first. " Will the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy," he asks, " ever be settled?" We should have thought it had been settled long ago, at least among rational people. But no "the arguments," says Dr. Sheehan, " on both sides seem overwhelming" ! He has his own • theory, which is even an improvement on that started by Miss Delia Baeon. "I find no difficulty in imagining a Bacon, or a Raleigh, or lesser souls, amusing themselves in the leisure of high political intrigues, in watching the progress of a London play; and sometimes furtively bringing down to the green room of the theatre, a manuscript, composed in the intervals of business, and asking that young man, William Shakespeare, to put it before the public in his own name." Bacon, say, brings down Hamlet, Raleigh Macbeth, and some "lesser soul" some trifle, such as Julius Caesar, or King Lear, or As You Like It, or The Tempest.

What a world of genius London must have been for the last decade of the sixteenth and the first decade of the seventeenth centuries ! We see that Dr. Sheehan puts among " tremendous metaphors, forced conceits, and antitheses,"

horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air"

(though he allows it to be a fine line). They were " peculiarities of the age." Was Psalm xviii., with the famous " He did fly upon the wings of the wind," written in Shakespeare's time? And surely the criticism that to say the tide once a day covets the shore is a blunder is a little strained. There are days of twelte hours, more or less, and days of twenty-four; " once " belongs to the one, and "twice" to the other. But Dr. Sheehan is net at his best in literary matters. In meditations on Nature and in certain aspects of human life he is more to be admired. Does he seriously think that when a doctor expresses his wonder at the mystery of pain he is going ultra crepidam ? He must leave Mete things to the theologian !