inside the reading-room of the British Museum,” and “expounds no theory save the unworthy one that literature ought to please.”  He says the one question about a book which is to be part of literature is, “Does it read?” that “no one is under any obligation to read any one else’s book,” and therefore it is a writer’s business to make himself welcome to readers; that he does not care whether an author was happy or not, he wants the author to make him happy.  He puts his theory in practice:  he makes himself welcome as a companion at once stimulating and restful, of humane spirit and elevated ideals, of digested knowledge and original thought, of an insight which is rarely other than kindly and a deep humor which never lapses into cynicism.

Mr. Birrell helps to justify Walter Bagehot’s dictum that the only man who can write books well is one who knows practical life well; but still there are congruities in all things, and one feels a certain shock of incongruity in finding that this man of books and purveyor of light genial book-talk, who can hardly write a line without giving it a quality of real literary savor, is a prominent lawyer and member of Parliament, and has written a law book which ranks among recognized legal authorities.  This is a series of lectures delivered in 1896, and collected into a volume on ‘The Duties and Liabilities of Trustees.’  But some of the surprise vanishes on reading the book:  even as ’Alice in Wonderland’ shows on every page the work of a logician trained to use words precisely and criticize their misuse, so in exactly the opposite way this book is full of the shrewd judgment, the knowledge of life, and even the delightful humor which form so much of Birrell’s best equipment for a man of letters.

Mr. Birrell’s work is not merely good reading, but is a mental clarifier and tonic.  We are much better critics of other writers through his criticisms on his selected subjects.  After every reading of ’Obiter Dicta’ we feel ashamed of crass and petty prejudice, in the face of his lessons in disregarding surface mannerisms for the sake of vital qualities.  Only in one case does he lose his impartiality:  he so objects to treating Emerson with fairness that he even goes out of his way to berate his idol Matthew Arnold for setting Emerson aloft.  But what he says of George Borrow is vastly more true of himself:  he is one of the writers we cannot afford to be angry with.

DR. JOHNSON

“Criticism,” writes Johnson in the 60th Idler, “is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense.  The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labor of learning those sciences which may by mere labor be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured:  but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critick.”