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 nauseated by the "fastidious virginity" of A. C. Benson's "Arthur Hamilton"; who found the self-analytic inaction of the nineteenth century "shocking"; who declared that a life of idealistic inaction, though noble, was "tragic"; who yearned for an "active struggle with the life we are born to, a full sense of all its temptations, of all its earthly significance as well as of its spiritual"; and who had to express his longing for adventure and reality by carrying on A. S. Hill's tradition of "clearness, force and elegance" and by play-acting in "Raleigh in Guiana." Do not doubt that he felt the huge irony of his pose as the preserver of the sacred traditions of the historical Puritans, he who expressed his aspiration for an immortal life in a letter to Judge Grant as follows: "If good on earth, I am now persuaded, I may live again as a golden carp in some everflowing fountain of sound French vintage, not too dry."

I never met Barrett Wendell to speak to him till 1918, when I sat next him at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner in Cambridge. He offered me his flask to tincture the ice water which had then come into vogue, and I, in exchange, offered him some compliments on the course to which I had listened in 1904. He flashed on me his quick blue eye and exclaimed, truly enough: "What, you were never any disciple of mine!" Since Mr. Howe's book has revealed to me the man's honest struggle for reality in an environment which almost stifled him, I am ready to revise my relationship to him and to declare myself a disciple of the Wendell who said: "God help me, I don't want to be a humbug!"

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HE seamy side of virtue is its origin. Bernard Mandeville, author of "The Fable of the Bees," 1714, was interested in origins. He was a great anatomist of society who transferred to the study of human nature the physician's habit of tracing symptoms to the vital organs. He said: "One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves is that most writers are always teaching men what they should be and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they are." By a merciless probing to the source of social phenomena in the self-preservative and reproductive impulses of natural man, and in the cluster of elementary passions which branch immediately from those two impulses, he attempted to disclose the necessary final basis of morals and politics. In the process he deepened the channels of thought and imparted to his intelligent admirers a relish for coming to grips with reality.

But Mandeville was not merely a social anatomist. He was also a born man of letters with an exuberant personality, which he liked to express. He was no sour misanthrope but, as I take it, a rather hearty, burly fellow who enjoyed the excitement of ideas and the collision of minds. Yet with all his truculent aggressiveness he was a crafty, insidious ironist with a most irritating wit and a capacity for interesting in

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 him a multitude of readers who were sure that they were "on the side of the angels" and that he was not—a multitude of readers who were far from clear what he was about, yet were entirely certain that he was very unconventional, very indecorous, very shocking, and very dangerous. And so Mandeville, who had no Boswell, has come down to us on the tongue of rumor, in an odor of unsanctity, and in a dust of controversy which delays recognition of the originality and penetrating vigor of his mind. The flavor of such a man, however, one gets the better if one comes to him through a little of the dust that he stirred up.

After he had offended the clergy and the masters of schools, as he did grievously—by telling more truth than either class thinks expedient or proper, and in sundry other ways—a number of terrible things were circulated about him. It was said, for example, that he had referred to that mirror of Queen Anne virtue, Joseph Addison, a man who had called his stepson to his deathbed "to see a man die like a Christian"—he had referred to Joseph Addison as "a parson in a tye-wig," which was certainly no proper way to speak of Addison. It was said, and it was openly avowed by Mandeville, that his system of ideas was diametrically opposed to that of the late Lord Shaftesbury; and every one knew that Shaftesbury had devoted his life to proving that man is inclined naturally towards the Good and the Beautiful. It was said that Mandeville was a foreigner, and this was true: by birth and education he was Dutch—out of Rotterdam, the Erasmus school and the University of Leyden.

Mandeville himself had offered to burn his book if anything could be found in it contrary to public morals, and it was said—it was published in the papers

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 —that a well-dressed gentleman, presumably the author, had been seen carrying "The Fable of the Bees" to the public bonfire. It was said that he had been hired by the distillers to write in behalf of spirituous liquors, and it was given out as his opinion that children of dram-drinking women were never afflicted with rickets. It was said that he lived in obscure lodgings and had little practise as a physician—both serious tokens of moral turpitude in the eyes of the poor in spirit.

Our young countryman, Ben Franklin, on his Wanderjahr in London in 1724, became intimate with a surgeon by the name of Lyons, who took him around to a pale ale house, The Horns, in Cheapside, and introduced him to Dr. Mandeville, who had a club there. Franklin in his autobiography reported that Mandeville was the "soul" of the club and "a most facetious, entertaining companion." But we know that Franklin himself, in those days, was no better than he should have been.

One sees how the legend of the vulgar tavern wit got afoot.

As a matter of fact, at the outset of his literary career, Mandeville himself was at small pains to be taken seriously. His "Fable," as he first launched it on the town in 1705, under the title of "The Grumbling Hive," was not, as it is now, a magnum opus, a life-work—comparable with Montaigne's "Essays," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Hobbes' "Leviathan," Locke on "Human Understanding" or Shaftesbury's "Charactersticks."

