BOOKS.

THE LATE MR. CHARLES BUXTON.*

• Notes of Thought by the late Charke Buxton, M.P. Preceded by a Biographical Sketch, by Bev. J. Llewelyn Davies, M.A. London : John Murray. self.„ And here again is a keen thrust :« In life, as in chess,

"You have not fulfilled every duty, unless you have fulfilled that of being pleasant," said Mr. Buxton, in these shrewd and often striking Notes of Thought, and no one ever succeeded much better, we suppose, in this life, in that part of human duty than himself ; —no doubt partly because his lines had fallen in pleasant places, and it was one of the greatest of his own pleasures to exercise his great power of giving pleasure ; still more because no one ever had more discrimination in assigning even to the diffusion of pleasure that strictly subordinate place in life which alone it can secupy with those who really succeed in diffusing it. Mr. Buxton was very happily circumstanced for the purpose of making life a little more sunny to his fellow-creatures. He inherited we may almost say with at least the opportunities of large wealth, very strict principles and a tradition of enthusiastic benevolence and earnest piety, while his own intellect, as it grew and widened, dissolved away all that was narrow and unsound in those principles, and left him uninjured all that ardour of temperament and that disciplined moral vigilance which are so rarely gained without the early help of one of the stronger, if not sterner, creeds. Add to these gifts a strong flavour of the keen curiosity of a naturalist, which showed itself not only in Mr. Buxton's humorous pleasure in natural-

history proper, but also in adding a zest that occasionally reminds us of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the study and criticism of the oddi- ties and paradoxes of human nature, and then crown them all with very artistic tastes, and it seems difficult to conceive how a man of large wealth could have a more unique assemblage of facilities for diffusing enjoyment around him. Mach too high-minded, conscien- tious, and earnest a thinker and politician to make the study of enjoyment even for others the first thing in life,—a false position, in which it always comes to grief,—he also had in himself almost. every other safeguard against that mechanical use of wealth which deprives it of all power of lending a certain magic and beauty to life. The keen naturalist's eye with which he looked on men. and things kept him from sinking into what was intellectually conventional, and also found him a constant supply of new ways in. which he could give pleasure to others ; his fine taste prevented him, from interrupting the course of what was usual by what was aim- ply odd ; his genuinely spiritual benevolence guarded him against anything like patronage or ostentation ; and his quaint humour kept up the freshness and zest for social enjoyments which with ordinary men are so apt to die out of them ae life draws on. Mr._ Llewelyn Davies's admirable biographical sketch gives a most vivid picture of his earnestness, his piety, his vivacity, his ardour against tyranny and cruelty, his sensitiveness to the bitter censure- which his public actions,—especially his denunciation of the. Jamaica Court-martials,—excited, his great candour and wide apprehensiveness to political ideas, his almost boyish enthusiasm, for the Volunteer movement, his delight in wild and domestic animals, his taste and skill as an architect, his genius as a host,. his generosity as a friend, and his great charm in domestic life. And we think it might be possible to verify at least a great many of these characteristics from the posthumous Notes of Thought now published. Certainly, numerous as they are, and various in quality,—they number 684 in all,—they all have the air of coming from a man who always thought for himself and thought with ardour, who had a great gift of ' detachment' from, the prevalent intellectual fashion of political society, who had at once a keen and benevolent insight into character, a sharp self- knowledge, a faculty of giving quaint, sidelong glances at society which afforded him much amusement, as well as fed in him what he- himself somewhere terms " originality of heart," and a considerable- faculty of humorous finish and literary polish. Sometimes Mr. Buxton's humour takes a wilfully ludicrous view of a subject, as, according to the theory of the delicate little garden-sketch from. which Mr. Llewelyn Davies quotes, the jackdaws did of their hemp-seed, when they indulged in the fancy that they were robbing him whenever they went down to feed, and "much relished the fancy." Such, too, is the suggestion in this book which Mr.. Davies takes as an illustration of Mr. Buxton's humour :- "Would it not be happy for all parties if idiots and old people, when grown imbecile, could be comfortably shot ?• I would have it done with the utmost decorum ; perhaps by the bishop of the diocese, but what an unspeakable relief I" But this is rare. As a rule, his humour is merely the quaint. form of a very true and perhaps obvious remark, to which it gives value and significance solely by the brightness it lends it ;. as for instance, " to plant a young tree is to set up a death's head. and cross-bones in your grounds. You may hear your young trees singing sotto voce as you pass by, Aha! you'll be dead, you'll be dead, you'll be dead, my fine fellow, before I am full grown. Young oaks especially are always crooning that to themselves on a windy evening ;" or, again, when he remarks, justly enough, though with a delicious quaintness in the point of view, that. " money is a kind of manure to one's expenses, the more you: lay on, the thicker they crop."

