LIVES OF GREAT AMERICANS.* The Beacon Biographies, of which Messrs.

Megan Paul, Trench, and Co. send us the five first volumes, promise to be a very pleasant and useful series. In form they are small and light,—really small and light enough to be carried without inconvenience in a good-sized pocket. They are printed in clear, readable type, on a small but roomy page with liberal margins. Each volume has a calendar of dates and important events at the beginning, and, at the end, a list of the larger works to which the reader may go for fuller information. The volumes already published are about Phillipps Brookes, Bishop of Massachu- setts; David Farragnt, the first American Admiral; General Robert Lee, the Bayard of the Confederate Army; James Russell Lowell ; and Daniel Webster. The "Lives " are written by various authors under the common editorship of Mr. De Wolfe Howe, who also writes the volume about Bishop Phillipps Brookes.

Instinctively one turns first to the book about Lowell, which answers particularly well the best object the writer of a little book can set before himself : it stimulates desire for the larger work. The final biography, Mr. Hale tells us, is yet to be written :—" What is next wanted (and every year makes the chance of it rarer) is a life by some one of those younger men of letters—Mr. Howells, for instance, or Mr. Stedman,—men of the literary generation just following Lowell, who began their work in friendship with him and in the encouragement of his interest, and whose warm personal opinion, ripened now, and with the perspective of a dozen years, would give as nearly a true idea of Lowell as one would want." Mr. Hale quotes a saying about Lowell to the effect "that you had to surrender yourself to his in- fluence before he approved of you and allowed you to get his best." And he adds rather enigmatically : " I am not quite sure that I have submitted to his influence ; I rather hope not. But I also hope, all the same, that in a way I have got the best of him that is now possible." " Now " means since Lowell has become a classic, and the distinction pointed is between the way of writing of him while be was still an active force in life and literature, and the way that has been the only possible way since death put " Finis" to his work. Some critical remarks at the end of the volume have an interesting

• Te Becteolz BidgeaphirM of Eminent Alnericane. Edited by M. A. De Wolfe Howe. London : K.-gam l'aul, Trench, and Cu. Bo.tun : Small, Maynard, sad Co. [2s. Gd. each.] bearing upon modern literature in general. Contrasting Lowell with Washington Irving, who "saw everything as literature," Mr. Hale says:— "Lowell, on the other hand, did not see everything as literature. He saw literature itself as an impulse to action, and as action was called for by the time, he made literature his means rather than his end. In his generation, literature was distinctively a force for action In our own time literature is hardly such a force. What happens under our eyes is hard to see clearly. But it seems, on the whole, as if we had neither Irving's object in view, nor Lowell's. We have got perfectly used to looking at everything as literature, so that any five years' graduate can turn out as good literature as you need right from the topics of the day, Nor is it so particularly necessary to use literature as a means of bringing things to pass. The people who wish to do anything nowadays are using means which, for the time being, are infinitely more powerful. Literature is now serving a wholly different purpose, so far as it is serious : it is serving as an interpreter of the secret of life,—a matter in which we have become much interested."

The fact that this matter of the "secret of life" was not particularly interesting either to Lowell or Irving makes it impossible, Mr. Hale considers, that they should have the hold on us that they had on their contemporaries, but it does not alter the fact that they were genuine men of letters in their day. Nor do the Biglow Papers cease to be "literature" because they will probably be taken account of by historians who will disregard all the poetry that is mere literature.

The life of Daniel Webster has the interest of a great drama of human character. In view of, his apostasy from the anti- slavery cause, a peculiar interest attaches to the equivocal indications of his natural bent in childhood. His mother always said of him when he was a boy that he "would

come to something or nothing. She was not sure which." He had less character, less sense of duty, than his elder brother Ezekiel, but more talent, and a quicker eye for effect. Leas directness, also, as one gathers from a delightful anecdote said to float about the neigh bonrhood of Salisbury, where the boys grew up on their father's farm. The father had been away from home, and had left the two boys a piece of work to be done during his absence. It was not done, and interrogation came. " What have you been doing, Ezekiel `Nothing, Sir." Well, Daniel, what have you been doing?' Helping Zeke, Sir.' " His biographer gives an interesting sketch of his early education, his first successes at the Bar, his magnificent indictments of slavery, his gradual cor- ruption and final fall. And he quotes Emerson's un-

comprising denunciation of the apostasy which, in his opinion, undoubtedly brought the Fugitive Slave Law on

America.