He threw out at first but the germ or nucleus about which his meditations were to agglomerate for the next generation. The germ is but a poem of some four

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 hundred doggerel lines, such as splenetic, misanthropic Swift was writing, such as iconoclastic Samuel Butler in "Hudibras" had written to tickle the anti-Puritan fancy of the last age. The pacifists and preachers and little Englanders and the societies for the reformation of morals were actively engaged in their perennial, millennial business, and Mandeville tossed among them a satirical skit, playing inoffensively with the idea that when ambition and enterprise are replaced by frugality, meekness, temperance, and long-suffering, society will cease to "bloom" and expand as it does when its animating ideals are stirring and aggressive.

For nine years Mandeville studied men and meditated on the contrast between what we might call "Christian idealism" and the actual way of the world. He came to the conclusion that all mankind talks about one objective: the kingdom of heaven, and bends the major part of its efforts toward reaching another objective: the power and the glory of this earth. He inquired why people worked at such cross-purposes, and I don't think he quite adequately solved that problem.

But he inquired thoroughly into the reason why the great majority of mankind actually find their pleasure in the pursuit of power and glory. He traced our civilization as it is back to its roots in the savage animal nature—into lust and fear and pride and vanity. His contemporary, Swift, coming on those same roots, became morbid and nasty over them, and was finally driven mad by the discovery. But Mandeville had the phlegm of a physician, and the special sort of robust clean-mindedness of which physicians are capable. He could cut open a patient and grope among his viscera or converse with his excrements, and yet think none

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 Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue the worse of him when, a month later, he shook hands with him and passed the time of day.

I conceive that Mandeville thought it would be well for the intelligent adult portion of mankind to acquire a less squeamish habit about facing, recognizing and naming facts of human nature and facts of the social organism. Accordingly he brought out a new edition of his poems in 1714, entitled this time "The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits," to which he added, ostensibly as a commentary, a substantial body of prose in the form of moral essays. After the lapse of nine years more, he published, in 1723, a second edition, supplemented by defensive dialogues, containing many new speculations, and an extremely provocative "Essay on Charity and Charity Schools," together with a "Search Into the Nature of Society."

If Mandeville desired to bugle forth all the forces of opposition he managed his "publicity" well. Apparently he was attacking everything in sight—especially everything sacred, such as polite society, the army, and charity schools. He displayed a sub-title—Private Vices, Publick Benefits—which attracted and fascinated the mob like the picture of a naked woman—or an advertisement of the Ten Commandments over a moving-picture palace. When the police ran up to see what was going on, he made disparaging remarks about London aldermen and the Lord Mayor—really stinging and insufferable remarks, coming from a foreigner, to the disadvantage of the Lord Mayor as compared with Dutch burgomasters. He explained that his show was not intended for the yokelry but only for the choice few who could think, or at least read and write, that is, what we should call the Intellectuals. "Apagete vulgus!" he exclaimed.

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 which was an extremely disrespectful and perhaps almost blasphemous way of saying: "Please rope off the crowd." He might well have added: "Este procul feminae," which, being interpreted, means: "Why don't the ladies go into the drawing-room?" For I suppose no one has ever heard of a woman who was acquainted with Mandeville's book.

Mandeville is for men—he does not flatter. There is, to be sure, something of illicit and "unprofessional" sensationalism in that sub-title; and there is much of sensationalism and economic fallacy in the mode of his argument for luxury and extravagance as the pathway to national greatness. But Mandeville's fallacies and his exaggerations have been sufficiently emphasized. Once past his outworks, you find yourself in the hands of a serious and masterly analyst of motive, bent on getting at the savage root of the matter.

Take, for illustration, his treatment of pride. As Christianity speaks of it, pride is to be abased, and as medieval theology regards it, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps it is, says Mandeville, in those who are preparing themselves for life in another world, but, as this world goes, pride is one of the indispensable pillars of civilized society. It is, as the ancients regarded it, one of the virtues of the magnanimous man. So far, Mandeville may seem to flatter pride and the pagan at the expense of the Christian virtues, in an effort to bring about, like Nietzsche, a "transvaluation of values." But if you subject yourself to the discipline of Mandeville you will ultimately find yourself left without a rag of pride clinging to you. He cuts beneath all the virtues, Christian and pagan alike, until he has dissected out of civil and polite society that nude, mean, nasty and brutish being in whose passion-

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 Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue ate selfishness the "cynical" moralists from Hobbes to Samuel Butler and Mr. Veblen have found the effective source of polite and civil society.

The fact of the matter is that Mandeville had by psychological analysis firmly established in his own mind the conception of man and society as products of a complex evolution. He hadn't a doubt that man was an animal of base ancestry and savage relatives. That this conception has haunted mankind from the earliest times is often suggested to us by the poets, who, when they leave off flattering the ladies and depict human nature as it is, show us lions on the throne, foxes at court and wolves, bulls, bears, monkeys and rabbits in the streets. With Mandeville, however, this conception is not poetically but scientifically and philosophically entertained. He works out his corollaries. He applies his ideas to the development of languages. He pries into the physiology of the emotions. He discards all absolute values, and works out a doctrine of pure relativity. Before Malthus and Darwin he meditates on the enormous potential reproductivity of nature, as exemplified in the shad roe; he concludes that the shad, if unchecked, would clog up the seven seas; he perceives that powers which thwart reproduction—pestilence and war—are as necessary to the "balance of nature" as reproduction: he states clearly the necessity of the struggle for existence. Without in the least intending to be a "forward-looking" man he prepares the way for the philosophical radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose most important distinction is in the part which they assign to conscious purpose in altering the terms of the struggle for existence.

