JOHN HLTNGERFORD POLLEN.*
• John Hungerford Pollen, 18204902. By Anne Pollen. With Portraits and Illustrations. London : John Murray. [158. net.]
THIS Life of John Hungerford Pollen will revive and keep in memory the name of a very able and attractive man, whose varied activities in the worlds of religion, politics, and art ended about ten years ago. It is not surprising that his family and friends should have wished for such a memorial, and his daughter's work, a labour of love undertaken in a spirit of most loyal affection, has been carried out with marked literary skill. Several excellent portraits, well repro-
I duced, do justice to Mr. Pollen's fine features with their expression of mingled earnestness and sweetness, and the charming decorative work of his later years is illustrated by plates, some in colour, and working drawings, which should interest every student of architecture- and its companion arts.
Circumstances combined to involve John Pollen in several of the important movements of the nineteenth century. He went to Oxford in 1838, when Newman's influence was at its height there ; and though the impressions then made only reached their full consequence fourteen years later they de- termined the bent of his mind and his friendships. As a Fellow of Merton, his friends were among the most distin- guished men the University produced—most of them earnest Churchmen ardently committed to the Tractarian Movement. In 1847, when that famous church was already in difficulties, John Pollen took charge for a time of St. Saviour's. Leeds ; and he kept up his interest in the parish, working there with courageous devotion through an epidemic of cholera, almost up to the excited and troublous days that followed the Gorham Judgment, when the clergy and workers of that church went over in a body to Rome. More than a year later John Pollen followed them.
He now retired into lay communion, married, and took up work on those artistic lines to which his genius and character specially attracted him. Churches both in England and Ireland bear witness to his taste and practical ability. As architect and decorator be found employment in many great houses, his best known work, perhaps, being the very remark- able Bird and Serpent ceiling at Blickling Hall. He became a friend and fellow-worker of Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and the rest of the pre-Raphaelite group. Through the. influence of Thackeray be was appointed Assistant-Keeper of the South Kensington Museum, which owed to him many of its choicest treasures ; for there never was a keener collector of rare and beautiful things or a more unerring judge of their value. Of his talent shown in these ways his daughter gives several striking instances.
Politics absorbed Mr. Pollen more as he advanced in years. Partly influenced, no doubt, by his religion, he was an ardent Home Ruler. A faithful follower of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Ripon appears to have been his ideal statesman as well as his best friend. For some time he acted as Lord Ripon's private secretary. Much more might be added in the review of a career so varied, yet always and consistently on so high a plane. Enough has been said, we think, to attract readers to a singularly taking biography.
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