Essays on Life, Art, and Science. By Samuel Butler. Edited
by R. A. Streatfeild. (Grant Richards. 6s.)—We cannot but think that it would have been well to leave the majority of these nine essays to the oblivion into which they had naturally fallen. The humour is thin, and sometimes it is of a kind w'ich can scarcely fail to give pain to many readers. Mr. Butler as a critic had very well-defined limitations. His extraordinary theory about the authorship of the Odyssey could hardly have proceeded from one who intellectually was totus, teres at gee rotundus. In this volume he says things even more strange about Aeschylus. It is not easy to say when he is in earnest; but we hope he was not so when he wrote of Aeschylus that "his voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained." The last two essays, "Thought and Language" and "The Deadlock in Darwinism," are on a different level.
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