The unusually great length of ime covered by the various papers this volume gives it an additional terest. Thus, we discover our author proving to his not to our satisfaction of Victoria was pre-eminently an age of law reform, and of little: suppose everybody," he irks, in the course of this essay, admit that all our greatest posts, dramatists, actors, warriors, historians, philosophers, orators, divines, took the unmannerly precaution to live and die outside the limits of the Victorian Age." But passage itself was written thin the limits of that age, and though Br. Birrell, with commendable honesty, has allowed it to stand, T doubt if the sight of it makes him feel quite comfortable now that he fs stranded among the raging, tearing Georgians, and Victoria and her mighty men are sinking below. the horizon of time, but looming fever more largely in the memory.
For the rest, this volume is very much the brother of the volumes we have been given before. There is talk of Leslie Stephen, Coleridge, Newman, Jane Austen, Fielding, Byron, Chateaubriand, and the val amusing smaller fry, whom Mr. Birrell serves up with the dressing of his learning and the sauce of hhis humour. Many of these papers are only reviews, and the practice of reprinting reviews is not to be encouraged; indeed, it would not be a bad idea if writers.were compelled to take out a licence or some form of official permission to reprint their reviews. But if I were in charge of the department that granted such licences, I should send tone to Mr. Birrell even before he had asked for it. If he has still more gleaning to do from the perlodicals of the last 30 or. 40 years, let him glean again, and Mr. Heinemann will print and publish, and we will read and rejoice, only' too de-Tighted to see again' tha' cunning hand administering the oil and vinegar of his criticism to the salad of literature—"Daily News."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.