I doubt whether Mandeville suffered much from the

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 attacks which the ministers made upon him, or even from the heavy guns of Bishop Berkeley and William Law. They started from assumptions about human nature and human origins which he had dismissed as completely as most biologists to-day dismiss the assumptions of Mr. Bryan. He was a very modern type of man: philosophical bishops amused him. But Mr. Kaye, in his admirably learned edition of the "Fable.Fable, [sic]" has made a large collection of tributes from later writers, which show the wide and deep furrow that Mandeville drew in the thought of two centuries. Most of them are by solid men.

Samuel Johnson said: "I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago . . . he opened my views into real life very much." Crabb Robinson called the "Fable" "the wickedest, cleverest book in the English language." Lord Macaulay said: "If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions it is . . . extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in 'The Fable of the Bees. William Hazlitt said: "I like Mandeville better [than La Rochefoucauld]. He goes more into his subject." Robert Browning, in "Parleyings" saluted Mandeville as the sage in whom truth triumphs through the harmonious combination of good with evil.

Now, if you look into the ordinary textbook by which English literature is introduced to students in the United States, the probability is that you will not find Bernard Mandeville so much as mentioned, though the author of "Marco Polo's Travels" usually finds a place. In a history of eighteenth century literature,

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 such as that of Edmund Gosse, he is dismissed as a vulgar, if sometimes amusing, fellow, a devil's disciple. Writers like Professor Saintsbury and Dean Inge find him vulgar and foul and unpolished, though Professor Saintsbury, on reconsideration, admits that he is a master of the vernacular. In the great Cambridge History of English Literature he gets a paragraph from Professor Sorley as a reviver of the Hobbesian selfishness theory against the facile optimism of Shaftesbury. The two English writers who have most sought to do him justice are Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. Leslie Stephen. The latter, as author of the article in the "Dictionary of National Biography," extensive references in his "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century" and extensive treatment in his essays, is perhaps chiefly responsible for his present English reputation. Leslie Stephen saw clearly that Mandeville was a remarkable man with important intellectual connections, but he was irritated by Mandeville's "detestable grin," and he felt bound to apologize for Mandeville's giving up to the coffee-houses "a penetration meant for loftier purposes."

I have gradually been preparing the way for two announcements. The first is: Mandeville is worth knowing—a man to lay siege to and conquer. The second is: If you wish to know Mandeville you may now, without hesitation, be recommended to disregard everything else, and begin with Mr. Kaye's two magnificent volumes. I speak with emphasis and feeling. In twenty years' observation of the products of higher English study in America I have met with no more exhilarating and satisfying work than this, which originated in the Yale school for eighteenth century letters.

Mr. Kaye gives us an admirable scholarly text of the

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 "Fable," preceded by a life of Mandeville, a history of the text, an analysis of Mandeville's thought and studies of his background, and of his influence. The brilliant preliminary discussion is supplemented by extraordinarily rich and illuminating notes and various appendices by the aid of which one sees the naturalistic thought of Europe converging upon Mandeville from the time of the Renaissance, and, from him, coursing on to our own time. The point of view is easily accessible, but the vistas are immense, and Mandeville is steadily at the center of all of them, flooded with light. It is a triumph of technique and of the intelligent, purposeful pursuit of ideas.

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HEN Boswell's mind was not preoccupied and splendidly buzzing with drink, women, friends, celebrities, business, literature and glory, it was occupied with religion. He was no Calvinist, the good Boswell; and he did God the justice to believe him no Calvinist either. From Pope and the tolerant deists of his day he acquired a leaning toward universalism. Of one thing at least he was sure: That the use of religion is to comfort men with whom everything in this world has not gone strictly according to hope and expectation.

How he himself would have governed the universe, with what benignity of temper he would have dealt with sheep and goats alike, one may deliciously infer from his comment on the death of his "poor uncle, Dr. Boswell," who seems to have been, like his poor nephew, what is called nowadays a "yea-sayer to life." Writing to his lifelong confidant, the Rev. William Temple, James Boswell says of his deceased relative, with sympathetic indulgence and a sidelong

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 glance at the complex case he himself was preparng for the last assizes: "He was a very good scholar, knew a great many things, had an elegant taste and was very affectionate. But he had no conduct. His money was all gone; and, do you know, he was not confined to one woman? He had a strange kind of religion. But, I flatter myself, he will be ere long, if he is not already, in Heaven." [My italics.]

