That there is room and need for such a review can hardly be doubted. The names of the scholars who are associated in its editorial management are a pledge that the work they have undertaken will be thoroughly done, and the articles in the numbers which have reached us fully confirm this expectation.

Kaftan's opening article has been already mentioned. It is followed by a doctrinal article by Professor Herrmann on the "Repentance of the Evangelical Christian," which is well fitted to clear up the obscurity and confusion which is so widely prevalent- not in Germany alone - about this fundamental article. The second number is filled by an extremely interesting historical article by Professor Harnack on the "History of the Doctrine of Salvation through Faith Alone in the Early Church." Professor Harnack shows with painful clearness how the character of the various teachers and parties who in the early church stood for this doctrine hardly left the church any alternative to the Augustinian doctrine of justification. "Almost everywhere, if not everywhere, moral laxity, unwillingness to suffer for the faith, want of brotherly love, and lack of sincere repentance sought to cover themselves with the mantle of the sola fide. How can we wonder that the church rejected it? And the moral of this lesson in history for the Protestant church, which has made this doctrine its corner-stone, is briefly but pointedly indicated.

The readers of the "Andover Review" will, doubtless, unite with me in the wish that this attempt to bring theology and the church nearer together by ways of practical service may have deserved success. George F. Moore.

Life and Letters of Robert Browning. By Mrs. Sutherland Orr. In two volumes. Pp. xii, viii, 646. $3.00 a set. If the poet's family was connected with the knightly and squirely families of his name in South England, the connection was remote. "Both the vivid originality of his genius and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as, in some sense, the product of virgin soil." The Jewish admixture has been disproved. The negro admixture, through his West Indian grandmother, is not established, nor even made probable. Any one as well acquainted with the West Indies as the present writer is well aware that such a mixture is always to be presumed where West Indian neighbors affirm it. But there is no evidence of that in this case. There is therefore, at most, a mere possibility that Browning's veins were enriched by a strain of the glowing blood of Africa. The grandmother's portrait shows no traces of mixed blood. The Empress Josephine was probably a colored woman, but Browning was probably not a colored man.

Browning's parents were dissenters, though not narrow ones, and though he commonly attended the church service when he attended any, he never detached himself from dissenting intimacies. Between the two

he may the easier have become indifferent to theology and fallen back on Christianity, though assuredly not in a looseness of feeling independent of thought. With all his vigor there was interwoven a fibre of nervous suffering which, the biographer remarks, may have been needed to quicken the healthy talent of his father into the intensity of genius in him. From his mother's German father he may have derived his power of infinite psychological analysis. The quiet perfection of his mother's character drew to her such an adoring love from her son as even wedded bliss and early fatherhood were powerless to bear up from an intensity of sorrow at her death that long threatened health.

The biographer thinks that Browning's purely literary education left his genius too much to itself, and that some coercion of mathematics or logic might have rendered his works easier for normally constituted minds to follow. Very probably. In point of language he made one good beginning for his vocation: he read and digested the whole of Johnson's Dictionary.

Americans are continually coming into his life and his wife's, and always in the most agreeable connections, wound up by their son's marriage with an American. They were deeply grateful, with the best reason, for the early American anticipation of his fame, which was so slow in coming at home.

The account of the Brownings' intercourse with George Sand is very interesting. Browning's grave courtesy seems to have stung her. It marked his silent disgust with the coarse and dirty men whom she allowed to fall on their knees and beslobber her hands. The enthusiasm was evidently his wife's.

The one note of discord in the awful bliss of his married life seems to have been in his intense dislike of spiritualism and persuasion of its absolute emptiness. Even a suspense of judgment in others drove him wild. Doubtless it was the ghastly uncleanness of the whole thing as a concrete reality, daring to approach the angelic simplicity of his wife's nature, which made it intolerable. He overshot all logical limit in his agony of desire to detach her from it.

The high-water mark of the long-delayed recognition at home was in 1867, when Oxford made him honorary Master of Arts, a much higher distinction, it was officially explained, than D. C. L., one since Dr. Johnson scarcely given except to princes. Fame came at last with a flood, and even the great loss yet left his latter years full of sunshine.

