tions that rendered Cambridge dear. I love the sleepy river,' he wrote much later; and we can guess why. Thirty years after he had left, speaking at the unveiling of Fawcett's statue at Lambeth, he said:

I always associate Fawcett with a garden. . . . He loved it . . . not least because a garden is the best of all places for those long talks with friends which were among the greatest pleasures of his life. The garden where I have oftenest met Fawcett, and where I have talked with him for long hours, never clouded by an unkind word, is the garden of an old Cambridge college, with a smooth bowling-green and a terrace walk by the side of the river, and a noble range of chestnut trees, and the grand pinnacles of King's College Chapel looking down through the foliage. Fawcett loved that garden well.

And does not this beautiful passage show how Stephen also loved it, and why? Well may his biographer say, 'the siren Cambridge had sung her song, and won such a lover as she has rarely had.'

Once in London, Stephen soon found as much work as he wanted. Debarred, as he imagined, from adopting the law, he was driven,' as he put it, to the occupation of penny-a-lining.' His pen was busy in many quarters in the Saturday Review, then at the height of its fame, in the newly established Pall Mall Gazette, in the Cornhill, Fraser, the Fortnightly (then edited by his friend Mr. Morley), and elsewhere. His work on the Cornhill and the Pall Mall Gazette brought him into connection with Mr. G. Murray Smith, a connection which ripened into affection, was cemented by common undertakings— notably, the Dictionary of National Biography-and lasted for the rest of Stephen's life. This is not the place to estimate or criticise the quality of Stephen's literary work-such a task would require an article by itself—but it may be pointed out that a large portion of his best writing took at first a journalistic form. This was the case with his Sketches from Cambridge, his Hours of Exercise, An Agnostic's Apology, Hours in a Library, Studies of a Biographer, and other works composed of scattered papers. These books show a unity of cohesion which indicate a definite conception and purpose in the author's mind. Of course there was an enormous mass of work, principally belonging to his earlier years, of the ordinary journalistic type-what he called his subterranean' work-which was not republished, and which Mr. Maitland has not sought, except in rare cases, to identify. As he well says, 'sufficient unto the day is the daily thereof, and to the weekly the weekly thereof.' There is a cacoethes servandi, as well as scribendi, but neither Stephen nor his biographer was likely to give way to it.

But besides these articles and essays, whether converted into books or not, what an amount of solid reading and thinking was put into the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century and The English Utilitarians-subjects in which family traditions and his own studies had steeped him from youth up! What fraternal

devotion and discriminating sympathy are to be found in the lives of his brother Fitzjames and of Henry Fawcett! What model biographies, distinguished alike by judgment and learning, lucidity and force, are the volumes he contributed to the 'Men of Letters' series-the lives of Johnson, Pope, Swift, and others! His philosophy, as displayed in these books, in the Science of Ethics, &c., has the severe sanity of the eighteenth century in which he delighted. He made no pretence of being a metaphysician. Metaphysics he regarded as unlikely to lead to discoveries, but as a legitimate, normal, and interesting branch of imaginative literature. The poet and philosopher have this in common: they prove nothing, but by utterly dissimilar means they suggest a view of life.' If it was true that he thought of philosophy as akin to poetry, he was equally apt to criticise poetry from the point of view of philosophy. His literary judgments do not show much sense of form or much taste for the finer shades and supreme dexterities of expression, whether in poetry or prose; he took no great delight in the mot propre or the perfect line. For him it was rather the contents that mattered; and of these he was a shrewd, penetrating and sympathetic judge. Common sense rather than subtlety marked his critical work; George Meredith applied to him the epithet 'equable'; and his biographer approves.

These sober, sane, and equable judgments and descriptions of men and things he continued to produce for nearly forty years, in the midst of much laborious editorial work, in connection first with the Cornhill, afterwards with the great undertaking of his life, the Dictionary of National Biography. Few, if any magazines, have attracted so brilliant a circle of writers as the Cornhill during Stephen's management. Matthew Arnold published in it his Literature and Dogma ; Robert Browning sent poems; George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Miss Thackeray, and other first-rate writers contributed novels; Henley and R. L. Stevenson (whom Stephen had brought together in Edinburgh) wrote essays. Of the editor's own contributions-which were many-a remark of George Meredith must be quoted, for its delicious invention and observant aptitude. Speaking of Stephen's style, he says: 'The only sting in it was an inoffensive humorous irony that now and then stole out for a rollover like a furry cub, or the occasional ripple on a lake in grey weather.'

