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But the teachers are the coronated kings of Oxford. They are essays in the ruddy humanities. There is the one who lectures on Anglo-Saxon grammar. He manages to stretch his matter so that it covers the jingle of barrel organs just outside they are always just outside Oxonian lectures-and of quarrelling cabmen. He can compete with life and come off with banners flying. The sky spreads blue serenity flowering with summer clouds against his windows; he holds the young men's eyes. He is a fragile little man, whose manipulation of a large teacup looks a miracle; but under his ribs he is oak all through. His talk at times fills his eyes with flames; he loves to speak of the brawny and blonde barbarians who tore the muscles like squirming serpents from men's shoulders and bit into the bone-links of monsters. His yearning is for the days when strong men wore wide beards and fought together with spears. Of course, his habitat would be the Old School of Geography.

Then there is the Yes-and-No don, with the profile of Dante and the grace of Abelard. A bold generalization to him is the unpardonable sin. Always too much the scholar to make an unsupported assertion, he balances off the ayes with an equal phalanx of noes; buttresses his cathedrals of scholarship with so many supporting structures that the marvel of his aspiring Gothic mind is hard to discern. But buttresses themselves have their beauty. Another don is a man out of a Medieval illumination, faded blue sweetness of a shy heart, a mind foliated with the exquisitely delicate and golden vines of the lessons in things. He divides life into seven jewels with seven virtues, and all Creation is a sermon. He is none the less a Mediæval preacher, though his subject is modern history. Akin to him is the one whose lecture on Dionysius the Areopagite is a Neo-Platonic ecstasy itself. Another makes his province the eighteenth century; his witticisms have the tang of rare snuff from filagreed snuff-boxes; his facts are marshalled as orderly as the hairs in a Town wig. He is a breath from the coffee houses. A man who looks perpetually as if his hair were coming off at all points and who has the shoulders of a drayman airs prejudices on authors delicate as rose petals; though his complexion is like beefsteak, Arnold and Ruskin are too burly and rough for him.

One who has studied human nature unwashed in the

twilights of South Sea jungles fits the savage into the pageant of man and shows the connection of cannibalism and Damon and Pythias, of "bull-roarers" and the Masonic societies. Another does little more than read dusty Italian chronicles in broken English among the broken shards from the Palace of the Axe; but the combination makes a magic thing. There is a lecturer who always lowers his head and mumbles whenever he comes to an important date or name. He is the despair of the women students, the determined note-gleaners. But the notes of his lectures, untroubled by the miasmas of time or personalities, sound like eternal truth and read like passages from the City of God. Cuthbert the Celibate is conspicuous both for his voluminous knowledge of the Church Fathers and for his voluminous, flaming beard. He wears the brown corded robe of the Cowley Fathers and loves to thunder forth the summer storms of Trismegistus, or breathe the West wind which is Augustine. At times Cuthbert grows militant and spends his hour demolishing the dicta of his Roman Catholic rival, setting the spires of the Church already High above the pinnacles of the Eternal City.

But the king of all lecturers has joined the ancient kings now, and his going has left a chair that is hard to fill. I do not think there is another man so remembered around the world for making milk and honey of learning as Sir Walter Raleigh. If ever a title became a man it was he. Men of the five continents will recall him sitting in Magdalen Hall below the portrait of Colet, another prince of humane letters such as he. And from the slender grace of the dashing Prince Rupert one's eyes could descend to another as splendid Cavalier. Sir Walter was at ease among the men who have worn the laces and swords and the wisdom of the world. His thoughts had a zest that made the heart glow. He was a great teacher and a great critic because he was a great man. The best lecture I ever heard was Sir Walter Raleigh's on Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan Poet, Warrior, and Gentleman. The years rolled back; and here was the splendid Courtier of the Great Queen bending over the desk in this tall gray-haired man with the broad brows and magnificent chin. Here was the elder Raleigh, and here was the dignity that wore a jovial face, the scholarliness that went in lace, the naiveté that sweetened robust

manhood, the scorn of the mean and low, the religious fervor that went with great deeds, and the passion for all that was new and beautiful and graceful and shining; here was all that made the Elizabethan English the chief heirs of the Renaissance. It is good to have a contemporary of Shakespeare to listen to. And this later Raleigh went as lightheartedly and as superbly to meet the adventure of adventures as ever the other who wrote his best poem in the shadow of the scaffold. The last of his great books was the history of English wartime aviation, which he called the Romance of Youth. His own unending youth took him in his studies for the book to Mesopotamia where he contracted the fever that closed the pages of his work. And his last book was as full as his earlier ones with his abiding love of men who think and do like princes. All his life of teaching and writing, as well as his own example of living, was given to prove that the Scholar-Gentleman is the ideal in all English letters, from the first to the last; not Walt Whitman with his revolutionary morals and ideals, not the "learned barbarism" of modern specialized knowledge, had ever obscured that figure:

There was something profoundly sane, after all, in the ambitions that built New Place and Abbotsford. At the close of a revolutionary century, now that the fogs of a crude moral theory are dissipating, and the dream of a mechanical Utopia, a mere nightmare produced by a surfeit of science, is passing away, it is time to remember our ancestry. Our proudest title is not that we are contemporaries of Darwin, but that we are the descendents of Shakespeare.