His letters, in themselves, are neither clear nor remarkably interesting. Fortunately there are a good many of his wife's. The biography itself, though deep, is not very lucid. One thing, however, keeps the author always on the alert. She is ever watchful to minimize the meaning of Browning's religion. She allows, indeed, that his conviction of his indestructible personality survived all the teachings of experience, and even imposed itself upon them, in other words, that he interpreted the lower by the higher, and not the higher by the lower. She maintains that the Christmas and Easter Day poems at least bring religion into no practical correspondence with life or human experience, and upholds it as probable that they are a sympathetic appropriation of his wife's religion. She will have it that Shelley is the master-key to the real Browning, and that this implies his actual maintenance of everything which the two Chris

tian poems appear to condemn. To the complaint that in details he

accepts this age, but in fundamental principles is behind it, in denying that experiment can control the foundations of belief, she pleads for large allowance to "the transcendental imagination," although she admits that the deductions of this very deeply determined the attitude of his mind towards God and Immortality. She makes him out to have held Christ as a message and mystery of Divine Love, but not a messenger of the divine intentions towards mankind. In what way He could possibly be the one and not the other, especially as He so emphatically affirms himself to be both, is left undetermined. She represents Browning as fully possessed by the idiotic pagan assumption that every affirmation of an attribute in the Supreme Being is a denial of his exist

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ence, as if the qualities of pure Being were mutually exclusive, devout way of inducing infinite Emptiness in the place of infinite Fullness. Yet she sympathetically remarks that the poet could not easily be persuaded that conscious life is not real and persistent, and that affirmations concerning God, however false, are not at least a witness to the reality.

Now that we have this biography by a Christian unbeliever, it would be interesting if we could have one, of equal ability, knowledge, and candor, by a Christian believer.

root.

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Studies in Letters and Life. By George Edward Woodberry. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 1890. Pp. 296. $1.25.The first paper of this series is on Landor. Why is it that, having received such enthusiastic appreciation from the elect spirits of literature, he is dying out, even for them? The author explains it by his lack of unifying power. He does not fuse his work in his personality. Therefore magnificent material, magnificently handled, still remains piece-work. His fine thoughts and wise apothegms, overwhelming in their number, crown no achievement." They are flowers without a Crabbe comes next. He "does not, in a true sense, give expression to the life of the poor; he merely narrates it." "Crabbe's description is perhaps the most nakedly realistic of any in English poetry, but it is an uncommonly good one. Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe's powers were confined strictly within it; but he had the best virtues of a realist." Men like Scott and Fox could supply the tenderness and the genius, and they loved Crabbe because he enlarged their experience. Moreover, his style, formed in the school of Pope, impressed them as it does not us. But Crabbe gives us, at his best, human life and the human heart, and this is more than "Scott's romantic tradition, or Moore's melting, sensuous Oriental dream, or Byron's sentimental, falsely heroic adventure."

The next paper is on "The Promise of Keats." The author differs entirely with those who hold that Keats had essentially achieved himself when he died. He holds him to have been "born for the future, to the future lost." He believes him, amid all the crudeness and boyish effervescence of his years, to show plainly "the elemental spark, the saving power of genius, the temperance, sanity, and self-reverence of a fine nature gradually coming to the knowledge of its faculties, and unriddling the secret of its own moral beauty." He quotes many sayings of Keats in his letters which lift him "out of and above the sphere of the purely sensuous, and reveal at once the spiritual substance which underlies his poetry."

The next paper is "Aubrey de Vere on Poetry." Of this the critic says that, by rare good fortune, "the ideas are more excellent than the manner, and the spirit finer than the ideas." The whole nature of the man speaks in it. He is a Christian idealist, and he refuses to regard poetry except in the light of those great ideas which belong to the spirit, and, being nobly and beautifully interpreted, are the substance of the poets who live by their wisdom as well as by charm." "With Spenser, naturally, he has many affinities. The mediævalism, the sentiment of chivalry, the allegorizing spirit, and not less the Puritan elevation of the first of the Elizabethan poets, exercise a special fascination over a Catholic mind for whom the Ages of Faith, as he likes to call

them, have in a peculiar degree the ideality that clothes the past." "He reveals his own theory of poetry, and it is one that derives its philosophy from the great historic works of our literature, and is grounded on the practice of the English masters whose fame is secure. Its cardinal principle is, that man is the only object of interest to man, all else being subordinate, and valuable only for its relations to this main theme; and more particularly this subject is the spiritual life, not the material manifestations of his energies in deeds apart from their meaning." Wordsworth did not altogether escape the pantheism incident to a constant preoccupation with nature, and his poetry is therefore less distinctively Christian than Spenser's; "but Aubrey de Vere easily makes it out that Wordsworth's philosophy, much as it differed from Spenser's, is concerned with the same topics of moral and spiritual life, and is the substance of his poetry." The author, however, maintains, even against De Vere, that Wordsworth's poetry is deficient in passion. He will not allow that moral enthusiasm is just the same thing.

