Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/63

 Rh his life was great and fruitful. To enumerate all his writings would be to recite a lengthy catalogue. Many of them were on subjects more or less controversial; yet I will venture to say that, however widely one might differ from his conclusions, it was impossible to read anything he wrote without receiving an intellectual stimulus such as results only from contact with an original mind. Some men display their best qualities only in their books. I remember a favoured undergraduate who had been asked to meet a writer of genius at the table of the head of his college, telling me afterwards of his disappointment. The author, to whose conversation he had looked forward with such lively anticipations, would only talk about the excellencies of buttered toast! Dr. Brinton would not have disappointed him. A man of wide learning and exquisite literary taste, there were few intellectual subjects on which he could not and would not talk in a way that conveyed instruction without patronage and made discussion one of the keenest of pleasures. He received every honour which academic and scientific bodies in America, as well as many in Europe, could bestow; and he added lustre to them all. His name was a household word to British, hardly less than to American, anthropologists; and we join with sad hearts in the last homage of regret universally paid by his countrymen to the author of The Myths of the New World, The American Race, and Religions of Primitive Peoples.

Nor can I forget, among those who on our own side of the water have passed into the unknown, one whose premature departure has for some of us cast a darker gloom over the closing months of a gloomy year, and has called forth more than one eloquent memorial of sorrow from intimate and sympathetic friends, and at least one graceful and touching tribute from an opponent in many a controversial tournament. Mr. Grant Allen was not, like professor Brinton, a member of this Society. But he was an earnest and widely-read student of tradition. Of great and multiform