James Hutchison Stirling, patriarch of British philosophers, was born at Glasgow in 1820, studied at Glasgow University, and practised 18431851 as a surgeon near Aberdare in South Wales; but afterwards went to Paris and Heidelberg, and devoted himself to philosophy. His Secret of Hegel (1865; new ed. 1900), a masterpiece of philosophical insight and expository genius, opened up an unknown world to English readers, and gave a powerful impulse to the study of philosophy; in 1881 came his Complete Text-book to Kant. LL.D. both of Edinburgh and of Glasgow, he delivered the first course of Gifford lectures at Edinburgh -Philosophy and Theology (1890). Other works, hardly less original, incisive, and influential, are an assault on Hamilton's doctrine of perception (1865); a translation, with notes, of Schwegler's History of Philosophy (1867; 12th ed. 1893); Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay (1868); As Regards Protoplasm (1869; complete ed. 1872), a reply to Huxley; Lectures on the Philosophy of Law (1873); Burns in Drama (1878); Darwinianism (1894), a trenchant criticism of the three Darwins; What is Thought? or the Problem of Philosophy (1900); and, finally, The Categories (1903). In Germany, as well as in Italy and elsewhere, the Secret of Hegel was accepted as a profound, brilliant, and authentic exegesis ; Emerson knew no modern British book that showed such competence to analyse the most abstruse problems of the science, and, much more, such singular vigour and breadth of view in treating the matter in relation to literature and humanity.' And Carlyle thought its author 'the only man in Britain capable of bringing metaphysical philosophy, in the ultimate, German or European, and highest actual form of it, distinctly home to the understanding of British men who wish to understand it.' Lewis Campbell was born 3rd September 1830, at Edinburgh, the son of a cousin of Thomas Campbell the poet, and was educated at the Academy of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, and Trinity and Balliol Colleges at Oxford. He took Anglican orders, and in 1856-58 was vicar of an English parish; from 1863 to 1892 was Professor of Greek at St Andrews, where he delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1894-95. He has edited the plays of Sophocles and three of Plato's dialogues, one of them in collaboration with Professor Jowett, and has translated Eschylus and Sophocles into spirited and graceful English verse. Besides other books and articles on classical subjects he has published sermons, written (in collaboration with W. Garnett) the Life of Clerk Maxwell, and (with Evelyn Abbott) edited Jowett's Life and Letters. Friedrich Max-Müller (1823-1900), son of the German poet Wilhelm Müller, was born at Dessau, and educated at Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris; and through Bunsen was, as an accom plished Sanskritist, asked to England to edit the Rig Veda for the East India Company. Settling at Oxford, he was successively Taylorian Professor of Modern Languages and, from 1868, of Comparative Philology, a study he did more than any one else to promote in England, though many of his favourite doctrines have been superseded. Besides a history of Sanskrit literature and books on the science of religion, of thought, and of mythology, he issued in singularly nervous, polished, and idiomatic English the essays he called Chips from a German Workshop (1868–75), and the Glasgow Gifford lectures on natural religion (1889-93). He held numerous academic and other honours, and in 1896 was made a member of the Privy Council. Auld Lang Syne (1898-99) was autobiographical; and his wife edited his Life and Letters (1902). Thomas Hodgkin, born of Quaker stock at Tottenham in 1831, and educated at University College, London, became partner in a large banking house at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Devoting learned leisure to historical writing, he has recorded the history of Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire in Italy and her Invaders (7 vols. 1880–98); and as parerga wrote monographs on The Dynasty of Theodosius (1889) and Theodoric the Goth (1891), and a Life of Charlemagne (1897). Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), born in Bombay, graduated at London University and at Cambridge. Ordained in 1854, he was for many years a master at Harrow, and in 1871-76 head-master of Marlborough College; in 1876 he became canon of Westminster and rector of St Margaret's, archdeacon of Westminster in 1883, and Dean of Canterbury in 1895. An eloquent preacher and a copious author, he wrote Eric and other stories of school-life, books on philology and education, a Life of Christ (1874) which ran through twelve editions in as many months, a Life of St Paul, besides Lives of the Fathers and a History of Interpretation. One of several volumes of sermons was Eternal Hope (1878), disputing the doctrine of eternal punishment. Darkness and Dawn (1892) was a story of Nero's days, and Gathering Clouds (1895) of Chrysostom's. His Life by his son was published in 1903. Frederic Harrison, born in London in 1831, was educated at King's College School, London, and Wadham College, Oxford, taking a classical first-class in 1853. He became Fellow and tutor of his college, but was called to the Bar in 1858, and practised conveyancing and in the Courts of Equity. He has served on more than one Royal Commission, from 1877 till 1889 was Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law