HERBERT BARING GARROD.*
HERBERT BARING GARROD, the subject of this volume, was best known as the general secretary of the Teachers' Guild, a post which he occupied with conspicuous energy and success for more than twenty years. The administrative aide of his office, however, by no means exhausted his activitiei, and it is the object of the present volume to construct some memorial of his labours in other and, perhaps, higher fields. Garrod was a first-rate scholar (his capacity for prize-winning earned him at school the title of " Cormorant ") and a man of fine taste and high ideals, and his work as a lecturer and editor of the Teachers' Guild- Quarterly gave him some scope for the utilization of his 'wide reading and earnest thought. Almost half of the present volume is devoted to a series of lectures on Dante, in which Mn Garrod aimed at leading his hearers through the prodigious tract of the poet's work by the moral and spiritual path. The next lecture treats Goethe's Faust from much the same standpoint, endeavouring to isolate and express its moral content. Throughout 'these very concen- trated and careful lectures the treatment is sane, lucid, and enlivened from time to time by sparks of that humour which helped to make Garrod so agreeable a companion and so effective an administrator.
The rest of the volume is occupied with the treatment of educational subjects. One of the main objects of Garrod's activities was the establishment of a satisfactory system of registration for teachers, by means of which lie hoped to raise the teaching profession to a level with the great learned professions of the law and medicine. The pro- gress of the work is traced here in lectures and articles; but, unhappily, the author did not live to- see the crown of his labours, and it is only the last few ,months that have brought his ideal within sight of accomplishment: Of greater general interest are the essays on "A Living Wage for Teachers," the Poor Law Report in its relation to educa- tion, -the old Universities, specialization, and co-education. On all these subjects Garrod showed himself possessed of a power of lucid argument and of a humane and- cultivated mind, ever ready to appreciate the merits of progressive theory, but never seduced by an unbalanced idealism into forgetfulness of the paramount value of those "institntions which owe their-complicated and often irrational development to some innate necessity transcending reason.
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