these were some of Leslie Stephen's attributes. No one can read many pages of this book without learning, if he did not know it already, that they are Mr. Maitland's too, and that he is fitted by them, as very few other men could be, to handle his theme worthily. Here is a comment on Stephen's meeting with the King, then the Prince of Wales, at a dinner which celebrated the completion of the Dictionary of National Biography. The Prince, Stephen related, had asked whether he smoked; and Stephen went home outside an omnibus, both bored and amused.

Did he smoke? With the eye of faith we may see a silent but convincing answer given to the Prince's question. We watch the tall man, aged sixtyseven, who has climbed to the top of the omnibus. A hand dives into a pocket and thence extracts an ancient pipe. Is there a guide in all the Alps more expert with a match in a wind? Would Melchior show more skill? So the smoke goes up; and no one will grudge the smoker his "chuckle or two," for, beyond a doubt, he has been "dreadfully bored," and, beyond a doubt, the Dictionary which "cost a slice of his life" was "a good bit of work."

There is more of Leslie Stephen in this little paragraph than in a dozen pages of formal biography. Here again is a foot-note after Stephen's own heart concerning an address to Mr. Holman Hunt which was drafted by Stephen and, it seems, amended by a committee.

On a printed copy of this address Stephen noted that another hand had touched it, and that he was not guilty of "the century of which you have been an ornament." I cannot imagine Stephen writing a phrase so suggestive of the fire-stove."

Let us be thankful that Stephen has not been delivered over to some bi

ographer of the ornamented fire-stove species.

As not one reader in a hundred will pursue a reference, Mr. Maitland is wise in giving, under a preliminary heading of Parentage, a summary version of what Leslie Stephen himself, in his life of Fitzjames, had set forth as touching. the Stephen family. Mere enumerative genealogy is in itself the driest and dullest form of narrative. It is another thing to see how the foundations of eminence were laid in ancestral care and virtue, and how the ripe tradition flourishes afresh in new, it may be in quite unexpected forms. A shrewd observer might have predicted that in Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen, who were growing up about the middle of the nineteenth century, the joint paternal and maternal strain of orthodoxy-liberal orthodoxy for the time, but firm could not be precisely continued. He could scarcely have foreseen that in each case the conflict, in absolutely sincere minds, of independent thinking with belief accepted from one's nearest and dearest would act on a sensitive nature so as to produce a strict reserve as to the man's real feelings, guarded in ways outwardly very different and equally misleading to all but intimates. Both men, notwithstanding an ample sense of humor, took life as a whole too gravely to find much amusement in it as a spectacle. Perhaps this was connected with an indifference to enjoyment of art for its own sake which was a blind spot common to their spacious and active minds. It would be a mistake to set down either of them as a pessimist; it was not their normal habit to damn the nature of things with Porson. Yet their relations to it, if not exactly strained, were not cordial, and could at best be described as correct. A mood of somewhat reluctant acquiesence, too proud

to vent itself in complaint, and too sincere and unselfish to feed vanity. was not likely to produce any such facile geniality as adorns the selfcontented man. Fitzjames Stephen dissembled his humanity by seeming aggressive, and Leslie by seeming unapproachable. Accordingly the judgment of superficial acquaintance called Fitzjames brutal and Leslie cynical, with even wider departure from truth than usually attends on such judgments. Those who knew both men as they were are very sure that failure to know either would have been a loss not to be compensated. It was possible, and doubtless good so far as it went, to know Fitzjames Stephen moderately well. Leslie had under the mask a peculiar subtle charm, and the discovery of it came with a dramatic enlightenment, not persuading but compelling. When once the ice was broken, it was deep water or nothing. Sir Alfred Lyall goes to the root of the matter in a communication to Mr. Maitland: "He was a man on whose steadfast friendship, whenever it might be put to the proof, I felt that one might have relied confidently." Like many shy men, Leslie Stephen won some of his best friends by enthusiasm in a common cause. In 1863 he was of the minority among educated Englishmen who stood for the North from the beginning of the American Civil War. He crossed the Atlantic with a few introductions "to see for himself how matters stood," and thus he came to know Lowell, Mr. C. E. Norton, and O. W. Holmes junior, now Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States. Two of these lifelong friends survive to bear witness of the affection he inspired. Mr. Maitland has made excellent use of his correspondence with the three; the specimens of Stephen's letters make us wish that we could

have the whole, and both sides of it.

