BIOGRAPHIES.
My Life and Adventures. By Earl Russell. (Cassell. 256.)
"In my passage through life I have been chiefly struck by the essential stupidity of humanity as a whole in its conduct of life. People seldom seem to stop to think what they want of life." This dictum of Lord Russell's seems to have fasci- nated the publishers of his recent autobiography, for they quote it in a circular letter and quote it again in a pamphlet. Whether the author intended this big book for humanity as a whole, with its essential stupidity, or for the select and wise few, is a question not lightly answered. But it is certainly an odd production. After a few early chapters on his life at Winchester and Oxford (which he left in 1885, "accompanied to the railway station and seen off by scores of enthusiastic friends and defiantly wearing in my buttonhole the white flower of a blameless life "—a touching picture), he launches us on a vast and rather unsavoury sea of litigation. Then follow adventures at home and abroad, chapters bearing such titles as "I Practise the Law," "A City Gent," "The House of Lords," after which we get a chapter on the author and science, a very short chapter because, as he tells us, it is impossible in a book of this kind to deal seriously with any scientific questions. Had the book been of another kind and had not humanity as a whole been essentially stupid . . ? The next chapter, on "Religion and Conduct," pays a tribute to Paine's Age of Reason, and contains quota- tions from Whitman and Mr. Bertrand Russell. An odd book —sometimes amusing, sometimes mdrely vulgar, always restless, pretentious, making us wonder whether the writer, unlike the rest of humanity, has really stopped frequently to think what he wants of life.
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