Poor Boswell! He hoped all his life for a blessed resurrection, and now he has got one—a resurrection of that quick, curious, eager, affectionate spirit, so scintillant and vivacious, so subject to somber hypochondriac vapors. He has got, also, a resurrection "of the body," according to the aspiration of his creed, with his tied wig, his pointed nose, the fat collops of his double chin, his stomach ruined by alcohol and refusing food, long fevers and shameful diseases clinging to him from nights spent, after intoxication from drinking the health of his intended wife, with girls of doubtful virtue. But all of these ignominies of the unruly flesh, quite unbecoming the friend of Paoli and the disciple of the moral Johnson, as he would be the first to acknowledge, were veiled from a censorious world during his lifetime by "a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-colored silk and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons."

Here he is again, the naughty, irrepressible fellow with no conduct, whom the sternest moralist of his day loved like a son; who brought to another stern moralist, Carlyle, more pleasure than any other of the fifteen million souls whose decorum he outraged; and who was declared by Lord Macaulay to be as indubitably the first of biographers as Homer is the first of poets.

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 Professor Tinker's book, which every library and every Johnsonian and Boswellian will wish to possess, gives us the most accurate, comprehensive, intimate and scandalous account now available of one of the most captivating figures in the entire range of English literature. There are a hundred hitherto unpublished letters, including a series addressed to the steward of Boswell's estate at Auchinleck. More important than these considerations is the restoration of the original text of the letters to Temple, which are the piece de resistance.

Since 1857, when the series was first published, with the disreputable editing and the grave expurgations characteristic of that decorous Victorian time, apparently no one had studied what Boswell actually wrote till Professor Tinker explored the manuscript treasures in the possession of Mr. J. P. Morgan. After due hesitation, he decided to reproduce with practically immaculate integrity the correspondence in which Boswell shows himself to Temple naked and only intermittently ashamed.

His editorial work may serve as a model to all editors of letters; and all scholars, of course, know that Professor Tinker is much more than a master of editorial technique. In the flourishing Yale school for the study of eighteenth century literature, Professor Tinker has for some years appeared to be, as Boswell said of Malone, "Johnsonianissimus," with his studies of "Johnson and Fanny Burney," "The Salon and English Letters," "Young Boswell" and "Nature's Simple Plan." But his long frequentation of the wits and the blue stockings who bowed to the Great Bear appears at present as but preliminary to the "insidious

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 circumvallation" of James Boswell, who now emphatically challenges reconsideration, not as a satellite, but as the fiery center of his own turbulent system.

The impression that Boswell derives all his interest from his relation to Johnson is an error which this edition of his letters will help to explode. This erroneous impression is due, first, to the great biography and then to two famous essays on the biography by Macaulay and by Carlyle. Macaulay, as every one remembers, spitted Boswell on a glittering antithesis: "Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all." Macaulay went on to prove that Boswell's achievement was due precisely to the fact that he was an officious, inquisitive, insensible, toad-eating fool, and that he possessed "absolutely none" of "the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers." Carlyle, himself a biographer of a new style, disrelished Macaulay's recipe for supremacy in the biographical art. He declared this estimate of Boswell egregiously wrong, assured the world that every great work is the fruit of virtues and not of vices, and, in accordance with his own favorite doctrine, he explained Boswell as a man eminently endowed with the supreme virtue of hero-worship. Thus Macaulay and Carlyle both place Boswell in the list of Johnson's dependents.

Carlyle's theory is not, like Macaulay's, positively silly, but it is quite inadequate. It doesn't really touch: Boswell's center. Hero-worship certainly was not the mainspring in Boswell. No one can scrutinize intimately his inner workings and fail to recognize that he burns with a flaming desire to be a great man in his own right. He also would rather like, if he could

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 Boswell on His Own Hook manage it without impediment to larger ambitions, to be a good man in his own right. Se perfectionner—to shape and polish his own character: that is an object which already interests him in his teens. With that in mind, he applies for guidance to Hume, to Johnson, to Paoli, to Rousseau, to Voltaire, and he feebly returns from time to time to the consideration of self-perfection amid the growing dissipations of his later years.

But the master passion in Boswell from the outset is for full self-realization and self-expression. He is the supreme biographer because he is a great artist and has a most extraordinary faculty for taking in and giving forth again all the elements in a situation which constitute its life. With much loud ado, Macaulay and Carlyle bring their critical sledge-hammers down on both sides of the nail. Professor Tinker strikes it accurately on the head with this simple declaration in his "Young Boswell": "The distinctive feature in Boswell is the capacity for realizing and using the richness of life to which he was admitted."

Boswell, beyond any man in his time, realized the richness to which he was admitted in Johnson; but in this case he had brisk competition. Fanny Burney, for example, describes an Irish gentleman, a Mr. Musgrave, a member of the Irish Parliament, as glancing up at Johnson's portrait and exclaiming: "What a fine old lion he is! Oh! I love him—I honor him—I reverence him! I would black his shoes for him. I wish I could give him my night's sleep." That is hero-worship, and Fanny, who thinks it is a little foolish, remarks that Musgrave "is a caricature of Mr. Boswell, who is a caricature, I must add, of all other of Dr. Johnson's admirers."

