LECTURES OF A CERTAIN PROFESSOR.* Tins is a very difficult

book to criticise ; it is almost at the- same moment good and bad, thoughtful and twaddly, liberal" and narrow-minded, eloquent and,—the reverse. Perhaps the best way will be to think for a moment what a volume of occa- sional essays should be, and then to let this work, as far as possible, speak (by quotations) for itself.

With the permission, then, of our readers, we will dogmatise a little on this subject of essay-writing, premising that the species of essay which we are going to consider is that of Lamb,—the essay, in short, chatty, discursive, and suggestive, rather than learned, ponderous, and prosy. When a professor comes before us in this guise of a light essayist, under what circumstances should we give him a welcome hearing?

Well, the first requisite, it seems to us, will be that the gentleman is what he pretends to be,—that Le does not lay a trap either to " catch a sunbeam," or any grosser matter ; that he does not stop us to ask the way, or give a " Good-day," and end by picking our pockets, or buttonholing us for a sermon- A slight requisite, this, no doubt our readers think, and yet how vitally necessary; for what can be more unfair than to lead us by unexpected and obscure paths into some bog of miry common-places, some dreary forest, where platitudes and truisms grow rankly luxuriant, in the "dim, green, dayless day ?" " Sermons in stones, and good in everything," —we grant it you readily, but for pity's sake sometimes leave us to read the sermon for ourselves, to discover the good, especially when it needs only surface-mining to bring it to light !

What shall be our second requisite ? That the writing shall not only spring naturally from the matter selected, butthat it shall be uninterrupted by apology, untinged by the self-consciousness of the writer. Let us have the writer's opinions, by all means, but do not let us hear the diffidence with which he expresses them ; let

• tenures of a Certain Profaner. By the Rev-T. Farrell. Louden:. Macmillan and Co.

him never apologise for digressing, or hesitate to speak freely ; least of all let him not consider too tenderly the reader's feel- ings, and remind him that he is being talked to. Surely the very greatest point of merit in one of these light essays is to put the reader in a similar state of mind to that when, with slippers on his feet and pipe in his mouth, he listens over the winter fire to the discursive talk of some old chum, and scarcely troubles himself to emit a " hum" or " hah " in the pauses of the monologue.

And lastly, we will put the requisite which we should have, perhaps, put first,—that the whole effect must be amusing; the merest suspicion of boredom or common-place will spoil the whole matter, and very rightly so. We give our friend or our author " his head ;" we say to him, tacitly, " You are hereby freed from all necessity of being instructive, or wise, or eloquent, or even witty ; we lay no command upon you to be even coherent in your speech or relevant in your matter ; but in return for all this, you must not bore us. Do you fear the ordeal ; is the one thing we ask too much ? Then, best of friends or authors, sit down and drink your toddy or write your sermons in peace, and leave the essay to lighter and more dexterous hands."

With these preliminary remarks, we leave Mr. Farrell to speak for himself, as we promised :—

" My Greek, like that of a great many other people I know, has grown somewhat rusty, but it is not hard to muster up enough to enjoy an occasional dip into Homer. Like most great things, it is simple; and like many a simple thing, it goes straight to the heart. The music of those grand hexameters seems to me to be different even in kind from the music of other hexameters ; there is a roll, and a ring, and a resonance in them that I find nowhere else. I can well imagine the savage chiefs in the old palaces of Pyles starting up with a loftier excitement than any Chian wine had ever caused, as the blind old bard rolled forth his sonorous chaunt. More than that, when I read a passage sometimes and get fully into the swing of the melody, I begin dimly to realise the truth of those stories, that to Northern ears are apt to sound somewhat apocryphal, of the marvel- lous effects produced by the Rhapsodists."

So much for our first quotation, which reminds us strangely of a passage in Guy Livingstone, by the late Mr. Lawrence, in which much the same sentiments are expressed, and in very similar language, apropos of the way in which the muscular " Guy " used to quote Homer.

History, we know, repeats itself, and why not fiction ? Let us encounter Mr. Farrell on another and a more favourable ground, where he is recounting his ill-success in cultivating the acquaintance of two robins :—

" I remember once making to some extent, and striving to culti- vate, the acquaintance of two robins. I was anxious to be of use to them, to alleviate the hardships of the severe winter. I had ready for them a constant supply of crumbs, and, conscious of the most benevolent intentions towards them, it was my pro- gramme that they should completely surrender themselves to my views, and consent to be made happy, not indeed in their own foolish, ill-considered way, but in the way in which my higher intelligence would be prompt to suggest. But they did not seem to fall in with my views. They seemed to have an unreasonable distrust of my ultimate intentions. They took my crumbs, but kept carefully beyond the reach of the hand that scattered them. I felt hurt. They were unreasonable, they were even ungrateful. They should have known me better, and better discerned the benevolence of my intention. A cold shadow of cynicism stole over my preconceived views on the subject of robins. I began to think that they had been spoken of beyond their merits. My faith was shaken in the portion that concerned them of the legend of the Babes in the Wood.' So far as I could see, they were no better than sparrows ; indeed, not so good, for their social manners, free and jerky, not to say impudent, presented many aspects with which a growing boy might naturally sympathise."

One more quotation from Mr. Farrell, and we shall have exhausted the main qualities of his writing. We have had our author, didactic and descriptive, in our first quotation ; narra- tive and jocose, in our second ; it but remains to show him, in the third, philosophical and religions, and our readers will then be able to consider with fairness the question propounded in the beginning of our article :—

" The finest faculties may spend themselves, nor complain of being wasted, upon the duties of a common day. Intellect may find its work—and it has none in kind nobler—in discerning simple ends, and adjusting to them adequate means. Will can exert itself quite as forcibly, and, so far as we are personally concerned, quite as profitably, in the street or in the workshop, as in the battlefield or the senate. Or are you fool enough to think that God cares for mere results ? Could He not have them without you, as many as He pleased ? But what He will not have without you, is the nice work- manship which your human personality can lavish upon that rough material of every-day life from which all results are born."

We have chosen these three quotations as samples, not in- vidionsly, for similar ones may be found in almost each of these essays. Whether Mr. Farrell talks about " books," or " life," or " culture," or the " common-place," in every case there may be found a little rather picturesque writing; a little jocosity, generally of narrative, egoistic kind ; and a little, or sometimes a big, religious and moral appendix generally winding up the whole matter.

Were we to give a judgment upon this book, we should be heartily puzzled under what head to put it. Certainly, the promise of the first essays, that the papers which are to follow are to be " gossip" of the Elia " arm-in-arm " kind, is not kept. Nor are the papers wholly serious and sermonic. We confess that, for our taste, they are a little too hermaphrodite in character, too consciously literary on the one side, and too professionally religions on the other. There is an occasional mixture of the Daily Telegraph and the Dissenting minister about them which is, when it occurs, very irritating, and this is the more to be regretted, as the author is evidently a kindly and, in some ways, a clever man.