THE AMATEUR SPIRIT.
The Amateur Spirit. By Bliss Perry. (Gay and Bird. 6s. net.) .--The six essays in this volume are very pleasing examples of what American writers can do in this branch of literature. The art of the essay flourishes better, as we have said more than once, on the other side of the Atlantic. We may leave aside the first and second, "The Amateur Spirit" and "Indifferentism," not because they are inferior, but because it would take too long to appreciate them. "The Life of a College Professor " and "College Professors and the Public" are nearly related, and have as close an application here as in the States. We, too, have now and then such recluses as Evangelinns Apostolides Sophocles, Greek tutor at Harvard from 1842 to 1878, and never seen, so to speak, outside his rooms during that time. We have also our " minority man of the academia species, who mistakes for the Divine clarion what is merely a tin trumpet hanging on the wall of his private study." Possibly he is loss frequently here an academic because we have a larger leisured class outside College precincts. Still, we know the variety, the man of whom you may safely predict that he is teetotal, "passive resister," anti-vaccina- tionist, Pro-Boor,----all defensible positions, but not simultaneously occupied except by the "minority crank." "Hawthorne at North Adams " is a lively sketch of the literary order. To some readers the last essay, "Fishing with a Worm," will prove most attractive. It may be, as one of Mr. Perry's friends suggests, an allegory, but he need not go beyond its "first intention" to find a delight in it, especially if fishing with fly or worm is one of the things of which one is constrained to say : " Singula de nobis anti praedantur euntes."
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