Mr. I'Anson Fausset has shown a wide range of choice
in his literary biographies. In each one, however, he has tried in the same way to show the quarrelling motives under- lying the man of whom he writes. He has been particularly interested in the details of religious life ; his own attitude to religion is one of an optimistic common sense. In his new study of William Cowper (Cape, 12s. 6d.) he has a good deal of the material which he is best equipped to handle. The chief value of his attitude is that it enables him to put his finger on the elements of excess in Cowper's outlook. Its chief defect is that it leaves him without any sharpness or heat in his own opinions. He decries a " narrow rationalism," a " narrow evangelism;" and every sort of narrowness : we feel that he may soon be objecting to a narrow cannibalism or a narrow sublimity, and suggesting that if the vices and virtues were only broad enough they could live together on the best of terms.
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