BOOKS.

SIR MOUNTSTUART GRANT DUFF'S DLiRIES.*

TALKING of books good to take on a journey—at one of the Grillion breakfasts where so many of the "good things" of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's new volumes were aaid—some- • - . - . - . • Notes from a Dian, 1889•1891. By the Right Ron. Sir Mountatuart E. Oust vole. Miami': John liturray. Ms.] . body recommended Liddell and Scott: "it is full of little quotations which remind you of pleasant things." The same might be said of these Diaries of '89, '90, and '91. Only we should have to mention that the quotations they abound in are not all little. Sometimes they are very long—a full page or more from Newman's Loss and Gain; an exquisite idyll of country scenery from George Sand; extracts from friends' letters longer than the whole letters most people write nowadays; complete poem of some minor poet, who will perhaps owe his only immortality on earth to the good fortune of having been copied into Sir Mountstuart's commonplace-book. It is in these things and the many allusions to re-readings of favourite authors, revisitings of the National Gallery or Kew Gardens for special study and affectionate observation, that we follow the thread of sentiment and individuality holding together the very miscellaneous memoranda that make up the book. The preface warns us that in these stay. at-home vohimes we I shall not find matter of the same kind of interest that filled their travelled predeces. sore. On the other hand, we may look for a larger pro- portion of "anecdotes, witticisms, good stories, and the like Such things grow up and thrive in the atmo- sphere of great cities, but are to be found only as imported articles on the slopes of the Nilgiris or those of Mount Carmel." The warning and the promise are both justified. The book is the offspring of club-life and London society, and it is rich in epigram and apophthegm. , Nor does it dis- dain the homelier tribe of witticisms, riddles, and puns, the humour of the Irishman, the American, the peasant, and the child. Indeed, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff collects his "good things" in a spirit so catholic that one rather wishes he would sort and classify his curios, -and give us a catalogue raisonne which might throw some light upon that obscure subject, the metaphysics of humour. For instance, when we hear that Mr. Henry James talked about that American humour of which the point lies in exaggeration, and told in illustration the story of the man who, being "seen off" on a journey by his wife, put his head out of window to kiss her at the last moment, and, because the train moved so fast, kissed instead a coloured girl at the next station, we are devoured by curiosity to know what Mr. James would say about the rela- tion of his own vein of microscopic inwardness to this florid

national development. Is it, perhaps, the same as that of the endogen to the exogen in botany ? But this the Diary does not tell us. It gives us, however, a neat

epigram, joint produce of the wit of Mr. James and Sir Mountstuart, in regard to the esprit of the French nation:—

" Conversation turned upon fencing, and the French aptitude

for it. It answers,' I said, to their esprit.'—` Yes,' said Henry James, it is physical esprit.' " Related to this in

spirit is the comparison between fencing and conversation

borrowed from the programme of a causerie d'armes :— "Qu'est ce que c'est que faire des armes ? C'est causer. Car

causer, n'est cc pas parer, riposter, attaquer, toucher surtout."

A fragment from a letter of Mrs. Barrington, glowing with the beauties of the country in the month of Midsummer roses, reminds us how much talk—how much "contact "—there may be without the quality that " touches " :—" It is wicked," she writes, "to be in London in June. Not that people aren't the

best thing in the world, but you don't get people—only their hurried, wearied ghosts, mazed and stupefied by much contact without society—in London."

Witli Sir Andrew Clark the talk was of old age. Asked to define age, Sir Mountstuart took refuge in the conventional distinction by which "a woman is the age she looks, and a man the age he feels." The physician's comment was that that is well enough for society : But what is age ?" and went on to a definition worth pondering :—" Age begins when we cease to be able to adapt ourselves to the changes of our environments. A man who cannot do that is already aged, whatever may be the sum of his years." Then Sir Mount- stuart told the story of Father Bowden's rider to a very bad bulletin of Newman in a serious illness : "Nevertheless, I

don't think he is going to die He has a great deal of Latin read to him, and he is made so cross by the false quantities." "That," Sir Andrew remarked, "is a deep-sea sounding."

For a book. of . our day, the Diary touches curiouslY little upon the preternaturaL But it has one good ghost-

. story, which, if it is authentic, suggests an interesting inter- pretation of a very large class of dreams :— "A certain lady and her family hired a place in Scotland which was haunted by the ghost of a woman who was to be seen constantly at night wandering through the rooms and passages. When the family arrived the lady was much struck with the place, and mid, must have been here before, for I know this place so well, only there ought to be two rooms here, and there is only one.' The agent replied that within a few weeks the owner had caused a partition to be taken down and made the two rooms into one. Still the lady was puzzled at her knowledge of the place, till she remembered that it was a house she used to go to in her dreams. Well, some time passed, and the agent was up at the house again, when the lady complained that one part of the contract had not been fulfilled. They had hired a house and a ghost for the summer, and no ghost had she seen. The agent replied, 'Of course not, because you are the ghost ; we recognised you the moment we saw you."

