seeming, that could have been selected,—­a few great orthodox names on which opinion was closed and analysis exhausted.  Browning, Carlyle, Charles Lamb, and John Henry Newman are indeed very beacons to warn off the sated bookman.  A paper on Benvenuto Cellini, one on Actors, and one on Falstaff (by another hand) closed the list.  Yet a few weeks made it the literary event of the day.  Among epicures of good reading the word swiftly passed along that here was a new sensation of unusually satisfying charm and freshness.  It was a tour de force like the “Innocents Abroad”, a journey full of new sights over the most staled and beaten of tracks.  The triumph was all the author’s own.

[Illustration:  AUGUSTINE BIRRELL]

Two years later came another volume as a “Second Series”, of the same general character but superior to the first.  Among the subjects of its eleven papers were Milton, Pope, Johnson, Burke, Lamb again, and Emerson; with some general essays, including that on “The Office of Literature”, given below.

In 1892 appeared “Res Judicatae”, really a third volume of the same series, and perhaps even richer in matter and more acute and original in thought.  Its first two articles, prepared as lectures on Samuel Richardson and Edward Gibbon, are indeed his high-water, mark in both substance and style.  Cowper, George Borrow, Newman again, Lamb a third time (and fresh as ever), Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, and Sainte-Beuve are brought in, and some excellent literary miscellanea.

A companion volume called ‘Men, Women, and Books’ is disappointing because composed wholly of short newspaper articles:  Mr. Birrell’s special quality needs space to make itself felt.  He needs a little time to get up steam, a little room to unpack his wares; he is no pastel writer, who can say his say in a paragraph and runs dry in two.  Hence these snippy editorials do him no justice:  he is obliged to stop every time just as he is getting ready to say something worth while.  They are his, and therefore readable and judicious; but they give no idea of his best powers.

He has also written a life of Charlotte Bronte.  But he holds his place in the front rank of recent essayists by the three ‘Obiter Dicta’ and ‘Res Judicatae’ volumes of manly, luminous, penetrating essays, full of racy humor and sudden wit; of a generous appreciativeness that seeks always for the vital principle which gave the writer his hold on men; still more, of a warm humanity and a sure instinct for all the higher and finer things of the spirit which never fail to strike chords in the heart as well as the brain.  No writer’s work leaves a better taste in the mouth; he makes us think better of the world, of righteousness, of ourselves.  Yet no writer is less of a Puritan or a Philistine; none writes with less of pragmatic purpose or a less obtrusive load of positive fact.  He scorns such overladen pedantry, and never loses a chance to lash it.  He tells us that he has “never been