But his great achievement was the Dictionary of National Biography. For nine years he toiled, almost without ceasing, at this heavy task, until his health broke down under the strain. To Mr. Sidney Lee is due the credit of completing what had been so well begun, but Mr. Lee would be the first to assign the chief praise to the pioneer who determined the lines and principles of the work, who selected and trained his regiment of contributors, and set a high example of patience, judgment, thoroughness, and all the other editorial virtues for his successor to follow. Of the value of the

Dictionary there are no two opinions; it is doubtful if it has its equal, it certainly has no superior, in any tongue. Not content with editing, he contributed to almost every volume; and his contributions contain some of his best though naturally not his most attractive work. Dry as these lives mostly are, they are frequently enlivened by touches of Stephen's humour, as in his description of Robert Owen 6 one of the intolerable bores who are the salt of the earth.' Of his dictionary style' his biographer picturesquely and truly says: 'It is Stephen's very self on one of his "going days": making a bee-line across country, with no ounce of flesh to spare, and with that terrible step that looked so short and was so long.'

The Dictionary shortened his life. For a year or two, about 1885, he paid no visit to his beloved Alps; and a man of his nervous temperament and fierce application could ill dispense with holidays. The consequences were disastrous. Repeated collapses compelled him in 1891 to give up the editorship, and he was never the same man again. To give up his Alpine holiday was a loss which nothing else could make good. For seven-and-thirty years Switzerland was to him a source of health and pure delight. He was no great traveller; two or three visits to the United States almost exhaust the tale of his wanderings far afield; but to the Alps he went back year after year, at first always in the summer, for climbing purposes, latterly in the winter, for health alone. One of the original members of the Alpine Club, he was for years one of its most venturesome and accomplished climbers. It was said of him that he strode from peak to peak like a pair of compasses'; and Mr. Whymper called him 'the fleetest of foot of all the Alpine brotherhood.' His many first ascents-his passage of the Eiger Joch, his conquest of the Schreckhorn, and other feats -are they not told in the pages of the Journal, or described with inimitable humour, often at his own expense, in The Playground of Europe?

It was quite in his own ironical vein to dwell on the athletic and sporting aspects of mountain travel; we know how he hated 'gush.' But Switzerland was to him far more than a health-resort, or a gymnasium; the good that he got from the mountains was at least as much moral and spiritual as physical. They were endeared to him by sacred associations with friends and comrades, and still more by what he had felt in their austere and majestic presence. The long days spent upon the heights, in the ethereal air, the solitude, the purity and mystery of the higher Alps, swept the cobwebs from his brain, the melancholy from his heart, the dross from his soul. No wonder that -to alter Wordsworth's line-' the precipice Haunted him like a passion,' or that, as Mr. Freshfield says, 'the Alps were for Stephen a playground, but they were also a cathedral.' All true mountaineers, all whole-hearted lovers of the Alps, know what this means. One does not worship a cathedral; one loves it because of its associations, the

emotions it inspires-because, in short, one worships in it. And what he worshipped, let Stephen himself say:

The mountains speak to me in tones at once more tender and more aweinspiring than that of any mortal teacher. The loftiest and sweetest strains of Milton and Wordsworth may be more articulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination. . . . There, as after a hot summer day the rocks radiate back their stores of heat, every peak and forest seems to be still redolent with the most fragrant perfume of memory. . . . They retain whatever of high and tender and pure emotion may have once been associated with them.

...

Stephen's first marriage, with Miss Minnie Thackeray, in 1867, put some limits to his climbing, though not to his enjoyment of the Alps, but it brought him instead domestic happiness. One of his love-letters must be quoted here. It was scratched with a fork on the back of the menu of a Political Economy Club dinner :

My dearest Minny,-I am suffering the torments of the damned from that God-forgotten Thornton, who is boring on about supply and demand when I would give anything to be with you. He is not a bad fellow, but just now I hate him like poison. O-0-0-0-oh!