Coherence is not to be thought of in speaking of a book of which half the charm lies in its abrupt transitions. So we pass without apology from the dream-story to the absurd anecdote of the Irish Member who was seen to execute a somersault in the streets of London :—

" Many years ago there sat in the House of Commons a solid and prosperous tradesman, who was Member for an important constituency, and the very type of respectability. Baxter, who was the most accurate of men, declared that he was one day following this personage along the path which leads from the Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, when, to Baxter's extreme surprise, he suddenly turned head over heels ! It was of the same individual that Disraeli said when he first rose to speak : I have always understood that Irish Members were either gentlemen or blackguards, but this old man is neither."

That is an anecdote worthy to rank with Louis Stevenson's observations of the mixed phases of civilisation in his South Sea Islanders. We like much the laconic Somersetshire orator's reasons for not voting for a rate to build a wall round a churchyard: "Them as is in can't get out; them as is out don't want to get in. I'm agin the rate." Very good, too, is the advice of the sympathetic groom to Sir Charles Bowen when a favourite horse was discovered to be ill with a disabling and incurable disease. "What am I to do?" asked the distressed owner of the animal. "Well, Sir, I would conscientiously advise you to sell it to another gentleman." Another shrewd and typical person immortalised in these pages is the little girl who, when it was suggested to her that she should "leave off something during Lent "—sugar per- haps—replied : " No ; I don't think I could leave off sugar how would soap do?" And we are grateful to Prince Francis of Teck for having picked up at the Stuart Exhibition the style of the late Sovereign in the vocabulary of the White Rose Society. He heard a visitor say something to his com- panion about "the Queen." "You mean," replied the other, "the Princess Albert of Saxe-Coburg."

The stories of public men and the bon-mots of statesmen— though fairly numerous—like the patient whose doctor could assure him that he was not "dangerously ill,"—are some of them, possibly all of them, "dangerously old." Ten years is time enough for any story to get about, especially a story that was already "told" a decade ago. But this is no reason why these stories should not be preserved in Sir Mountstuart's Diaries. It is only a good reason for not calling attention to them in a review. The people who have not heard the oftenest-told story of the world always outnumber those who have heard it, and it is a small satisfaction to spoil sport by crying Connu ! especially when there are also so many

good things given us from sources too intimate to have had a chance of being hackneyed. Among these the variety to choose from is almost inexhaustible, but we cannot pass un- noticed either the definition of Renan's sentences as "boa- bons qui sentent rinfini," or a lady's citation of a wise saying of Franklin's, "if we must give an account for every idle word, so must we for every idle silence." Among graver thoughts, tersely cast, one notes also the comment of Lady Blanche Balfour, when some one told her that he had dropped the habit of prayer : "That is a mistake ; keep the frame and the picture will grow into it?'

An appendix gives the text of an address delivered by Sir Mountstuart in 1891 to the students of the Girls' High School at Oxford. There are at least tido utter- ances in it which may be taken as history of the making of the writer's own store of memories:—" Consider that all intelligent persons whom you conic across are your natural prey " ; and "Acquire the habit of making notes of all interesting things you see, hear, or read, and do not let the notes lie dormant, but recur and recur to them till they have become a part of yourselves." It is a question whether or not the average reader should feel encouraged or discouraged by the personal revelation Sir Mountstuart makes in regard to the physical disability in spite of which he has acted upon this principle through life. Defective eyesight obliged him, even in undergraduate days, to depend for moat of his reading and writing upon the help of readers and secretaries. Given this help, it is easy to understand how much more regularly the commonplace-book would be kept than by a person depending only on his own eyes, however competent. It is a great merit of this lecture that it descends to practical particulars, even to the naming of the four books every girl should take care to begin her library with on leaving school. The death of Mrs. Craven happened during the period covered by these volumes ; and a tribute to the character of her who had been for so many years a source of good and great inspiration to the lecturer finds a natural place in it. We have quoted much, but have left much that was tempting unnoticed. Somewhere Sir Mountstuart alludes in passing to a person whose acquaintance we should much like to make, "a professor of wise ignorance." In the same university there must be at least one chair for the "professor of necessary omission."