to the Inns of Court, and was an alderman in the London County Council. He is an advanced Liberal and HomeRuler, and his outlook on the world is largely conditioned by his zeal as a convinced Comtist. Since 1880 he has been president of the English Positivist Committee. An eager student of history and literature, as a critic he wields a versatile and trenchant pen. He has written on the meaning of history (1862), on order and progress, on education and the choice of books, on Byzantine history, and on early Victorian literature; edited the Positivist Calendar of Great Men, and published much on Positivist matters, especially on Comte's Positive Polity; is author of books on Cromwell, William the Silent, King Alfred, and Ruskin (1902), the latter containing much original and suggestive criticism; and we have further had from him a collection of critiques of Tennyson, Mill, and others, and a volume on Washington, with other addresses delivered in America (1901). Sir Leslie Stephen, son of Sir James Stephen, for many years Colonial Under-Secretary, was born at Kensington Gore, 28th November 1832. He was educated at Eton, King's College, London, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was his intention to follow a clerical career, and he took holy orders, but in consequence of increasing intellectual dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church, he abandoned the idea of becoming a clergyman and devoted himself to literature. Settling in London, he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette as well as to the Fortnightly Review, Fraser's Magazine, and Macmillan's Magazine. In 1871 he was appointed editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and retained this position till 1882, when he resigned in order to undertake the duties of editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. The first volume of the Dictionary appeared early in 1885, and under Stephen's editorship twenty quarterly volumes were published. He afterwards appointed Mr Sidney Lee-since 1883 his assistant -joint-editor, and early in 1891, in impaired health, he abandoned the editorship to his coadjutor, but continued to be contributor. In 1895 he was appointed president of the London Library in succession to Tennyson, and in June 1902 was created a Knight Commander of the Bath. A thinker of singular independence and energy, a critic of exceptional learning, breadth, and sanity, Sir Leslie Stephen has been an industrious writer, amongst his works being The Playground of Europe (1871), Hours in a Library (three series, 1874-79), The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876 and 1881), Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking (1879), The Science of Ethics (1882), Life of Henry Fawcett (1885), An Agnostic's Apology (1893), Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1895), and Studies of a Biographer (4 vols. 1898-1902). work on The English Utilitarians (3 vols. 1900) consists mainly of studies of Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. A disciple of Hume, Bentham, and the Mills, in his Science of Ethics he retains on the whole the utilitarian system, modified by the new light thrown upon the ethical development of man by the theory of Darwin and the speculations of Spencer. His great course Stopford Augustus Brooke, born in 1832 at Letterkenny in Donegal, had a distinguished at Trinity College, Dublin, and taking orders, became a curate in London. His first incumbency was St James's Chapel (1866-75); his second, Bedford Chapel, Bloomsbury, where, in virtue of his independence of thought and the literary grace of his sermons, he came to be till his resignation in 1894 amongst the foremost London preachers. In 1880, on dogmatic grounds connected with miracles, he severed his connection with the Church of England. For a time he had been a royal chaplain. His Life of Robertson of Brighton (1865) from the first ranked as a classical biography; his Primer of English Literature (1876), unique amongst primers, was followed by his History of Early English Literature (2 vols. 1892) and a one-volume work on English Literature to the Norman Conquest (1898). Amongst his volumes of sermons and theological works are Jesus and Modern Thought and The Gospel of Joy. A poet himself, he is a critic of sympathetic insight, and he has published, besides a little book on Milton, important studies of Tennyson (1894) and Browning (1902). With a colleague he prepared A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (1901); and the first section of the present work (Vol. I. pp. 1-30) is from his pen. James Cotter Morison (1832-88), son of the proprietor of Morison's Pills, was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, and lived much in France. His masterpiece, The Life of St Bernard (1863), was dedicated to Carlyle. For his friend Mr Morley he wrote Gibbon (1878) and Macaulay (1882) in the Men of Letters' series; his last work, The Service of Man (1887), was a criticism of revealed religion from the Positive point of view Sir Lewis Morris was born at Penrhyn in Carmarthen in 1833, and educated at Sherborne and Jesus College, Oxford, where in 1855 he took a first in classics and won the Chancellor's prize. He practised at the Bar as a conveyancer from 185; to 1881, and subsequently devoted himself to local work in Wales in connection with education and politics, but failed (as a Liberal candidate) to gain a seat in Parliament for a Welsh constituency