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 Boswell excelled all the other admirers not because he was a greater hero-worshiper but because he had a far more comprehensive appreciation of the points of interest in the hero. As a biographer Johnson himself was a dry-as-dust professor compared with Boswell. Johnson hadn't, for instance, the dimmest notion why it was worth while to preserve a record of his hoarding of orange peel. Boswell had. From the time he published his "Account of Corsica" to the close of his literary career he was master of a recipe for writing such a book as no one could help reading.

He realized the richness of life that there was in a Corsican patriot before Lundon had heard of him. He realized the richness of life in John Wilkes when England had exiled him. If Johnson had not happened to be the best extant subject for a biographer and the recognized center of literary society, Boswell would not have focused his magnum opus upon him, and he would not have wasted his time touring Scotland and the Hebrides with him. He valued his time and he was absolutely sure of the quality of his talent while all the world was laughing at him. In order to prove his possession of a glorious lifeenhancing faculty, independent of his subject, it was no more necessary for him to paint Johnson than for Velasquez to paint Philip IV. If Johnson had never lived, Boswell, I think, would still have produced masterpieces.

In the "Letters," the Johnson Biography drops into its place as only a considerable incident in a many-sided, adventurous and ambitious career, full and running over with experience, most of which was zestfully welcomed.

There is the stuff of an excellent novel in Boswell's

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 relation to Scotland, the Auchinleck estate, and his father, and that "implacable" woman, his father's second wife. As Carlyle recognized well enough, the young James was no insolent toad-eating upstart from nowhere. He has the blood of Bruce in his veins, and social position and culture behind him. His father, an eminent member of the Scottish bar and Lord of Auchinleck, can ride ten miles from his front door on his own land. He wants an heir to his profession and his property and to his position in the country, and he gives his boy an Edinburgh education, and tries to make a sound religious Tory and a good Scotsman of him. Sentimentally, the project appeals to James; he always remained sentimentally enthusiastic for his religion, his king, and his family, and he enjoyed drinking port wine and coffee on the 30th of January in honor of the blessed martyr Charles I.

But young James has a pair of the most candid realistic eyes that were ever set in a man's head. At the age of seventeen, precocious, well-read, wide-eyed, he turns his eyes toward London, recognizing that Scotland is going to be more and more irredeemably provincial. With his instinct for the main current, he cannot bear the thought of accepting a Scotch laird's universe, and remaining in the backwater. Edinburgh he knows only too well. He is irked by the study and practise of law as he sees it in the provinces. He loathes the gloom and the dull placidity of country life. His temperamental melancholy craves the stimulation of gay scenes and people. To escape from his manifest destiny and to torment his father, he talks about entering the priesthood and the army. These are but youthful writhings against the study of law. As a disciple of the rational Hume, he has no

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 place in the priesthood. Physically timorous, he has no use for the army, except as the convivialities of the officers' mess entice.

What the young Boswell is really yearning for is the new poetry, the new plays, the new histories, the new skeptical philosophy, hot from the capital; and, as soon as possible, he must be down there in London among the producers of the new age, which his prescient nostrils have scented afar off. His father, almost heartbroken, sees this restlessness, but has outlived his sympathy with it. He talks to James as if he were a silly, stubborn boy—even after James is a man grown and married, he always is made to feel like a "timid boy" in the presence of his father, except when deep drafts of strong beer have stupefied his sensibilities to the paternal snibbing. He reveres his father and would, if given a chance, love him. But his father sheds a black frost on his affection, and seeks to destroy the form which the spirit of his son's young life spontaneously takes. As an incidental consequence, perhaps, of this repressive discipline, when James at the age of twenty-two makes his arrangements to go abroad, ostensibly to study law in Utrecht, he is obliged to set aside £10 of his traveling allowance for the upkeep of the illegitimate child which he leaves behind him.

By heredity and by poetical sentiment and by association with Johnson, Boswell is a Tory, but by a deeper impulse in him he takes to radicalism and revolution like a duck to water. He has in Holland an interesting affair with a young lady of excellent birth, whose skepticism in religious and moral matters shocks him, superficially; but to whom does he run for consultation on the case but to the author of "The Nou-

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 velle Héloise"! He carries messages from Rousseau to Paoli, the Corsican patriot. He makes a sensation at the age of twenty-seven by his "Account of Corsica," containing the spirited journal of his association with Paoli, which first interpreted him to the English world. He would like to effect a meeting between Rousseau and Voltaire. Failing at that, he assists at the junction of Rousseau and Hume; and he pilots Rousseau's mistress across the Channel. He has an affair with a lady in Sienna, which pleases him for years. He courts in italy the insolent democrat John Wilkes; and later, as a masterpiece of mediation, he maneuvers Dr. Johnson himself into a meeting with Wilkes at a dinner party with the bookseller Dilly. He sides with the Americans against Dr. Johnson. He pretends to side with Burke against the French; but Burke's continually raging against the French bores him to extinction, and he is grateful and happy when the great man refrains from the subject for an entire evening.

The fact is that Boswell, in the prime of life, hasn't a political conviction in his body for which he would shed his blood, nor a moral principle which he isn't ready to sacrifice at a moment's notice for an enlargement of his experience—unless, indeed, we recognize as a conviction his impresario's passion for bringing great artists together; and as a principle, his desire "to be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy."

