THE LATE PROFESSOR A. J. CHURCH.

IT has been said that a bishop should die preaching, and the late Professor A. J. Church, who was, of course, familiar with the saying, since he knew all that there was to know about bishops, might well have transferred the saying to a man of letters who was also a journalist. He might have said of himself that he ought to die writing, and so he actually did. Till within four days of his death be wrote with the youthful vigour, the distinction, and the fineness of touch and taste which he had borrowed from the classics in his early manhood and had retained, unjaded and unjaded, throughout his life. The exercise of his intellectual faculties and the use of the classical aptness, which he never allowed to fall away from ripeness into the fatally easy next step of luxuriant decay, kept him fresh. Freshness was his characteristic. Many young men must have contemplated his work and habits when he was over eighty years of age with as much misgiving for themselves as admiration for the veteran. When they were eighty years old, they asked themselves, would they have a tithe of his intellectual quickness, his freedom from crotchets, and his humanity P The aged critic is commonly a man of accumulated prejudices and even of personal animosities. Certain writers and certain principles have at last " got upon his nerves." But Mr. Church was quite unlike this. As a reviewer of books ho had no bitterness, no jealousy, no prejudice—except a prejudice against everything base and despicable. Doubtless his humanity and his even temper were his personal merits, and we must not deduce any general principle from private virtue. But it is fair to say that, apart from all that, Mr. Church was a radiant example of how mind and body may be preserved in vigour by a constant practice of intellectual concentration. One knew it already from the lives of Gladstone and others, but the proof is not leas striking in the life of Mr. Church.

When R. H. Hutton died and was buried Mr. Church, who had been for many years his close friend and his colleague on the Spectator, remarked that " the world seemed to awaken to a consciousness of the great man who had passed from its midst." That was perfectly true in the sense that the influence of Hutton, anonymously exerted for many years, was not fully recognized as a tangible effect in the thought and movements of his time till after his death. Almost the same thing will be found true, we think, of Mr. Church. Most of his work was anonymous, and, of course, this was so in all that he wrote for the Spectator as a reviewer from his first connexion with it in 18G8 till last week. But, paradoxical though it may seem, Mr. Church's scholarship reached far and wide "anonymously" even in the numerous books which bore his name. The names of scholars, we moan, are not familiar names, and therefore Mr. Church's books were known better than their author's name. It was his eminent and permanent service that he popularized the classics. Tens of thousands of boys and girls have read in prize-books or gift-books the stories from Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and so forth which Mr. Church told in faultlessly simple English prose; and they remember the story when they have forgotten who wrote the book that first introduced them to the beauty and wonder of classical legend and poetry. Among scholars the name of Church will live chiefly as the translator, in oolloboration with W. J. Brodribb, of Taoitus ; but English men and women who have small Latin and less Greek will honour him for having faith- fully conveyed to them the gracious atmosphere of the sources of our civilization. The directness and great simplicity of Homer can be rendered into English only by a scholar. " Simple" English that is not guided by the severe taste of a scholarly mind is simple in the wrong sense—stupidly affected or blunderingly naive. When Matthew Arnold die. cussed the art of translating Homer he looked round for the simplest English vehicle of metrical expression. He believed that to be the English hexameter. He may have been right or wrong, and it does not much concern us here, for all Mr. Church's better known translations were in prose. Some of his rarer verse translations were fine, as we shall hope to show by quotation. But his essential service to his day was that he did for a large part of the classics what Lamb did for Shakespeare and Kingsley for certain Greek stories in his "Heroes." We suppose that there must be thousands of readers who feel towards Mr. Church as Keats felt towards Chapman. Several of Mr. Church's books were expressly written for children. The" Iliad" and the" Odyssey," because they are epics, are the best children's poems in the world. The eternal truthfulness of the Homeric incidents contains the germ of all behaviour that is honourable, ohivalrous, and courageous. There is no judicial code in Homer, but there is everywhere a soaring ideal. And yet there is human error to ballast the ideal, for neither Greek nor Trojan was flawless. Perhaps because Homer was his greatest subject Mr. Church's " Stories from Homer" was, as many of us think,. his best work. His language was elegant, direct, and appropriate, and the choice of events always showed a mind that leaped out instinctively to choose what was salient.

We spoke of Mr. Church's rarer translations in verse. As instances of his happy combination of grace and strength in this respect we may quote a rendering he furnished at short notice of some lines by Rutilius Claudius Numatianus which had been incidentally referred to by a correspondent of the Spectator.

" Nam solis radiis aequalia munera tondis Qua oireumfusus fluetuat oceanus.

Volvitur ipso tibi, qui oontinet omnia, Phoebus Eque tuie ortus in tun condit °clues.

To non dammigeris Libya tar davit aronis,

Non armata silo reppulit urea gelu.

Quantum vitalis nature totendit in axes Tantum virtuti porvia terra tune. Pooisti patriam diversis gontibus

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Prof uit iniustis, to dominant°, capL Dumque offers victis proprii ounsortia juris, Urbem foetal quod pram orbis orat." Wide as the ambient ocean is thy sway, And broad thy Empire as the realms of day; Still on thy bounds the sun's groat march attends, With thee his course begins, with thee it ends.

