Some Books of the Week ERNEST RENAN was suave and
delicate. He was marked by that air of worldly wisdom which a polite scepticism gives even to those who are most remote from practical affairs. Certainly he seems not to have been made for the bustle of life. " I have long since given up travelling by omnibus," lie relates ; " the conductor came to look upon me as a passenger who did not know what he was about." His advice to the polite, on being jostled by their more pushing fellow- creatures, tends the same way : " The proper thing to do is to draw back with a gesture tantamount to saying, ' Do not let me prevent you passing.' " In his Recollections of My Youth, now translated by Mr. C. B. Pitman (Routledge, 12s. 6d.), he tells of the formation of his own mind. " I was educated," he says elsewhere, " by women and priests ; there you have the whole explanation of my qualities and my defects." It is this education that he here describes in a peculiarly gentle, gracious, and romantic, style. He does not by any means unlock his heart to us : as Dr. Coulton says in his introduction, " In this book his whole life is dramatized with conscious art." But we learn much of his mental and spiritual background, and, perhaps, can deduce even more than he intends to tell.
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