Every vital impulse in him is an expansive impulse; and it is his misfortune, when he is in "good society," to live in an "epoch of concentration." His presence in the sturdy classical circle of Burke, Johnson and Reynolds is, in a sense, an accident. He paints the temple of Georgian classicism because it is quite the

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 finest thing in England. He goes through the political and religious and social motions of conforming with the age, and works quite a bit of ardor into his conformity. He calls himself a Tory, a Christian and a gentleman, and he keeps up appearances as well as he can when he isn't drunk. But his gentility, his Christianity and his Toryism are garments which he has got at the tailor's, like his suit of imperial blue with the rose-colored lining. At heart, one is tempted to say, the man is a rationalist, a free-thinking deist, a "child of nature," and far better qualified for discipleship to Rousseau than to Johnson.

If one were bent on proving Boswell a hollow sham and a contemptible hypocrite one could find abundant evidence in his outpourings to Temple.

After innumerable previous affairs of the heart and of the flesh he does marry a cousin and beget three daughters and two sons, to perpetuate his ancient race. He thinks an ancient race is a good thing and ought to be preserved—if it can be done without interfering with more interesting occupations. But he doesn't even consider settling down after his marriage to be a country gentleman. He leaves his "valuable" wife—his constantly recurring epithet for her—to manage his estate and the children in the country. He is glad to pay her an occasional visit, but he is also glad that she doesn't care to live in town. For his part, he candidly recognizes that he is "too many, as the phrase is, for one woman, and a certain transient connection I am persuaded does not interfere with that attachment which a man has for a wife and which I have as much as any man that ever lived, though some of my qualifications are not valued by her, as they have been by other women—aye, and well educated women, too."

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 Besides, there is a handsome chambermaid who cheers him on the way to and from his wife. And on one of his trips to Auchinleck he has the gout, or some trouble with his toe; and he easily finds in the post-chaise an "agreeable young widow" who is happy to hold his foot in her lap.

These little amours are the of idle moments. They don't weigh on his mind or fill it. He aspires for distinction at the English bar. He is trying to attract the attention of Lord Chatham. He would like to be English commissioner in Corsica. He is giving dinner parties and dining out daily with the most exciting groups of the most stimulating people, and sitting from 8:30 to 3 in the morning at the Turk's Head Tavern, gathering material for "the most entertaining book you ever read"—and it is only now and then in a spare moment that his mind wanders to his debts and to his "valuable spouse" who, far away in Auchinleck, is dying of consumption, as he rather fears from the physician's report of her "severe cough, sweatings and swelled legs."

Up to the time of his wife's death, Boswell felt, like another great man, that "he had come to the ring, and now he must hop." He was hopping in the London ring when his "valuable wife," who had repeatedly warned him that she was about to do it, died, uncheered by his presence. He had tarried, with apparent callousness, till it was just too late, and then had posted to Auchinleck to find her beyond the reach of his belated consolation. Feebly, at first, he recognized what had happened. Her countenance was so little disfigured that he almost felt it must all be a deception. "But alas, to see my excellent wife, and the mother of my children, and that most sensible lively

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 woman, lying cold and pale and insensible was very shocking to me." Contrary to the custom of Scottish gentlemen, he resolved to attend the funeral, and got through it very decently. Then he privately read the funeral service over the coffin in the presence of his sons, and was temporarily relieved by that.

But in the next days and weeks gradually there breaks over him such an overwhelming sense of what he has lost that he is "avid of death," and wonders why people are so eager to bring offspring into the world to meet with so much misery and so little real happiness. In his depressed fantastic moods his wife, he now remembers, had been wont to be his comforter and to suggest "rational thoughts" to him. The complex and annoying business of the estate she had in great part taken off his mind. The five sons and daughters—he is terribly attached to them, now that he thinks of them; and he has got to think of them now very hard. Their schooling, for example, must receive attention at once, and what problems for his poor head! The girls are too precocious and too independent to be sent to any ordinary governess; he himself has no "authority" over them and can influence them only by "affection." One of the boys he will send to Eton; the other he takes into his own bachelor apartment in London and provides a private tutor for him; but this arrangement worries him because the poor little fellow has no one to associate with but the old housekeeper and the footman. He rests badly at night, thinking of his sickly mind, his bereavement, the disappointment of his "hopes of success in life," the embarrassment of his affairs, "the disadvantage to my children in having so wretched a father," the

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 uncertainty of being happy after death, the certainty of death.

One can't read the later pages of this correspondence without recognizing that Boswell responds to the elementary moral appeals of life in a way to justify his declaration that, in spite of the romantic aspects of his career, he is "a very sensible, good sort of man." Yet to dull the edge of his misery and his anxiety, he drinks in these last years harder than ever—scarcely gets through a day without sinking into a drunken sleep. In these circumstances, in this half desperate mood between the death of his wife, in 1789, and 1791, in "a dissipated stupor and afraid to think," this Divine Madman, as he called himself, wrote out, polished and published the "Life of Johnson." It was all that held him up. It was enough.

