DR. FURNIVALL.* 'THE late Dr. Furnivall was a great "character,"

and this brief !biography with its collection of appreciations by Furnivall's friends is a tribute to the human man rather than to the man -of letters. On Furnivall's seventy-fifth birthday his friends published a miscellany in his honour ; now they inscribe a ;book to his memory, and the number of contributors is much ?larger than before. The proceeds of this last volume are to :go to the Furnivall Sculling Club at Hammersmith, and no 'one who ever made friends or fought with Furnivall—plenty -of people did both—will dispute that a club connected with the river is the proper recipient of the profits. The Thames was Furnivall's passion. He organized a sculling club in which men and women met to row and picnic -and dance and sing; and for years they all submitted dutifully to the autocratic-democratic rule of Furnivall.

The greater part of its members acknowledged that it was Furnivall who had found for them the joy of the river which they never would have discovered for themselves. There must be thousands of persons along the riverside between Hammer- -smith and Richmond who were accustomed for years jocularly to hail "the Doctor " (as he sculled in a pair or four, or perhaps steered an eight, his white locks waving in 'the wind), yet never knew that "the Doctor" was a -distinguished man of letters. Furnivall was young all his 'life. When he was well into his eighties and was given only six months to live, he still had the enthusiasms of a boy. He possessed all his life an extraordinary combination of the power to serve others at no matter what sacrifice to himself, and the power to provoke others for no matter what insignificant cause. This wan was, indeed, a " character "—an amalgam of generosity and of indiscretion for which he had a profound tempera. mental faculty. A variety of attempts, several of them by distinguished men, to explain his personality ought to be interesting, and they certainly are interesting.

Furnivall's interest in sculling and rowing began when he was at Cambridge. In 1845 he conceived the idea of building -a boat with longer outriggers than had been used before.

"He therefore, with his friend, Jack Beesley of John's, hired a -coal-shed behind St. John's College, and set about making Beesley's craft of 15 or 16 inches, and his 12-inch wager-boat, the narrowest boat then on the river. Newell, who was to race Clasper in 1846, asked the loan of this, and would have sculled in it had not the jealousy of the London watermen intervened. They built Newell a boat on the lines of Furnivall's, and in it he gave Clasper his only beating in the course of his long racing career, on January 18, 1846."

One very curious fact about Furnivall's rowing career is that though be spent nearly all his leisure in cranky craft and

often upset be never learnt to swim. In 1848 he was intro- duced by his friend J. M. Ludlow to a world of drink, disease. and hunger of which he had scarcely suspected the existence. The result of this revelation was the founding of the Little Ormond Yard School. A room was hired and furnished, and Furnivall and a few friends paid the rent and taught children

there in the evenings. Furnivall's father, a country doctor, was displeased at this method of spending part of an allow- ance intended for legal studies, and wrote to his son :- " We can all easily be liberal and generous with other people's money. .. . . With ragged Schools, Socialism, or any other ism,

you have really no business at all. . . Lawism, not Socialism, • Scheolism, or any other ism, ought to be your End and Aim, your Duty, your Pleasure, and Pursuit. Don't play at Law and work at School teaching. . . ."

But Furnivall was now launched on a career of founding—the -founding not only of teaching societies but of literary societies —and nothing could stop him. He founded societies as easily as a flash financier floats companies.

Soon after the founding of the Little Ormond Yard School he came into touch with F. D. Maurice, and became a colleague of Maurice's in directing the Working Men's College. But he was not a man to accept and carry out other men's ideas. He grafted a system of Sunday excursions on to the practices of the College and fell foul of Maurice. This was not alone in causing unpleasantness with the Council of the College; Yurnivall insisted that feinale society should be an essential

• Frederick James Purnivall a volume of Personal Record. London : Henry .irowds. Ds. 8d. net .l part of the life of the College Maurice was- not intolerant of ideas, but he -perhaps could not disregard the fact that

Furnivall's unconventional reading of . Christianity, devout Christian though Furnivall was for many years, happened to be giving way to the unorthodoxy which ended in agnosticism. . . , • A curious fact in Furnivall's life, comparable with his -failure to learn to swim, was that, deeply interested though he was in language and the origins of languages, he only once in his life went abroad. That was in 1858, when he took a party of working men to France. In 1859 the Volunteer movement began as a response to the demonstration of Toulon, and . Furnivall, who was still teaching grammar at the Working - Men's College, joined the college corps and later became company commander. A member of the corps bad fought as a sergeant in the Crimea. Furnivall could worship a hero with any man, and wrote of this sergeant :—" We always cut and buttered his bread at tea, and paid for it, and would any of us have blacked his boots with pleasure."

Furnivall became secretary of the Philological Society, and in connexion with it had the honour of assisting in the great work of the New English _Dictionary. Furnivall's idea for this great book outran those of many of his co-workers, who

proposed only a supplement to older dictionaries, yet he quite under-estimated the amount of research that would be necessary. As to this, however, there is a strange conflict of evidence between Professor Walter W. Skeat and Sir James Murray, the .present editor of the Dictionary. Mr. Skeet says :-

"It is probable that many are entirely. unaware of the great services rendered to English literature and the study of the English language by the late Dr. Furnivall, particularly with re- gard to the famous New English Dictionary now being printed at Oxford. It is, of course, true that it owes very much to its first and original editor, namely Dr. Murray ; but it must not be for- gotten that Dr. FUrnivall's share in it was even of superior importance, because if it had-not been for the exertions of the latter there would not have been sufficient material for the former to work upon. It is expressly noted on each-title-page of the, Dictionary that it is founded on the materials collected by the Philological Society; and it is only just that the exact meaning of that phrase should be rightly 'understood."

Sir James Murray says :—

" But I am sure that he [Furnivall ] greatly under-estimated the preparatOry work that had first to be done, in order to carry out the scheme. I have in my scriptorium a small block of fifty-four pigeon-holes which formed his repository for quotation slips, and which is capable at the most of holding 100,000 quotations ; and I have heard Dr. Furnivall say that Coleridge thought that, when he had these filled, it would be time to begin to make the Diction-' ary. The quotations now accumulated would fill some 2,500 similar pigeon-holes and number some five or six millions, of which more than a million and a quarter -will be printed in the Oxford Dictionary. But in 1560 the study of English had hardly begun ; materials for it were still to a great extent inaccessible.'

In this conflict of testimony we feel bound to accept the judg- ment of Sir James Murray. We do not know whether there is

a list in existence of all the societies and clubs which Furnivall founded, but we must not fail to pay our own tribute to the great usefulness of the Early. English Text Society and the Chaucer Society. Among the others the Browning Society and the Shelley Society may be mentioned. The New Shakespeare ,Society gathered

together an elect band of Shakespearean scholars, among whom were Sir Sidney Lee and Professor Dowden. Mr. Munro,

the author of the short biography in this book, does not attempt to justify the offensive violence of Furnivall's attacks on Swinburne in connexion with the New. Shakespeare Society. Mr. Munro calls the episode the most unhappy in Furnivall's public career :—" One would wish it had never been, but there it is, significant and revealini." Furnivall was a reinarkable example of the type of hard-hitting men who are genuinely surprised to find that anyone is hurt.