MR. G. W. E. RUSSELL'S RECOLLECTIONS.* MR. RUSSELL'S readers will,
we think, like him least when he takes them into polities. He may be right or wrong in his opinions—he talks, we see, of our "crimes and follies in Egypt," and he is a Single-Chamber man on the ground that there is now no danger of party legislation (!)—but he fails in good temper and courtesy. He speaks, for instance, of the clergy as his "most unscrupulous opponents," emphasizing the charge by "excepting from the general indictment" one single name. Politics, of course, occupy a considerable part of the book, but there is plenty of matter into which they do not intrude and in which much that is pleasant and interest- ing will be found. First comes an account of early days, spent mostly at Woburn, with a highly amusing dis- course on the doctors of the old school and the now. " We will continue the bark and linseed," was the style of Dr. Parker Peps of the mid-Victorian era : "I know the peroxide dressing is rather beastly, but I'd stick it another day or two if I were you," says Tom Guy, a present-day practitioner. This is a propos of weak health in boyhood which brought about our author's entry at Harrow as a house- boarder, the Harrow chapter beginning with a warm eulogy on Dr. Montagu Butler and a fine appreciation of F. W. Farrar, an inspiring teacher and a preacher whose "gorgeous rhetoric" hold his young hearers spellbound. Whatever their elders may think, this is the speech that vanquishes the young. There is an excellent appreciation of • One Look Rack. 13y the let. Hon. George W. E. Russell. London : Wells Gardner, ])arton and Co. [ies. ed. net.] Westcott, whose last two years as Composition Master to the Sixth coincided with Mr. Russell's first two at school. Altogether he seems to have been fortunate in his teachers, even though one of them was the man to whom be ironically gives the pseudonym of Stick to right, at Harrow a bachelor, at Brighton a married man—he had married a housemaid. We could wish that the "Harrovian& " and " Oxoniana" had been longer than they are. When Mr. Russell quotes front Thorold Rogers the couplet "When ladling butter from a largo tureen See blustering Freeman butter blundering Green," he might have added: "And largely ladling from alternate tubs Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs."
This suggeste the chapter on " Literature," which will be found well to repay perusal. Mr. Russell says that his early style—he acquired a style very early—was "ludicrously rhetorical." It is a curious coincidence that the most "ludicrously rhetorical" writing in English literature was that of William Russell (1746-1794) in his History of Modern Europe.
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