Memoirs of Celebrated Etonians. By J. Homage Jesse. 2 vols.
(Bentley.)—This book will doubtless have, and in a sense deserves to have, a certain success. Old Etonians will be glad to have in a con- venient and shapely form the biographies of men who have made their school famous, and old Etonians form a large and, what is equally im- portant, a wealthy public. But the book has very little to do with Eton, beyond the fact that the statesmen, divines, soldiers, &c., whose memoirs are included in these two volumes, were once there. Often we are merely told that the subject of the memoir was sent to Eton, and passed thence to the University or into public life. It is rare to find any detail about school exploits, school places, &c. Very often, doubt- less, there was but little that could be said. Yet the mere record of the passage from one form to another would be worth something. It would be interesting to find tho future scholar rising half after half ; the future man of action, perhaps, obstinately standing still, just as the records of Merchant Taylors' describe Clive as sticking obstinately to the fourth form. We presume that the books of Eton could give the information. And there are other authorities which might be consulted. We feel convinced that research might have brought out the strictly Etonian or school element more prominently in these volumes. We can find memoirs at least as good elsewhere of the political and military careers of such men as Lord Chatham, George Grenville, the Earl of Bute, Horace Walpole, and Lord Cornwallis. What we want to hear about is their school-days, if there is anything to tell. In some cases there certainly is, and if Mr. Jesse had excluded some of his " celebrated " Etonians, whom no one has ever heard of, and some of whom we can easily hear elsewhere, and given us a sketch of Canning and his contemporaries at school, we should have been more obliged to him than we can in candour at present own ourselves to be. We notice a curious fact, which shows how different the Eton of the last century was from the Eton of to-day. Home Tooke was the son of a poulterer, who brought up another son to be a fishmonger, and a third to be a market- gardener.
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