million fold more truly life than anything they have yet been able even to imagine. But the greater number shake their yet unfashioned heads and say they have no evidence for this that will stand a moment's examination.

The fantastic and the poet are not incongruous; but the author of "Erewhon" presents the far rarer combination of the fantastic and the man of science. He is a sceptic who wishes to preserve religious ideals, but there is a spring, a freshnessif we may say so about his scepticism which removes him from his fellow thinkers. An intellectual Quixote, he slashes with his sword of wit in the cause of Truth, though on his way he sometimes knocks down a household god or two. If, as he says in his preface, he belongs to the Broad Church, he should have added that his Church is so broad that it has no boundaries at all. His book is not intended for the orthodox or tenderminded, and they would do well not to read it. But the audience to which it does appeal will not easily forget it.

The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, 17451826. Edited by the Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale. (Murray. 32s. net.) It would be hard to find better company than Lady Sarah Lennox, as her letters reveal her to us. She dominates now as she must have done then, and gives us one more proof that death does not exist for fascinating people. She resembles her own "Little Madame Fitz" for she is "like nothing but herself." Tender, brilliant, impressionable, constant, humorous, serious and full of loving courage, she was, perhaps, the most unworldly woman that ever lived in the great world. She seems, indeed, like some meteor that soon grew tired of coruscating and settled contentedly in the heavens as a fixed star. Born in 1745, she was the fourth daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Richmond. The first Lord Holland, who had married her sister, was her uncle; Charles James Fox, four years her junior, was one of her nephews; Lord Edward Fitzgerald was another; she was the betrothed of George III.; she was the mother of the three great Napiers. In youth she lived at Holland House, and at fourteen she burst upon the town.

"Of course one thinks the people sensible that like one," she once wrote, and she had reason to think everybody sensible. Her boon companion, then as later, was the lifelong friend, to whom from her seventeenth to her seventy-third year nearly all her letters were addressed-Lady Susan Fox-Strangways (the daughter of Lord and Lady Ilchester, Lord Holland's brother and sister-in-law), almost as fascinating a woman as Lady Sarah herself. They went out together, "all bonneted and hooded up in public," to "giggle and laugh at the ridiculous people they saw," they discussed the Etonian, Charles James', Latin verses on Lady Susan; they acted tragedies and comedies, with "Charles as Anthony and the Copper Captain." At one moment Lady Sarah is deep in flirtation with her "Ajax," Lord Errol, at another she is deeper in the "Iliad." At fifteen she became engaged to George III., and in the middle of their engagement his betrothal to Princess Charlotte was announced. Lady Sarah, said Lord Holland, cared more for the death of her pet squirrel which occurred at the same time. "I did not love him and only liked him," she wrote, "nor did the title weigh anything with me." She never regretted the throne till the King went mad, when she thought she might have helped him by her devotion. But she often rejoiced she was not Queen, especially at the outbreak of the American war, because she could not have endured to be tied to one who promoted it.

At seventeen she married the handsome, horseracing Sir Charles Bunbury, but space fails to describe, first their happiness, then his repeated absences and Lord William Gordon's passion for her. She left home with Lord William in 1769, but misery of conscience and her friends' persuasions drove her from him and she returned to twelve years' retirement, with her brother, the Duke of Richmond, at Goodwood, in spite of Sir Charles' entreaties, even after their divorce, that she should marry him again. When she was thirty-six (in 1781) she became the wife of George Napier and at last found the real happiness of life-in London lodgings, with the husband

she adored and with five children on £500 a year. The children increased to nine; Colonel Napier's military career was precarious; she lost three daughters and the husband who was more than all; blindness and poverty came upon her; but she felt, enjoyed, understood to the end, measuring the issues of life with a deep and just appreciation. Directly she became poor she gave up "society" for "company," indeed her immense family was a world in itself.

Most of her relations were important in public affairs. "Let us talk," she once wrote, "about that incomprehensible thing, politicks." But for all the "incomprehensible,” no one can give a better account of the state of Ireland, or more acutely discern the qualities of the men she came across.

I won't name my brother's politicks to you [she says] because I really do not understand them; but in my poor opinion he wants to spin sentiment, which does mighty well in love, but not in politicks, and he will try to be so very right that he will be very wrong.

She hated "Billy Pitt" as much as she loved Fox.

