Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/387

. vii. MAY ii, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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For the light it throws upon history and historical personages, and for the revelation it affords of Swift's own character, the 'Journal' is alike precious. Nowhere is Swift seen to so great advantage as in these intimate communings with the woman he loved. If one seeks to learn how arid and barren was his life, one must learn to judge it from what are its oases ; and if one seeks to pardon all but unpardonable offence, one is called on to do so in the ' Journal.' It needs all the tenderness of the " little language" to reconcile one to the exhibition of what in Swift is unlovable arid, not to mince matters, base. Neither Swift nor his book is, how- ever, now on trial, and all we have to do is to congratulate our readers upon an edition which, for the present generation at least, is ideal.

THE new number of the Library has for frontis- piece an excellent portrait of William Morris, with an account of whose personality and library it opens. ' Cornaro in English ' is the subject of an edifying article by Mr. W. E. A. Axon. It is, among other things, a bibliography of the ' Trattato della Vita Sobria,' written in his eighty-third year. Cornaro lived to be almost, if not quite, a hundred. Mr. James Duff Brown advocates ' Descriptive Cataloguing ' as likely to be of service to the reader. His system, to be useful, seems to need expansion. Mr. H. R. Plomer's ' Glance at the Whittingham Ledgers ' supplements contributions of the author to ' N. & Q. It reproduces many illustrations. Mr. Pollard's paper on ' Book Illustration in the Fifteenth Cen- tury' is both interesting and valuable. It might, however, with advantage, be continued; material is abundant.

' THE DISCOVERIES OF PASTEUR' is a noteworthy paper, in the Quarterly Review, by one who possesses ample knowledge regarding the discoveries and career of the great discoverer, and who is in ful 1 sympathy with the work he did. We wish, how ever, the writer had given a few more details regarding the man himself, apart from his work. Pasteur was of peasant extraction. His ancestors and their kin were serfs until the time of his grandfather; theirs was probably a mild form oj servitude, for Claude Etienne was emancipated on payment of four louis d'or. The family were tanners. Pasteur's father, when not in the army, followed the ancestral trade ; but, from the scanty notices we have, he seems to have been devoted to his duties as a soldier. He rose to be a sergeant major, and won the cross of the Legion of Honour, When the army was remodelled after the Bourbon restoration, the body in which he had served became the Regiment Dauphin. This was no place for the devoted imperialist, so he returned to his hides and his tanpits, only to leave them again for a time to fight for his old master during the Hundrec Days. The father was, we are told, a slow, reflective man, of somewhat melancholy nature, and in early life, it would seem, Louis showed much of the same nature. He had an ardent desire for knowledge but when at sixteen he was sent to Paris to th< Lycee Saint Louis he suffered from home-sickness so acutely that he had to be taken away. His original training was that of a chemist, but an intellect such as his was not to be limited to one line of thought. His life-work branched off in unthought-of directions. Biology, medicine, physio logy, and many of the processes of the manufactur ing industries were in later life equally familiar to him. In all these regions he made great discoveries

I, as surely we may do, we are to estimate the >enefactors of our race by the amount of relief they lave given to human ana animal suffering, Pasteur must oe reckoned among the noblest souls that the world has produced. So tender-hearted was he in the presence of pain, that even when a boy he could not be persuaded to go out shooting. * Humanism ind Christianity ' indicates knowledge of a subject beset with difficulties, on which there are wide divergences of opinion. So far as humanism re- sulted from a true desire for culture and a revolt against the narrowing influences of a very imper-
 * ect civilization, no sensible person can have any-

thing to say but what is favourable ; but there is another side to the picture. In its latter phases bhere was much that was revolting, and it also led to the mere imitation, for the sake of style alone, of the classic authors, a perversity which has done untold damage, as it has been the fertile source of evils from which even the rapid growth of modern languages has not yet freed us. The notice of the late Bishop of London is reasonable and fair. We may not criticize it so far as it pertains to theo- logy, but the estimate of Creighton as an historian is just and not too highly coloured.

LITERARY articles in the Fortnightly form but a small percentage of its contents. Most important among them is the disquisition by Mr. W. E. Garrett Fisher on ' Mr. George Murray Smith and "National Biography."' This is, in fact, an essay on collections pi biographies generally, such as, on a more ambitious scale, was contributed fourteen years ago by the late Chancellor Christie to the Quarterly Review. That the conception of the scheme was Mr. Smith's own we were told by him- self, and the information has since been repeated by Mr. Leslie Stephen. It is urged by Mr. Fisher that the appendix ought to include the life of the founder surely a most reasonable proposition, though it is suggested that, as in the case of Wren and St. Paul's, the mere inclusion of his name, with the motto " Si monumentum requiris, circumspice," would be adequate. The tribute paid to Mr. Smith, Mr. Stephen, and Mr. Lee is of course thoroughly merited. A further tribute to one of the editors is furnished in a sonnet written by Mr. William Watson on Mr. Sidney Lee's ' Life of Shakespeare.' Mr. E. H. Cooper pays a glowing tribute to Miss Charlotte Mary Yonge, and is disposed to place her, in some respects, next among women workers to the late Queen. No great reader of novels are we, and especially of the novels of women. Mr. Cooper has, however, inspired us with a velleity to read her works, and we hope a cheap and uniform edition will soon furnish an opportunity of so doing. M. Re"ne" (sic) Doumic supplies an interesting account of ' The Literary Movement in France.' Mr. Hamil- ton Fyfe deals with the question of a national theatre, now much debated. As a Literary Supple- .ment appears ' Laboremus,' a wild piece of mys- ticism, or symbolism, or what not, from Bjornstjerne Bjornson. In the Nineteenth Century Mr. Walter Frewen Lord discusses ' The Novels of Anthony Trollope.' We read with much interest what is said, though we are puzzled with the kind of criticism that opens an article with a sentence such as "Lord Beaconsfield was the Paul Veronese of English novelists." Would it not be equally apt to say that R. L. Stevenson was the Robin Adair of English fiction, or Ibsen is the Charlemagne of Norwegian saga ? The cause why Trollope's work