A Young Scholar's Letters. Edited by D. 0. Kellogg. (G.
P. Putnam's Sons.)—We do not think that the memory of Mr Byron Caldwell Smith, whose letters written from Europe to his mother in America form the substance of this volume, has been entirely well served by his friend and editor. Much in the letters is worth preserving ; something might have been advan- tageously retrenched. Letters not written for publication are surely fit subjects for an editor's prudent excisions. A. lad not yet twenty-one is somewhat absurd ".'hen he writes, "Hegel has already taken his place in the ranks of things that were." Nor are we prepossessed by a highly aggressive defence, if the phrase may be allowed, of certain English poems, a defence which the author himself would hardly now endorse. We are prepared to allow that the young man who could express himself with such vigour, who had manifestly thought and read much, and had devoted himself with a single mind to laborious study, " took by willing consent a commanding position in the scholastic and social community of Lawrence." (Lawrence, we may explain for the benefit of British ignorance, is the University of Kansas). But why so magniloquent Si description as "It was the silent rising of Sirius into the Empyrean " ? Mr. Smith seems to have been dispossessed of his Professorship of Greek. "When another man took his duty while he was in quest of health, his adversaries were able to confine the substitute in his room and end his connection with the University." This is a very strange story. At Oxford, certainly, it would not happen, even though that University, as an eminent Nonconformist member of it assured an American audience, never feels a breath of free thought.
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