'Tis not possible to know him and not adore him [she writes] Nothing but a supernatural power could, I think, make Charles the Guide of Administration, in spight of all the pains he takes to marr the genius that Providence gave him. I am so far from thinking he seeks greatness, that I am sure greatness pursues him into gaming-houses.

And later on: "I had rather be disappointed Sarah Napier than the Cormorant, Mrs. Bouverie, and I love Charles the better for being duped to the end of the chapter." That "end of the chapter" was spent with his wife and Lord Holland, "the Privy Council of his heart," as Lady Sarah calls them; and Mrs. Fox's simple account of her husband's last hours, published in the Appendix, is not the least moving page in these two absorbing volumes.

Lady Sarah confronted her blindness with serene gaiety. "Nor do I," she says, "dwell much on the charms of my cataract, tho' it is just like the King's." This was in 1806, two after her husband's death. Her sons' glories and perils in

years

Their subse

66

Instead of

the Peninsular war came to give her fresh life. quent marriages made her last years sweet. doating in my old age, I grow wiser by living with young people," she wrote. She had conquered happiness and she kept it to the end; it came in 1826, when she was eighty-one years old.

Lady Ilchester's charming and lucid Preface to the "Life and Letters" adds to our debt of gratitude to her. So do Lord Holland and Mr. Henry Napier's Memoirs of Lady Sarah with which the book begins. So last-and also first-do the beautifully reproduced portraits of which the book is full.

Letters of John Richard Green. Edited by Leslie Stephen. (Macmillan. 15s. net.)-Green's "Short History," if it has not "superseded Hume," has not been superseded, though Bright in his way and Gardiner in his have rehearsed the story of the English nation, and instructed and somewhat wearied their readers. Green never wearied us; and it is refreshing to be reminded, by the publication of his letters, of the indefatigable, unconquerable, cheery little hero, whose personality was as charming as his style, and his conversation as instructive and enlivening as his books, who worked as hard in an East End parish as in the field of history, who sacrificed to conscience the prospect of canonries and deaneries, who had no enemies but disease and a few critics, and whom every one loved that knew him.

Green was not exactly what is called a good letter-writer. He writes without premeditation and without thought of style; he is colloquial and condescends to slang; his facetiousness is sometimes tiresome, as facetiousness generally is; but now and then he warms into eloquence, and when he does so his writing has all the charm of his "Short History," with the added grace of an outburst of spontaneous feeling. Above all, he wrote as he felt and thought; and if he is too much occupied, for the ordinary reader, with questions of the crow-and-kite period, the virtues and vices-if they had any virtues of the House of

Godwine and the Angevin Kings, we must remember that his chief correspondent was Freeman, and that it argues great detachment of mind to be able to write to Freeman letters so perfectly free from pedantry as these; and, we may add, no inconsiderable courage to take Freeman by the beard so familiarly as he does, and rate him severely (as Mr. Barlow did the bear) about intolerance, wearisome repetition, and want of taste.

The letters give a delightful impression of a perfectly sane mind, full of the enthusiasm of humanity (a phrase not yet stale in the sixties and seventies), devoted to duty, a splendid worker, combining in wholesome proportion the types of the energetic clergyman and the devoted student, precocious and universal in knowledge but never cumbered with learning; a perfect friend, a lover of children, never complaining of labour or the "long disease" of life, nor "looking over the edge of his work," and sighing for a Chair or a Stall. Some of this we might have guessed from the animation and brilliancy of "Little Book" as he lovingly calls it, and from what we have heard of the devotion of such friends as Freeman, Stubbs, Boyd Dawkins, and Bryce; but it comes out with new freshness and reality in this record of a life spent in struggling with illness but never yielding to depression, disappointment, or cares of money, a life supported and exalted by lofty feeling, the love of all beautiful things, and a faith in the goodness that orders the world, and the dignity of human life. "You are a vivid man, as vivid as lightning," Tennyson, who usually hit a nail on the head, said to him; and vividness is his characteristic, in history, in letter-writing, and in conversation. Never was there a scholar with less pretension, never a historian with fewer crotchets or less of dryasdust heaviness. Freeman on the right, Stubbs on the left, das Weltkind in der Mitte kept his cheerful path, neither worshipping indifferent heroes like the one, nor enveloped in sheepskins like the other.

Green, like Freeman and Kingsley, to whom he extended more toleration than his severer brethren, believed in the