That ideal of the Courtier of the Best was the glory of the past and the hope of the years to come for all Englishmen, from the humblest to the highest-born. If ever there were a man of calmness in a troubled age, it was this great teacher. And in reading and resurrecting the past in his deep mellow voice, he was building also the future for who knows how many young men. Like all the great, under his courtly dignity he kept the secret places of his heart full of simplicity. And like them he had the gift of humor that is the salt of our earth. His lighter moments put the winds and the fragrances into the past. He was the Cavalier Scholar to the end.

Perhaps the finest thing about this fine man was his voice. He could make the dullest catalogues of facts read like one of the

Psalms. Mellow and rich and golden, that voice could bring to life the seventeenth century and the men who made rhetoric the chief of the arts and the half of holiness. And Raleigh's words, like the words of the greatest literature, arranged themselves into something of the rhythm of all life, the cadence of the springing flowers, the movement of men's hearts and of the stars. He was the man for Milton, whose greatness is the greatness of the human voice. Milton was his favorite poet to read aloud; and the sublimity and thunder of the cataracts of beauty in Paradise Lost swept him along voice and soul, for his voice and soul, like Milton's, were twin harmonies and sons of awe. One will remember him always reading that terrible sermon of Donne's on the horror of falling out of the hands of the living God; his voice rising, falling, swelling the dread diapasons:

That this God at last should let this soule goe away, as a smoake, as a vapour, as a bubble, and that then this soule cannot be a smoake, a vapour, nor a bubble, but must lie in darknesse, as long as the Lord of light is light itselfe, and never sparke of that light reach to my soule; What Tophet is not Paradise, what Brimstone is not Amber, what gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worme is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed, to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God? Nor can one ever forget the pathos and the pity this kingly man put into other of Donne's wistful words on the fallen Jezebel:

When a whirle-winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Jesabel (Jesabel was a Queen) expressed; They shall not say, this is Jesabel; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be, but they shall not say, they shall not know, This is Jesabel.

All queenly things he loved. And Raleigh's voice was the organ where the old hymn of the kinship of all the ages in weal and woe could play its way into men's minds. He was one of those rare men who have raised college towers to the height of the cathedrals, who have set great learning beside great faith.

ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN.

JEAN DE BALZAC

BY THE HON. MRS. GILBERT COLERIDGE

In the year 1654 the publishing house at the "Crown and Marigold" in St. Paul's Churchyard sent forth a volume of letters, translated by Sir Richard Baker from the French of Jean Louis Quez de Balzac. Speaking of the French edition, Ménage said, "C'était le présent le plus agréable que les galants pussent faire à leur maîtresses," and Boileau wrote, "On ne parle pas de M. Balzac simplement comme du plus éloquent des hommes de son siècle, mais comme du seul éloquent." Later criticism confirms these opinions, for Brunetière tells us, "Balzac n'en reste pas moins considerable dans l'histoire de notre littérature et ces 'Lettres ou Dissertations' avec tous leurs défauts, demeurent au nombres des ouvrages qui ont fait faire en leur temps au progrès décisif à la prose française." In his dedication to Lord Newburge the translator claims "that the author's gold is so much overweight, that though much may be lost in the melting, yet it holds out weight enough still to make it currant." There is truth in this; for nearly every letter, and there are three hundred and fifty-five of them, contains some striking phrase, some point of view the interest of which remains in spite of the three centuries since their publication. Written for the most part from his quiet château in Angoulême, they are addressed to a diversity of persons, ranging from the great Cardinal Richelieu himself to the captivating and capricious "Clorinda." To this beautiful lady who scorned his suit he preaches the same sermon that found an echo across the Channel a few years later in his contemporary's lyric, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may;" and at the age of twenty-three Balzac pours forth a diatribe against the terrors of old age that may well bring a chill to the heart of a woman. "Gather Nose-Gayes before the roses wither," he cries, "and assure yourself that when you have no further attractions than an eloquent tongue, no man will seek for them among the fur

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