Memoir of John Niche/. By Professor Knight (Maclehose and Sons,
Glasgow.)—Professor Nichol cannot be said to have left a distinguished mark in literature. He did well what he under- took to do, but he did little to justify to the world the very high estimate formed of him by his friends. And his friends were far from being incompetent judges. Mr. Swinburne and the late Master of Balliol discerned in him qualities of the highest order ; eo did Professor Dicey, and, indeed, on every man of his acquaint- ance endowed with intellectual ardour, his sympathetic and richly gifted nature acted like an inspiration. He seems, too, to have developed all that was best and most loveable in the friends who rallied round him, and when Nichol failed to win the chair of Logic and Rhetoric at Oxford—which was not his only disappointment of the kind—Jowett wrote to him with a warmth and tenderness of sympathy which may seem to some readers a new feature in his character. At one time Nichol declared that he hated Oxford, which was probably a passing feeling due to his contempt of the competitive system, for in Oxford he gained some of his best friends and found a scope for the philosophical pur- suits which were dearer to him than English literature, to the chair of which he was elected in Glasgow at 1862. Later on he loved Oxford well, as his biographer acknowledges, and wished to return to its " semi-mediteval quiet ;" yet, while admitting the loneliness of a Scottish professor of his type, Professor Knight considers that the post at Glasgow was a happier one for his friend. He did not always think so himself, and, failing for the second time to obtain an Oxford chair felt the disappointment acutely. A highly irritable, if not a suspicious, temperament was one of the troubles of his life. "His nerves," a friend writes, "were all, as it were, exposed," and at one time he was under the impression, which Mr. Knight does not consider groundless, that his books were "criticised before they were read," and that in London there was a special " cabal " against him. "It grieves me," Jewett writes, "that you should think the world to be in a con-
spiracy against you. Indeed they are not I really fear that this restless feeling will interfere with your success in literature." It was only over trifles that he fretted, the great trials of life were met, we are told, with courageous manfulness. Professor Knight has performed his task with the appreciation of a friend, and the charm of the book is greatly increased by Nichols's own story of his early years. This beautiful family picture forms the choicest chapter of a volume which is full of interest throughout.
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