To Milton, the author thinks, De Vere is hardly just. The current of sympathy is broken between the Catholic and the iconoclast regicide, and he does not well perceive how thoroughly Milton is "bone and flesh of the English nation in the substance of his genius." The "noble spirituality which the author ascribes to him, we think it might be difficult to find except in the poems of his youth. "Towards Shelley" Mr. De Vere "exhibits a respect, a penetration of the elements of his thoughtful temperament, and a comprehension of the remarkable and intimate changes of his incessant growth, that are almost unexampled in authors writing from Aubrey de Vere's standpoint." "The general decline in the moral weight and the spirituality of late poetic literature" is recogized by De Vere, and rightly connected with the decline in the authority of religion.

"The aesthetic lover of beauty, the artist who is satisfied with feats of poetic craft, will not find anything to his liking in Aubrey de Vere's essays. They are presided over by a severe Platonism intellectually, by an exacting and all-including Christianity when the subject touches upon man's life, and they will prove somewhat difficult reading, perhaps, because the thought continually reverts to great ideas, to that doctrine of life which the author seeks for in the poets, and prizes as the substance of their works. But it is well, in poetic days like these, to be brought back to the more serious muses which inspired the great ideal works of our literature, and to converse with them under the guidance of such a spirit as fills these essays with a sense of the continual presence in great literature of the higher interests of man, his life on earth, and his spiritual relations to the universe."

Next come Illustrations of Idealism. Of these the most remarkable appears to us to be the criticism of Mr. Pater's "Marius the Epicurean.” It is marvelous in the searching exactness of its appreciations. Mr. Woodberry concludes his observations on the Italian Renaissance Literature with the remark that "the Renaissance was a movement of civilization not less important than the Reformation or the Revolution, and to Italy, as its source, the debt of the world is great. But the Renaissance was not conveyed to Europe by the literature of its corruption; it was conveyed in far different ways." The Italian mind, he remarks, is definite, hard, practical, and therefore irreligious. Its religion is of the emotions, flaming up and dying down. Therefore, we may remark, its

saints, as Sainte-Beuve says, have not been thinkers, which implies that its thinkers have not been saints. Even in Dante and Thomas Aquinas the outlines are too hard to cherish the deeper life of the spirit.

The author's remarks on Shelley are very extended and very thorough. He has an exceedingly exalted opinion of him. Not pretending to understand it very thoroughly, nor to sympathize with it very deeply, we will refer the reader to it as abundantly worth attention. The remarks on actors' criticisms of Othello, Iago, and Shylock are interesting. But we find Shylock a much more magnificent figure than the author seems to do, though it is true he has no heart and we rejoice in his ruin. The pleas, the author well remarks, are futile in law, but work out the higher ends of a nobler equity.

The remarks on Bunyan are an admirable vindication of him from Matthew Arnold's flippant sneer at him as "a Philistine of genius." The noble sanity of his spirit is appreciated to the full. The paper on Cowper is not unjust, except in seeming to attribute to his creed a madness that broke out before he had a creed, that was stayed for years by his creed, and that reverted in a form of impracticable contradiction to his creed. As to Channing, is it true that he helped Unitarianism to divest itself of the belief in the mystery of Christ's mission? We doubt it very much. We should rather say that Channing's spirit is presiding over the large present refluence into Trinitarian Christianity. If, however, as seems not unlikely, the author uses mysterious" in the sense of "non-natural," he is doubtless right. See Newman's criticism on Jacob Abbott for an illustration of non-naturalness, even after deducting all the truth in his strictures which Abbott was glad to acknowledge. Of such a conception of Christ, Channing has, indeed, done much to cure the world.

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The paper on Darwin is exceedingly fine and just. His moral beauty of character is fully appreciated, while yet the gradual atrophy in his mind of the highest interests of man is acknowledged. Byron is dealt with as an unworthy but not negligable character and genius. There is a gentle but very firm criticism on Browning's apparent depreciation of moral self-restraint. The largeness of his sympathies is rightly regarded as somewhat depressing his love of righteousness. His extraordinary power of reasoning in verse, and his usual neglect of the inexorable requirements for poetry of beauty and form, are hardly thought the best guaranty of literary immortality. "He belongs with Johnson, with Dryden, with the heirs of the masculine intellect, the men of power not unvisited by grace, but in whom mind is predominant. Upon the work of such poets time hesitates, conscious of their mental greatness, but also of their imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; at last the good is sifted from that whence worth has departed."

These two hundred and ninety-six pages are compact of intellectual appreciation, love of beauty, moral soundness, and religious reverence. They are the high-water mark of literary criticism.

College Series of Greek Authors. Edited under the Supervision of John Williams White and Thomas D. Seymour. Plato: Protagoras. With the Commentary of Hermann Sauppe. Translated, with Additions, by James A. Toule, Principal of the Robbins School. Boston, U. S. A., and London: Published by Ginn & Company. 1889. This beautifully printed classic, with its pleasant and handy shape, is enriched by a very thorough commentary, chiefly for the grammar, but largely for the sense.