Ever yours,

LESLIE STEPHEN.

Some charming letters to Mr. Holmes and other American friends -no space, alas! to quote them here-show conclusively how happy he was. His wife's death, in 1875, plunged him into corresponding woe; and again his deepest confidences seem to have been given to his American friends. To Mr. Norton he writes:

Do you sympathise with me when I say that the only writer whom I have been able to read with pleasure through this nightmare is Wordsworth? I used not to care for him specially, but now I love him.

In 1878 he was married again, to Mrs. Duckworth, and seventeen more years of wedded life were granted him. It was, on the whole— except for the overwork entailed by the Dictionary-his happiest time. A young family grew about him; his domestic affections, which were very strong, had full play; the circle of his friends was as large as he wished it to be; without going into what is called society, he came more in contact with the world, and was taken out of his somewhat melancholy self. Work he had in plenty, work he enjoyed, at all events after 1891. He was the recognised head of his profession, the doyen of literary judges, 'the best-loved,' as an unknown admirer styled him, of English critics.' The expression pleased and surprised him; for few men have ever been less conscious of their charm than Leslie Stephen.

So the busy, fertile life went on, till in 1895 the shattering blow fell, and his house was a second time left unto him desolate. The grief,' says his biographer, 'was much too deep for words'; but 'with quiet courage he tried, as it were, to piece together the fragments of a

shattered life.' Other losses he had too-losses of friends like Lowell, a nephew of great promise, a step-daughter of rare beauty and charm. His deafness grew upon him, to such an extent as to cut him off from all share in ordinary conversation. Of his subject in these latter years, Mr. Maitland gives us several life-like and touching sketches. After remarking that 'Stephen playing patience was not only a sight to see, but, if his luck was bad, a sound to hear,' he continues:

Another sight I remember, for I have often seen it-Stephen sitting in an armchair, with some favourite book in one hand, while the other twists and untwists a lock of hair at one side of the head. Hair and beard are thin; every trace of harshness has disappeared from the face, but not every trace of that fanatical enthusiasm of which the essay on rowing speaks. He does not look much like a judicial critic of that book; but he does look very like Don Quixote as noble a Don Quixote as painter could wish to see. And there is another look. The blue eyes wander round appealingly from child to child, for he cannot hear what they are saying, and wants to know why they are laughing. The little joke must be shouted in his ear or he will not be content.

No wonder that his letters are no longer gay; but the sadness was mingled with the thankful recognition of much happiness in the past, and of some still left in the present. His children, his correspondence with a few friends, and work were his great resources.

I worked [he says] in order to distract my mind from painful thoughts, and at last broke down under the strain. . . . Meanwhile I have one great comfort. My children are all well and growing up as I could wish. My wife's two sons are as good to me as if they were my own, and my home is therefore in many ways a happy one, even now.

And again :

My life is so sad and lonely, except for my children, that it might cease without loss to me or anyone. If I can still do some work, however, it will be bearable. I am cheerful enough, in a quiet way, as long as I can do something. Well, I have had a wonderfully good time, and must not whine.

Nor did he. His old impatience and irritability almost disappeared. 'I am,' he once wrote, 'like my father, skinless, over-sensitive and nervously irritable. . . one of the most easily bored of mankind.' But such slight defects were only on the surface. Beneath them were the real warmth and charm which made Lowell call him 'the most lovable of men,' and Mr. A. Greenwood write of him: None of his friends were able to stop at friendship for him; the sentiment went straightway on to affection.' Such as had insight and understanding soon found what was the essential nature of the man, but others were no doubt repelled by the impatience and irritability which he sometimes displayed. He was not one of those who suffer fools gladly. 'I cannot bear long sittings with dull people,' he once wrote; 'even when alone in my family I am sometimes as restless as a hyena.'

But [says his biographer, truly] all the excitability, all the fidgets, belonged to the most superficial stratum of his character. They were an exterior net