Songs of Two Worlds (3 vols. 1872-75) by A New Writer' showed taste, grace, craftsmanship, and the influence of Tennyson; The Epic of Hades (1876, by the same anonymous New Writer,' retold in a sufficiently modern spirit the myths and legends of ancient Greece-of Helen, Endymion, Marsyas. and the rest. These pretty idyls were welcomed with joy by a great public. His critics were will ing here, as in his later work, to recognise attrac tive narrative, metrical skill, clear and sometimes forcible thought, unmistakable talent, but refused to acknowledge evidence of true poetic genius. He has since published Gwen, a Drama in Monlogue; The Ode of Life; Songs Unsung; Gyi, a Tragedy; A Vision of Saints (1890), Idylls and Lyrics (1896), Harvest Tide, and many other books of verse, besides articles and addresses. In 1877 he was made an honorary Fellow of his old college; in 1895 he was made a knight-bachelor; and he holds a Greek decoration and some other honours. Edward Burnett Tylor was born at Camberwell in 1832, educated at the Friends' school, Grove House, Tottenham, and starting from Cuba in 1856 with a friend, made a scientific journey through Mexico, one result of which was his Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans (1861). He was recognised as the most philosophical of English anthropologists and one of the moulders of the science when, already F.R.S. and an honorary graduate of Oxford and St Andrews, he was appointed successively keeper of the Oxford University Museum (1883), Reader in Anthropology, and Professor of Anthropology; and he has been Gifford lecturer at Aberdeen and president of the Anthropological Society. His Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (2 vols. 1871; 3rd ed. 1891) stand first among works of their class, in learning, arrangement, grasp of principles, and breadth of view. The foundation of his philosophy of man is involved in the significance he finds in the various ideas, rules, and usages that accompany or flow from animism, the child-like apprehension by the primitive savage of disembodied spiritual existences, as the minimum of religion and the basis of culture. One of the best introductory handbooks to a subject ever written is his attractive, luminous, and comprehensive Anthropology (1881). Sir Edwin Arnold, the son of a Sussex magistrate, was born in 1832, and was sent to school at Rochester, to King's College, London, and to University College, Oxford, where he was elected a scholar. He won the Newdigate (1853) with a poem on Belshazzar's Feast, for a while was second master at Birmingham, and afterwards became principal of the Deccan College at Poona. Returning to England in 1861, he joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph, with which, as editor and otherwise, he has been since identified. He published a volume of poems in 1853, and as early as 1875, in The Song of Songs of India, was busy with his life-task of interpreting in English verse the life and thought of the East. His most important book is The Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation (1879), a verse rendering of the story of the life of Buddha, with an exposition of Nirvana and Karma and the rest of his teaching, and, incidentally, descriptions of the scenery and manners of ancient India. His statement of Indian philosophy has not been accepted by experts as impeccable, and his fluent and sometimes grandiose blank verse was by critics generally regarded as lacking in distinction; but the work attained great popularity, and by the end of the century had gone through sixty English and eighty American editions. In The Light of the World (1891) he attempted, more audaciously and less successfully, to do for Jesus Christ's life and teaching what he had done for Buddha. The subject was less unfamiliar, the inadequacy of the treatment more generally recognised, and the not infrequent infelicities more inevitably conspicuous. There was little to rivet attention, the paraphrases of the gospel story were found pedantic or purposeless, and, spite of much fine writing in smooth and copious (but monotonous) blank verse, the whole failed of effect. Other works are Pearls of the Faith; With Sa'adi in the Garden (translations from the Gulistan); The Tenth Muse, and other Poems; SIR EDWIN ARNOLD. Potiphar's Wife; Adzuma, or the Japanese Wife (a play); The Voyage of Ithobal. He has visited India and Japan, and given readings in the United States; and has written books on his travels, some of them originally articles in his paper. He is C.S.I. (1877) and K.C.I.E. (1888), and has Siamese, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish decorations. His third wife is a Japanese lady. Lord Avebury had made his name in literature as Sir John Lubbock long ere he was created a peer (1900). The son of the astronomer Sir John William Lubbock (1803-65), he was born in London in 1834; from Eton he passed at fourteen into his father's banking-house; in 1856 became a partner; served on several educational and currency commissions; and in 1870 was returned for Maidstone in the Liberal interest, in 1880 for London University-after 1886 as a Liberal Unionist. He was the means of passing more than a dozen important measures, including the Bank Holidays Act, the Bills of Exchange Bill, the Ancient Monuments Bill, and the Shop Hours Bill. He holds honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and several other home and foreign universities; was vice-chancellor of London University 