As a rule, however, the " notes of thought" are serious, and much more than truisms set in a telling literary form. Sometimes, though rarely, they partake of a certain Thackerayan cynicism,

and then they are the least good. For instance, we don't admire either 497 or 498, especially the former,—" Juliet was a. fool to kill herself. In three months she'd have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo." That is taking a liberty with a world of imagination with which the cynicism of real Eb- bs no appropriate relation, and where the intrusion of the- common-places of sardonic depreciation seems almost impertinent. But this kind of " note of thought " is very rare, and those which come nearest to it have a dash of satirical self-mockery about them which saves them from the air of pseudo-cynicism belonging to the attack on Juliet. This, for instance, is subtle, though biting: —" His own blunders scratch a man's vanity; but the

thing to tear it is for a near relation to have made a fool of him- one's own pawns block one's way. A man's very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him."

But the classes of sayings which we like the best, and which seem to us to have moat perfection of form and weight of matter in them, are two :—those which show the trite artistic eye and feeling for nature in the writer, and those which show his very keen and delicate appreciation of moral and social traits. This, for instance, on the form of a pine wood, will be new in substance to many, and will seem striking in form to all :—

" A pine wood is like a battalion in square with the front ranks kneeling. The outside pines have their outer branches down to the ground, the inner only at top. Hence, so long as the outside ones stand, they keep the whole wood safe and wend. But once break the outer rank, and the cavalry of the winds rages through."

And again, what can be truer and more genuinely artistic in feeling than this :— "Keeping ' has been observed by nature with true artistic care. Does not a bat seem as if it were a slice clipped from the twilight by some supernatural scissors? And look, too, at the white owl, with its shriek and its ghostly flight. What can be more in harmony with the ,dreary moors and morasses in which they live than the melancholy whistle of the curlew and redshank ? But I am most struck with it in looking at that sight—to my mind, the most suggestive sight in the whole world—the sight of the saurian creatures in the Crystal Palace gardens. What a horror of ugliness ; but hew at one with the mud— that abomination of desolation—in which they disported."

But the sayings which show moral ' detachment,' are both the keenest and most numerous. Here, for instance, is one subtle and -quite original on the danger of discomfiting a shy man by too great cordiality :—

" Nothing makes a shy man feel more shy, than an overdone north- -ality. People's manner should show their kind feeling, but not puzzle you how to make a return. An euloginm by manner is almost as em- barrassing as an enlogium by words."

And here, again, how tree and accurate is the self-knowledge :— " Hearing any one wisely praised seems to precipitate one's liking for him. It tarns one's fluid notion, that he is a right good fellow, into a solid opinion."

• Others of these show the depth and sineerity of Mr. Batton's feeling by the very care with which he sets off the deductions against the depth of the feeling he describes, as in these extremely fine notes on pity :-

"We pity people too much. We forget the vie inertice,—the power of bearing—in human nature. We pity people too little : only he who has the wound, knows its agony : pain can only be felt for, when felt. We pity people too much. Life has a thousand interests, always grow- ing, always bursting into leaf and flower, which soon will cover the gap. We pity people too little. All bright things now add to the blackness. All delights are now laden with bitterness. He is gone who would have shared them."

—with which we may compare the following :- " We feel a shade of superiority to those whom we pity ; we look -down on them, not up to them. And yet people are certainly proud of their misfortunes."

Perhaps the true explanation of that last remark is that though people are proud of their misfortunes, it is not of all their misfor- tunes that they are proud, but rather of those which place them in a unique position of fortitude and lonely experience ; and that though we look down on those whom we pity, we do not look down on them in relation to those misfortunes of which we at least should think it natural to be proud. We do not look down on a sailor who has passed through a terrible shipwreck, or on a soldier whose leg has been broken by a ball in battle. On the contrary, we look up to them, though we may feel compassion for their pain. So there is a sense in which we even look up to those who have passed through a terrible grief or privation. The sufferings we pity with a touch of disdain are such sufferings as those of poverty implying a sort of helplessness, loss of eyesight or anything it is impossible to recover (though, of course, without relation to the power shown in bearing np against suffering, which may change pity into admiration), and so forth. In short, that which is the subjeet of pride, and that which is the object of disdainful pity, is a somewhat different shade of the same misfortune. This, how- ever, by the way.

These posthumous Notes of Thought are full of delicate -observation and reflection, and go far to justify in itself the remark quoted by Mr. Llewelyn Davies from Mr. W. E. Forster, —Mr. Charles Buxton's cousin,—that the gap which Mr. Buxton has left is bigger even than the place which he seemed to fill in society. The man who had so large a store of vivid and subtle and polished and humorous thought, combined with so deep a piety and benevolence, must have been larger than he seemed,— though be seemed to all who knew him a man of original char- acter, refined generosity, and delicate taste,—a politician who , never failed to understand and weigh both sides of a question, and a philanthropist who was as just and wise as he was tenacious in denouncing cruelty and protecting weakness. But after all, it was the honourable distinction of the man, that being so much more than an ornament of society, he fulfilled with so much originality of fascination that "duty of being pleasant" to which he refers, and connected, as few indeed succeed in connecting, the associations of wealth and culture with refined and generous thoughtfulness for others, and with that frank air of perfect equality which appeared quite unconscious of his advantages of position over those whom he had served.