The strong advance nor Afrio's barn. lug sand, Nor frozen horrors of the Pole with- stand ; Thy valour, far as kindly Nature's bound

Is fixed for man, its dauntless way has found.

All nations own in thou their common land, And o'on the guilty bless thy con- quering hand; One right for weak, for strong, thy laws create, And bind the wide world in a world- wide State.

Better still Was his rendering of the similar passage in which Claudian described Stilicho's victory at Pollentia—a revival of Roman soldiership as Claudian himself was a revival of Roman poetry.

Quis tibi nuno, Mario°, dolor, quum Marto perirent Divitiao, spoliisque diu queosita supel- lox, Pulsaretquo tuas ululatus conjugis aures ;

Conjugis invieto qua° dudum irate merit°

Demons Ausonidum gommata monilia matram, Romanesque Mtn famulas corvine potobat?

Scilicet Argolioas Ephyreiadesque puollas Coeporat of pulehras jam fastidire Lacunas.

Sod Dee quae nimiis obstat Mem:maul. yetis,

Ingomuit, !lasagne rotam domat nspera viotos Pauperios, unoque die Romana repon- t

Quiddiquid ter dents acios amisimus 0 colobranda mini eunetis Pollentia Bacons I 0 zneritum nomen felioibus apta triumphis Virtutis fatale solum; momorabile bust=

Barbariao I nem saepo loois ao dull= jibs

Plena laoossito redilt vindi eta Quirino, Illic meant stagnis excite. supromis Cimbrica tompestas, aliasque 1111114011.

per Alpes

Isdam procubuit campis. Jam pre- tinus aetas

Advoniene geminao gentle pormiseeat

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Et duplices signet titulos, commune tropaouzu Hie Cimbros fortesque Gotas, cone poremptos Et Mario olaris duoibus, togit Itala tonna.

Discite vesanao Romam non temnero goatee:"

What anguish, Alario, was thine to know Thy gathered plunder plundered by tho foe I To hem' her loud complaint who found too Into Tier matchless lord had met a mightier fate.

In frenzied pride the spouse of Alarie claims The gems that deck Italia's noblest dames; The maids from Corinth snatched or Argive coasts She scorns, and all the fair whom Sparta boasts, Alone content, if on her barbarous state With swan-like neck Rome's high- born daughters wait.

But Vengeance, foe of lusts that Swell too high, Turned the great wheel of chance with angry cry, Intent to spoil the spoiler, and repay Our thrice ton years of loss in one victorious day. All hail, Pollontia 1 hail, undying name, Pit theme for verse that sings a con- queror's fame, Where valour, armed by fate our state to save, Gave to her barbarous foes a splendid grave. Oft on those plains to Rome, by wrong and shame Too long oppressed, an ample ven- geance came.

'Twins hero the Cimbrian storm, in days of yore, With gathered strength from Ocean's furthest shore, Our Alpine barriers past, in fruitless Bushed to its end. And hero the coming ago, Mingling the huge remains of either race, Shall this one boast upon one trophy trace: Bore mighty Stilieho the Gotha o'er- threw,

And valiant Marius here the Cirnbri dew;

Both buried lie beneath Pollontia's plain, No more, 0 foolish world, the Boman yoke disdain.

One of Mr. Church's most che ished memories was his curacy, under F. D. Maurice, at St. Peter's, Vere Street. Maurice's " Broad" principles of Church administration and doctrine became Mr. Church's, and the latter never shifted his ground through his long life. He used to relate with zest how he once overheard a conversation of two visitors to the church in which one complained that he had given up coming to hear Maurice, as it seemed to be his fate to hear "only the curate." )4r. Church, we may say here, had a keen humour and, what is a priceless alleviation to the small annoyances of life, an overpowering sense of the absurd. He used to tell his anecdotes with a very slight, almost imperceptible, stammer that brought the well-chosen words out with a curious effect of isolation, heightening their value and one's sense of their appositeness. An odd mistake in a proof from the printer would cause him to chuckle with delight, particularly when the mistake was wildly absurd. He was delighted, for example, when his difficult handwriting caused the following mistake. He was writing of the boat in which Shelley lost his life, and quoted from " Lycidas " " That perfidious bark Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."

" Curses dark " became " Union Jack." On another occasion the phrase " the recent decorations of St. Paul's" became "the recent desecrations." "No doubt the printer is right," remarked Mr. Church, "but still I had better have what I wrote." He used to relate with much pleasure how he won the Oxford prize open to all graduates for a sacred poem. In 1870 the subject was "Tire Lake of Tiberias," and he unfortunately sent in his exercise too late. " Ibi omnis effusus labor I " he said to himself, and dismissed the matter. But thirteen years later the subject was "The Sea of Galilee." He brought his poem out of a drawer, revised it, added a few stanzas, and won the prize. His mind and his physical energy were equally ready for new pursuits. He was a fisherman— he once caught seventy-four salmon in five weeks—and a cricketer all his life. But when he was over seventy ho became a golfer (like a true cricketer believing that golf is an old man's game) and a fruit-grower in a small but still serious and professional way. His courtesy and kindness were a vivid justification of his training in the " Humanities," to which old-fashioned phrase his life gave a new illumination.