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NCE upon a time an old gray wolf had a den in the heart of England, from which he emerged and devastated the, terrorizing travelers, plundering sheepfolds and devouring young children. Parties of men with pitchforks and guns were often organized to hunt the brute down, but year after year, by superior strength and fleetness, he always escaped unscathed, leaving deep scars of these encounters upon his pursuers.

Finally an eccentric country parson whose wits had been turned by drink and disease and by reading curious old books got it fixed in his crack-brained noddle that as there are more ways than one of killing a cat, the same must be true of wolves. He made himself a suit of motley, with cap and bells, and, taking a bladder with rattling beans in one hand and a tear-bottle in the other, went forth to hunt the wolf.

When the fierce creature sprang at him the parson stood fast and rattled the bladder till he saw the whites of the wolf's bloodshot eyes. Then he tossed the contents of the tear-bottle into them. Dismayed by this unaccustomed mode of attack the beast turned tail and fied. The parson pursued, through wood and fen, through hedge and ditch, through bush and briar, still shaking the bladder, till the panic-stricken animal leaped over the cliff at Dover and was drowned.

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 The poor parson, bedraggled, blood-stained, begrimed, exhausted but triumphant, returned to the village, carrying the shreds of the bladder and the emptied tear-bottle in his hand. "Why, parson, are you mad?" cried the innkeeper as he passed the tavern door. "Quite!" gasped the parson and staggered in at his garden gate. "Lord-a-mercy!" exclaimed the maid who was sweeping off the step, "but you've got yourself filthy, master." "Haven't I!" said the parson, and reeled into the parlor, where his wife sat knitting. "Why, John," screamed his wife, "haven't you torn your breeches?" "Badly!" said the parson, and, stumbling up the stairs, threw himself on his bed. His weak heart having been overstrained by excitement, in a little while he died.

Laurence Sterne was that "poor parson" and the "old gray wolf" whom he hunted with jests and tears was the brutal insensitiveness of the healthy, redblooded Englishman. It would, of course, be absurd to represent him as conscious of any passion for any sort of reform. If he accomplished any "good" in the world, if he refined the manners of his time, if he introduced into polite society a new form of feeling, it was by indulging and expressing the pleasures in which his own nature found most gratification—like Montaigne, or, for a modern example, like Mr. George Moore.

We mention by way of background that he published several volumes of sermons, goodish in morality, weak in divinity, and embellished with plagiarisms from his illustrious predecessors. The upbearing wings of his reputation are two world-renowned books, "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey," filled with curious learning and sly wit, pervaded by

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 an original humor, concocted of a half maudlin mirth, a half maudlin pathos and acute sensibility to both. He was author also of a journal and of many letters addressed to various ladies not his wife, steeped in the perfume of sentiment and enlivened by delicate intimations that if God should open the gate (and take Mrs. Sterne to himself), he, Parson Yorick, had already in mind the boudoir which he would fit up in his parsonage for her successor.

I don't know just how to go to work to quarrel with people who hold that this sort of thing is infinitely more detestable than the "healthy animality" of Tom Jones. Think it out for yourself, set down your reasons, and balance them.

Judged as a "man of God" or as a "Christian citizen," Laurence Sterne was a ridiculous fellow. It was part of his own absurdity that his great-grandfather had been an Archbishop of York. His father, & poor ensign in the army, was run through in a duel over a goose. His mother—a "fruitful vine" and little else—produced seven children, four of whom died in infancy, and the three others, including Laurence, were, as he remarked of the brood, of delicate frame, "not made to last long." By the kindness of a cousin he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, and there he formed a lifelong cronyship with John Hall-Stevenson, apparently originating in their common fondness for idling under a walnut tree, reading Rabelais and swapping bawdy stories. In his senior year he had a hemorrhage of the lungs and got well into debt. And so, by a natural rather than logical process of reasoning, he accepted the advice of his uncle, a canon of York, and entered the Church, which in the mid-eighteenth century, was notoriously a refuge for

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 younger sons, a hospital for lame ducks, a club for bibulous old scholars and antiquarians.

Sterne married early, and, in a country parsonage about eight miles from York, slumped down into the indolent bosom of the Church, precisely as scores of other impecunious, ungodly, place-hunting young men were doing—the feebler ones starving, the stronger reaching out fat, greedy hands crammed full of benefices, to see if they could not, by skilfully crooking a little finger, rake in one more. Sterne vegetated, almost unheard of, in his parish till he was forty-six years old.

What was he doing all that time? Well, he preached twice on Sundays when he had no curate, and when he had a sermon ready, and when he felt like it, though it is related that, crossing the fields one afternoon to deliver his second discourse, he started up a covey of partridges, and, returning to the parsonage for his gun, left his congregation gaping for the sacred word in vain. And then, to eke out his slender clerical living, he dabbled in dairy farming and agriculture, till he found that turnips at £200 the load were too dear. In early years he wrote some political paragraphs for the uncle who had beneficed him, but he thought that dirty work, and he was more congenially occupied with hunting and with fiddling on the bass viol and with painting, mainly copying portraits. Besides, he frequented York society, and was a member of the carousing, free-thinking Demoniacks Club, a society of squires and parsons who drank and jested at Crazy Castle, the tumble-down seat of his crony, John Hall-Stevenson, where there was, furthermore, a library very rich in Curiosa, tempting to a parson whom the Lord had not anointed.

