A VOLUME OF MR. FREDERIC HARRISON'S PAPERS.
Among My Books : Centenaries, Reviews, and Memoirs. By Frederic Harrison. (Macmillan and Co. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mr. Harrison's last book is a collection of articles and essays, re- printed from many papers and reviews, together with seven here published for the first time. The whole book is a wonder of scholarship, a well of great depth, to be dipped into again and again, a record of real love and real patience in study; but, from first to last, a defence of that older criticism which is slowly pass- ing away. " Je ne lis plus," says Mr. Harrison ; " je relis " : to him, Rodin's art, in spite of its acknowledged power, is, before all, coarse and loathsome ; to him, Homer is the one man, the poet of unapproachable splendour, the bard of years before 1000 B.e. " We must fall back," he says of the Homeric problem, "on the best judgment which minds trained in the higher literature can give us," and puts but little faith in the excavations and research work of such men as Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans, or in severe textual criticism, with its emphasis on "inconsistencies, contradic- tions, and blots." All scientific arguments, in fact, must give way before the argument from literary judgment. Nevertheless, those who, like the Athenians, " spend their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing," may well learn from Mr. Harrison what a depth of study must go to the forming of one opinion, what years of reading to the making of a book.
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