School, College, and Character. By Le Baron Russell Briggs. (Houghton
and Co., Boston and New York. 4s. net.)—Mr. Briggs dates his preface from "Cambridge, Mass." These five essays have, therefore, an immediate bearing on the American aspect of the subjects with which they deal. This does not hinder them from being full of wise and weighty suggestions for English readers. The careless, the fussy, the suspicious parent is pretty well known on both sides of the Atlantic ; so is the idle, the weak, the good-for-nothing youth ; so also, but happily rare and becoming rarer yet, is the indifferent educator. These characters, and their opposites, a converee of the "moral virtues and their contrary virtues," to quote the old heading of the Book of Proverbs, form the subject of the first essay, "Fathers, Mothers, and Freshmen." In the second we have "Some Old- fashioned Doubts about New-fashioned Education," which will appeal to the conservatism still latent in the hearts of many old schoolmasters. The third deals with the delicate subject of "College Honor." There is in this a noteworthy observation,— " a discussion of athletics at one college frequently shows an almost complete want of confidence in the honesty of athletics at another." We have no wish to be self-righteous, but we feel sure that this could not be said of this country. The dispute a few years ago at the Oxford and Cambridge cricket match about the deliberate bowling of wides caused an exceptional stir, because it seemed to suggest a wholly strange phenomenon of foul play. The present writer, whose knowledge of Transatlantic sport is wholly literary, was unpleasantly affected by reading in an American tale of a "tout," as we should call him here, observing the practising of a rival crew from a hiding-place. No one would dream of such a thing here when everything is publicly reported. This book is well worth reading.
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