1872-80; and has been president of the British Association, vice-president of the Royal Society, president of the London Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the London County Council, and president of many scientific associations at home and honorary fellow of many learned societies abroad. Distinguished for his original researches on primitive man and on the habits of bees and ants, he is almost equally well known as having greatly contributed, by the interest of his exposition, to popularise all the scientific subjects with which he deals; and his treatises on the practical philosophy of life have some of them reached their two hundredth thousand. His selection of the hundred best books in universal literature greatly extended the mental horizon of many Englishmen and Englishwomen. He has given innumerable lectures and addresses, scientific and popular, and contributed more than a hundred memoirs to the Transactions of the Royal Society and other scientific journals. He has also published Prehistoric Times (1865; 6th ed. 1900); The Origin of Civilisation (1870; 6th ed. 1902); The Origin and Metamorphoses of Insects (1874); British Wild-flowers in Relation to Insects (1875); Ants, Bees, and Wasps (1882); The Senses and Instincts of Animals (1888); The Pleasures of Life (1887-89); The Beauties of Nature (1892); The Use of Life (1894); and The Scenery of Switzerland (1896). Sabine Baring-Gould, born at Exeter in 1834, of an old Devon family, in early life lived much in Germany and France. Educated at Clare College, Cambridge, he became incumbent of Dalton near Thirsk in 1866, and rector of East Mersea, Colchester, in 1871; and in 1881 presented himself to the rectory of Lew Trenchard, Devon, having on his father's death (1872) succeeded to the estate there. He is one of the most indefatigable, multifarious, and unequal of authors. His eighty works include, besides several volumes of sermons and theological works, collections of English minstrelsy and west-country songs; books of travel in Iceland, Brittany, and South France; works on Germany, past and present, and its Church; histories of the Cæsars and Napoleon Bonaparte; a whole series of popular antiquarian publications, of which The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) and Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866) were the most popular; collections of fairy stories, of historic oddities, and strange events; and a long series of novels, of which Mehalah (1880), John Herring, Richard Cable, Mrs Curgenven, and Nebo the Nailer (1902) are amongst the best known. Chris of all Sorts was the work of 1903. William Morris was born 24th March 1834 at Walthamstow, not then a suburb of London, and educated at Marlborough and Oxford. His writings form only one part of his life-work as poet, artist, and reformer; in each of these directions he did a full life's work. As artist the volume of original work produced by him or under his direction is enormous, and its effect-striking enough in England already is only now beginning to manifest itself in anything like its true proportion in western and central Europe. As reformer, the result of his life-work has been to revolutionise the decorative instincts of English homes; to emphasise, and to translate for the public, the meaning of decorative art; to bring back into English printing the ideals of an early age, 'printing books which should have a definite claim to beauty and at the same time should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye or trouble the intellect of the reader to eccentricity of form in the letters ;' and even in the Socialist agitation which took up so much of the latter years of his life, and which embodied for him so many of his ideals, to redeem it from the narrowness which characterises so many of the European Socialist parties, and to bring it into line with the aspirations common to the thinking men of all political parties. His influence is apparent not in the work of his imitators only, but even more in the general Renaissance of style, the substitution of a truer feeling for beauty of line and colour in all the ordinary surroundings of life. He died 3rd October 1896. As a writer, Morris belongs to the Romantic school at its best and healthiest. The PreRaphaelite movement, of which his work is but the direct expression, is a phase of the great romantic development, which, arising in our country, finding its first expression in the poems of Ossian, the Percy Ballads, and the work of Chatterton, spread to the continent of Europe, made itself deeply felt in Germany and in western Europe generally, while pursuing in England a course freed from some of the excesses of disordered imagination which characterised it abroad. As Mr Watts-Dunton, in formulating his theory of the Renascence of Wonder, has finely pointed out, the English Romantic school did not aim merely at the revival of natural language; it sought rather to reach through Art the forgotten world of old Romance-that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of which poets gain glimpses through Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. When Morris was beginning his career as a writer by his contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Tennyson had written his best poems, Browning was at his finest and freshest, Ruskin and Carlyle were applying a vigorous criticism in life and art. The moral and emotional life of the nation had been stimulated by the Tractarian