DR. GORDON HAKE'S "MEMOIRS OF EIGHTY YEARS." *
THIS book reminds us of a legend, current, we believe, in one of our Universities, that the printing of a certain book at the academic press had to be suspended because the supply of capital "I's" fell short. A. book of recollections must, of course, be of necessity egotistical; but there is a difference between books. A narrative may be in the first person, and yet per- fectly modest, only retaining the charm of a personal associa- tion with the things and person with which it is concerned. But if the writer is a protagonist in what he relates, if we are constantly reminded of the "quorum pars magna fui," the effect is apt to be irritating. And Dr. Hake is, we are sorry to say, capable of offending grievously against good taste. There is a. passage, for instance, on p. 112, which it is painful in the extreme not only for• any believer in transub- stantiation, but for any one who regards the decencies of religious controversy, to read. We should be surprised, indeed, if Messrs. Bentley, the publishers, are not anxious to cancel it as soon as their attention is called to it. Surely Dr. Hake ought to have learnt in his eighty years that nothing is more intolerant than to use language which must give offence—and the offence is here of the very deepest—to those who hold different views. But Dr. Hake is not fair to those whom he would, we suppose, describe as having a professional interest in religion. Of religion itself, he speaks, perhaps with a certain air of patronage, but certainly not in- juriously. It is, if we understand his view, a necessity of mankind in general, whatever it may be to superior persons. He does not see that the poor can feel it (p. 288) or the rich condescend to it. (What, we wonder, is the meaning of the dictum that the Irish religion "appears to require some readjustment " because " it does not in its pre- sent form give the Divine Sanction to murder" P The com- plaint is that this is just what it does, and why it needs readjusting ) To the clergy he is conspicuously unfair. " Many," he is good enough to allow, " begin by being honest, and remain so for life," a concession which is a thinly-veiled insult. Elsewhere he is not even so favourable. The "culti- vated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable ground." When we read that he "admires them as gentlemen and men of education," we must presume that he is ironical. In another place, he wants to know why they want to be endowed. For the same reason, we may tell him, that education has to be endowed. The supply must not be measured by the demand, The best and most valuable things of all are those which the average man does not feel the want of. It shows his entire incapacity to judge of these things that Dr. Hake actually says of his kinsman, Charles Gordon, that " a slight knowledge of physiology would have sufficed to root out most of his theological ideas." Charles Gordon, without his " theological ideas "—the abiding sense, for instance, of a divine presence with him—would not have been the man he was, or anything like it. But the subject always makes Dr. Hake unfair. So he writes :—" Some men are vain to the last ; Addison was when he invited a nobleman to come and see how a Christan could die." Put thus, it looks like a piece of pure snobbishness. But for " a nobleman" read his " profligate stepson," who, indeed, happened to be a • M411100.9 of Eighty Year,. By Gordon Hake, Phyidoitin. London: Bentley and Son, BM, nobleman, and the impression, though not entirely free from priggishness, is very different.
Apart from these very serious faults, the Memoirs are of value. A sketch of Christ's Hospital, as it was seventy years ago, though it is pale indeed beside the vivid pictures of Lamb and Leigh Hunt, is interesting in its way. School-life was succeeded by medical training, and perhaps the most pleasing portion of the book is to be found in the writer's recollections, almost always kindly, of eminent persons in physic and surgery, ;—surgery, physician as he himself is, he manifestly prefers to the sister-service. Some good stories are told in this connection. One of the best, though not the most flattering, is the recorded advice of an. eminent practitioner : —"Never dine with a patient ; you will be sure, sooner or later, to let out the fool."
A variety of persons more or less interesting figure in these pages. There is a certain Marquis of Bristol, an Anglican Bishop, who, invited to dine with the Cardinals at Rome, was so insulted by finding that the room was over the debtors' prison, that he refused to be pacified till, a list of all the debts being brought him, he satisfied them by a cheque. Dr. Donaldson we hear of, the once-famous author of Tasher, as a pioneer of criticism, but of the most indiscreet kind, and the victim of a vanity which Dr. Hake describes as "incom- mensurable," meaning, we presume, " immeasurable ; we hear also of George Borrow, Dr. Latham (as to whom it might have been well to remember, De mortals nil nisi bonum), and D. G. Rossetti, who is very judiciously estimated. It is of him, indeed, that we get the fullest account that Dr. Hake has preserved of any of his friends. On the whole, the estimate of his intellectual and artistic powers is judicious :—" His intellectual power was not of a striking order, but it was adequate ; his charm lay in the artistic colouring of his mind, arrayed, as it was, in the fascinations of a Provençal attire." And, again : "In his writings he did not exercise much imagination, and none of the philosophic kind." It is thus that his critic accounts for some lamentable aberrations in some of his verse. Among the miscellanea of the book, we may mention the statement, which we sincerely hope is true, that Professor Schiff, of Florence, whose name stands for the most cruel of Vivisectionists, was "benevolent, and carefully provided against the creatures on which be operated being alive to pain." The latter part of Dr. Hake's volume is chiefly occupied with reminiscences of foreign travel, commonly dis- appointing, and not wholly unlike The Innocents Abroad, and some criticism on the author's own verse,—verse which the world has not had the good taste to appreciate. Dr. Hake has seen many things and many men in his "eighty years," but be has scarcely made the best of his opportunities.
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