The Pains of Life. By Frank Govett. (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)—This is meant for an answer to Sir John Lubbock's "Pleasures of Life." Mr. Govett is a necessitarian (" Freedom of the will is a fiction which most people of higher intelligence have dismissed from their minds "), and, in a way of his own, a pessimist. Hence Sir J. Lubbock does not please him. "The book," he says, "is well fitted to be used as a bolster to that pre- vailing form of society which is a mixture of honest incapacity, muddle-headedness, dishonest cowardice or hypocrisy, dashed with as much Bumbledom as may be ventured on." How all these things can be "a form of society," it is not easy to see. The fact is, that Mr. Govett is very much discontented with what he sees about him, and says so in a somewhat inarticulate fashion. The "poetical justice" of fiction is particularly displeasing. He counsels his readers to avoid fiction, and advises "energetic enquiry into the nature and functions of the human body." He is good enough to give us his best "hundred books" (to be accurate, there are forty). Among them we recognise with surprise the despised Lubbock, and no less than ten writers of fiction. "I have not mentioned any Greek or Latin classics, because I remember nothing they contain which is not expressed more truly, com- pletely, and congruously to the modern mind in extant tongues." But it may be there, though Mr. Govett does not remember it.
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