movement and the Russian war, and he himself, prepared by a lifelong interest in medieval architecture and in such romance as was open to the reader of the day, had just made the acquaintance of Malory and Froissart. It was at this time that The Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul fell into his hands. We have heard him describe their thrilling effect upon him, and when this was reinforced by the remarkable personal influence of Rossetti and his paintings, the young poet found his bent determined. We owe to the acquaintanceship and intimacy then formed many of the more distinctive poems-such as The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur's Tomb and The Blue Closet, and the Tune of Seven Towers-but Morris even in these owed little to Rossetti, except subject and a sort of courtly and intense note in the diction: the two minds were essentially unlike. He was much more influenced by Tennyson and by Browning, but his poems were fresher and less conscious than those of Tennyson, while Browning had taught something of his own insight without lending his fine worldliness to the observation of the younger mind. In that sensitivity to the outward circumstances of things which we call sensuousness Morris approaches Keats. 'Riding Together,' 'Summer Dawn,' or 'The Haystack in the Floods' should, any one of them, have established the poet's reputation they did not. The little volume was spoken of as a curiosity which shows how far affectation may mislead an earnest man towards the fogland of Art.' Nearly ten years passed before Morris published his Jason, a poem originally designed to take its place in the framework of The Earthly Paradise, but which had outgrown in the making the limits of that scheme. His early verse 'had gradually gained for itself an increasing audience amongst men of imaginative taste,' to quote again the words of the greatest critic of our days. It was followed by the Earthly Paradise itself, the collection of poems with which Morris's name is most often associated. The device by which twelve classic legends are alternate with as many mediæval ones provided the poet with an opportunity of which he took the fullest advantage, while the introduction and the poems of the Months which connect the stories are little masterpieces: no one who understands the charm of English country can be unmoved by them. These works mark the second stage in his development as a writer. The early poems are all edge; these are distinguished by a flow so smooth and easy that 'the happiness of epithet and of local colouring, the picturesque detail and the appropriate phrase which give life and individuality to his pictures, are for the most part known only by their effects and only fully appreciated in the retrospect.' Love is Enough, published in 1872, was a bold innovation in point of form, written with a pas sionate quality such as one found in his earliest work, a much more mature balance in carrying out his scheme. It is perhaps the least popular of his works, and at the same time it is the most instructive for the student of his work, with its ordered intricacy, its architectural construction of four receding planes. In it real things are seen through a medium of strange and deceptive splendour, not enhanced but transformed, while the skill with which the difficult Middle English metres is handled enlarges the limits of English verse. The third period of artistic development, dating from his visits to Iceland, is marked by a series of translations from the Icelandic, culminating in his epic of Sigurd the Volsung, perhaps his finest work. More masculine than Jason, more vigorous and romantic than the best of the stories in the Earthly Paradise, it will take its place among the epic poems of the world.' A comparison of the way in which the subject of Sigurd was treated by Ampère among the French, Fouqué among the Germans, and Morris among the English would present an instructive study of the development of the Romantic school in these three countries. Translations of the Eneid, the Odyssey, and Beowulf mark another development of his energies. Virgil was brought from Classical Art straight into Romance; but after all this was but just, as the Eneid is the fountain-head of Romanticism. In writing of his version of the Odyssey, we may again quote from Mr Watts-Dunton: 'The two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets -are eagerness and dignity. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman's translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us but a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a literal translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman's free and easy paraphrase.' As a prose writer his productions fall into three distinct classes-his controversial writings, his translations, and his prose romances. The works of the first class, including his lectures on art and his Socialist tales and tracts, A Dream of John Ball, and News from Nowhere, are written in an English so simple and direct that it has no rival since the best of Cobbett, yet with a distinction and grace all his own. A little sketch, Under the Elm-tree, still lives in one's memory as the very embodiment of poetical ideas, expressed in plain and serious prose. Apart from its tendency, A Dream of John Ball is a work whose beautiful language, whose delicate fidelity to archæological details and mediæval feeling, have conquered for it a place in the affections of many who are as the |