Admiral Farragut, probably the least known of these five first heroes of the series, will win many hearts by his prowess as a very small boy. He was appointed a midshipman of the United States Navy in 1810 at the age of nine and a half, and joined his first ship, the frigate 'Essex,' six months later. And his account of his life on board, written at the time, is as good a piece of narrative

as any man, of any age and experience in writing, need wish to produce. Hostilities began between the United States and Great Britain in 1812 ; and David—aged twelve—after distinguishing himself exceptionally in the first naval engagement of the war, was put for three weeks in command of the captured brig ' Alexander Barclay.' But, alas ! when the time for recognising services came, the Secretary of the Navy wrote that " Midshipman Farragut was too young for promotion," and David was sent back to school.

In the volume devoted to General Lee, one turns with especial interest to the pages which discuss the frame of mind in which he embraced the anti-Federal side in the Civil War.

He came of the best blood and traditions of Virginia, and married the granddaughter of Washington. His wife's father was a slave-owner, and his wife, heiress of the slave estate and its responsibilities ; as to which Lee's present biographer writes :—" Neither he nor his father-in-law believed in the institution which was just beginning to array its warm partisans and violent opponents. Mr. Curtis

manumitted his negroes; and Lee, as executor, carried out the provisions of his will, although the war for the Union was raging at the time." The peculiarity of Lee's position as

Confederate General was that he believed neither in slavery nor secession :-

" I can anticipate no greater calamity for my country than a dissolution of the Union," he wrote before war was declared. " I hope therefore that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolu- tion Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and pro- gress of mankind. If the Union is dissolved and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and, save in defence, will draw my sword on none."

"But," his biographer goes on to argue, "there was another logic more difficult for Lee to resist than the logic of abstract political reasoning, to wit, the logic of sympathy ; he loved his fellow-Southerners, he believed them to have been wronged, and in the end he must stand or fall with them. And, in the last analysis, he was a States-rights man ; for he would defend any State if her rights were invaded, much more his mother-State, Virginia."

Invasion of the Southern States was the step on the part of the Federal Government which made it, in Lee's opinion, a duty to take arms on the Confederate side. On April 18th, 1861, he was offered the command of the United States Army, and declined it. Between the 18th and the 20th the blockade of Southern ports was declared, and a Massachusetts regiment had entered Maryland. On the 20th Lee resigned his commission in the Federal Army. On the 23rd he accepted the command of the Virginia forces. A pleasant little anecdote may be taken as good illustration of his tendency to act upon chivalrous and sympathetic impulse rather than by consistent reason :— " On one occasion, near Petersburg, after having warned back some soldiers who had ventured into danger on account of their enthusiasm for him, Lee exposed himself to the enemy's fire in order to replace an unfledged sparrow in its nest."

We must quote also the biographer's summing-up of the question of Lee's action in his choice of sides, because it may be taken as expressing the general principle of judgment that will be acted upon in this series of Lives :— " In this and in all other matters not settled by the consensus of civilised opinion or the arbitrament of arms - neither of which methods of solution had operated by 1861 with regard to secession, or indeed completely with regard to slavery—it is idle to judge men's moral characters according to our estimate of the cause they serve. We must judge them as men, in accordance with the totality of our knowledge concerning their lives. Judged by this standard, we shall find no purer life ever lived than that of Robert Lee, no matter whether or not we believe secession to have been justifiable from the point of view of history, or deny the right of a man to let his sentiments get the better of his reason."

The story of the life of Phillipps Brookes is told by the editor of the series. Nothing less episcopal-looking, accord- ing to English ideas of the aspect suitable to Bishops, could be imagined than the portrait which serves as frontispiece. It is a strong, handsome, good face, but absolutely free from every suggestion of clericalism, typically American, intensely modern, and entirely secular in expression. But the man and his influence were spiritual, and, excepting Lowell, the Bishop of Massachusetts is probably the most familiarly known to a large English public of the five men already written about in the series. His published sermons, however, and still more his Lectures on Preaching, might with advan- tage be more read than they are. When asked what sermon be would preach, he would answer, "I have only one sermon." He developed that one sermon, however, upon many different. lines. But be believed that no preaching succeeds that is not based upon a belief in man, as well as a belief in God :— "One brave and truthful man like Columbus believes that the complete world is complete and sails for a fair land beyond the sea, and finds it. The minister who succeeds is the minister who, in the midst of a sordid age, trusts the heart of man who is the child of God, and knows that it is not all sordid, and boldly speaks to it of God, his Father, as if he expected it to answer. And it does answer; and other preachers who have not believed in man and have talked to him in low places, and preached to him half-Gospels which they think were all ho could stand, look on and wonder at their brother preacher's unaccountable success."

A noble passage, quoted from his sermon on the death of Lincoln, brings us back to the anti-slavery cause, which, as all these little books remind us, is still the test of character and good citizenship among high-minded Americans.