For Leslie Stephen's earlier life Mr. Maftland has necessarily relied on the records and information of an earlier generation. His diligence in the minutest details has not shrunk from labor which would have been more than enough for a biographer having nothing else to do, and we may be sure that whatever he has left unsolved is now insoluble. Eton days are lightly touched; Mr. Maitland, an Etonian himself, knows well that a boy who leaves the school at fourteen carries but little away from it. The tutor's report of inability to do verses, perhaps taken too seriously, was the determining cause; nowadays it would not be deemed sufficient. Cambridge was Leslie Stephen's true nursing mother, and it is good to think that he is commemorated there in exactly the right way. As a Trinity Hall tutor he, the so-called cynic, anticipated the sociable and human methods of the modern don. At Cambridge, too, the boy who had been all but an invalid found himself a man of rare vigor and endurance, and from Cambridge he went forth to excel among the pioneers of the Alpine Club. Some little obscurity hangs over his parting from Trinity Hall at the time when it became clear to him that he could no longer serve as an Anglican minister. But it is plain that, the fundamental difficulty being there and insuperable, he parted on friendly terms which were honorable to all concerned. He was never parted from Cambridge in spirit, and the clear sanity of mind which is the traditional pride of Cambridge informed all his work even when he was combating traditions. If at times he was vehement in combat, it was not against persons or even opinions; the only thing he could not tolerate was intellectual duplicity.

A special chapter, happily entitled "The Playground of Europe" after

Stephen's own collection of mountaineering narratives and essays,`` is given, as of right, to his Alpine performances. There is one lacuna, a sadly inevitable one, to be an abiding regret among companions of that craft. C. E. Mathews had promised his recollections, and did not live to send them. As it is, however, Mr. Maitland has had able and zealous helpers; and if he has left much to be read between the lines by mountaineers, it is because full comment would have demanded a volume. Stephen, we are told, kept no record of his climbs - except new expeditions, as King Solomon made no account of silver. A man who in two successive years was of the first parties on the Schreckhorn and across the Jungfrau Joch, the greatest rock summit and the grandest ice-pass of the Oberland, could afford to let the memory of smaller matters take its chance. Note, reader, if you are not of the initiated, that the strain of an expedition, especially when it is new, is not measured by the number of hard places, but by the need of constant vigilance due to the lack of easy ones; and it was in such work that Stephen's endurance and sureness put him above his fellows. But I have formerly spoken in this Review of Leslie Stephen as a climber and walker, and must now keep silence even from good words. One interesting link between his athletic and his scholarly faculties has been brought out by Mr. Maitland, apparently for the first time. The dates make it highly probable that Stephen's early Alpine papers led him to discover his own power of writing English. Mountaineers, at any rate, will hold this as a pious opinion.

If one is asked to point to Leslie Stephen's best work, it is hard to make a choice. Begin with Hours in a Library, I should say, and learn to appreciate the most candid and modest

of critics, who always put justice to his subject first and display of his own knowledge last, and hardly ever went wrong, learned without pedantry and subtle without paradox. For my own part I think he never did better than in the course of lectures he was unable to deliver, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. Even if they missed his final touches, they are a model of ripe and easy mastery. So complete is the illumination that we forget how complex the matter really was. His greatest literary monument, no doubt, is the Dictionary of National Biography, where, as beseems his character, the most fruitful and strenuous work does not appear on the surface. Mr. Maitland has told us how he determined from the first to set the standard at the highest, and this when there was yet nothing to call a real school of historical studies in England; how he laid out the plan for himself and made and tested his tools as he went on, and how there was some painful cutting off of unsound members in the early stages. If there is anything more irksome than writing to a fixed length, it is reducing the length of what other men have written. Much of Stephen's editorial toil was of that kind, and it was no wonder that it bore hard upon him. A man of less refined conscience would have taken the responsibility more lightly, and perhaps have got the thing done almost as well, but not quite. Anyhow, Stephen, with all his selfdepreciation, never doubted that the work was worth the cost. It would have been well if unremitting labor had left its mark only on his handwriting; though I do not admit that even his latest writing could be called bad. One may puzzle printers without a bad hand. All fine cursive writing - and Stephen's was often minute - presents difficulties unless it is formed with extreme care, or the