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 We know the reading of this quaint man of God. He had some excellent works of divinity in weekly use—Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Hall, Tillotson, Bishop Berkeley—he had to have them in his business. He had also a tooth for all sorts of treatises on military and medical science, and he had manifest interest in the newly developing branch of obstetrics. But, in the long solitudes and silences of that pastoral study the authors most chewed and inwardly digested were meaty, racy fellows—Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Browne, Locke, Beroalde de Verville, Samuel Butler, Swift, Arbuthnot, Tom Brown and Voltaire.

The incongruity of his inner consciousness with his calling grew upon him till, as Gray suggested, he often must have ascended the pulpit, his fingers fairly itching with desire to throw his periwig in the face of his congregation. As an obvious result of his reading and his week-day way of life he was driven to a point of view at which he and his contemporaries, especially those in cassocks, appeared to him unutterably funny in their spiritual decadence, just as the Holy Catholic Church had appeared to Chaucer in the Middle Ages, just as all the churches appeared to Swift in the age of Anne. His humor was born in the stench of a moribund "Christianity."

Finally, in 1759, at the age of forty-six, on the occasion of a clerical wrangling under the shadow of the cathedral, his pent-up amusement burst forth in "A Political Romance," an allegorical skit in the manner of Swift's "Tale of a Tub," exhibiting himself and his clerical friends and enemies contending over an old "watch-coat," which "Trim" wants to take home "in order to have it converted into a warm under-petti-

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 coat for his wife and a jerkin for himself." A small edition of this squib was printed at York, 1759, but, on the advice of Sterne's spiritual superiors, burnt—all but a few copies. It did not make for edification, that is, it did not screen, as the work of a good churchman should, the petty greed and folly which mask under the solemn habiliments of the Church.

Seventeen fifty-nine was a momentous year for Laurence Sterne. His mother died, but that didn't trouble him. His uncle, the canon, died—but that didn't trouble him—leaving him no legacy, which troubled him so much that he refused to wear the mourning he had prepared in celebration of the event. His wife went mad, but that troubled him little; he humored her in it, for he was engaged in an impassioned flirtation—thought to be the cause of his wife's madness—with a professional singer, to whom he was sending wine, honey, sweetmeats and vows of distracted love "to eternity." At the same time he was writing the first instalment of "Tristram Shandy." His hero's name means "the sad crack-brained fellow," and he meant the book to give a true portrait, or rather impression, of himself and his peculiar humor.

It does. The characters, the opinions, the novel style—with its discovery of the intimacy-making uses of punctuation and the pause in the sentence—are Shandian, and so are this most outrageous plot and this most absurd of all conceivable artistic "points of view."

Here is an author undertaking to tell what took place below stairs between the time when his mother's pains came upon her and the time of his own birth. With expectation of the poor woman's deliverance to supply "suspense," the discussions of Walter Shandy,

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 the father, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Doctor Slop and Susannah run on for three volumes before the child is born, and he doesn't get into his breeches till the sixth volume. The "life and opinions" are thus, as it were, framed in a mystery of obstetrics.

And Sterne seems to say to us that all life is like that: a child just barely learning to walk and smiling midway with exultation as he toddles out of the hands of the midwife and totters into the hands of the sexton.

If life is like that, Sterne concluded in the teeth of all the theologians from whom he had plagiarized, success in life consists not in austere and strenuous activity and still less in the shows of pomp and ceremony, but in expanding to the utmost our consciousness of the smiling interval, in multiplying to the utmost the titillations of moments when birth or death or the beating of a fair grisette's pulse under our fingers or a pair of new black silk breeches or a fricasseed chicken or burgundy or a jeweled snuffbox or a pretty act of kindness or a letter from our mistress has given us a childish joy. If life is like that, says Sterne, let us follow our happy and our pathetic impulses, "as the fly stings"—on the spur of the moment—a dreadful notion, of course, unless our first impulses are indeed better than our discreet and cautious second thoughts.

How is it, madam, in your case, and in yours, sir?

Sterne approved the first spontaneous flow of his feelings, and so, to supply his own long-felt want, he invented the word "sentimental" and put it into circulation. He elaborated, if he did not invent, sentimental relations, and he made an ideal of the life of "sensibility." In "Tristram Shandy," in "A Senti-

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 mental Journey," in his letters to his various fair ones, in the "Journal to Eliza," he devised for it scores of famous illustrations.

Uncle Toby is sentimental when he carefully puts a fly that has troubled him out at the window, unwilling to hurt a "hair" of its head, being convinced there is room enough in the world for both. The Recording Angel who drops a tear on Uncle Toby's oath in the Book of Life and blots it out is a sentimental angel. Susannah is sentimental when she bursts into a flood of tears at Corporal Trim's dropping his hat to exhibit the transitoriness of life. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is a sentimental proverb, indicating what Sterne himself would have done, had he been God, and had tempering the wind occasioned him no great inconvenience. A starling in a cage, a dead ass by the roadside, may be the occasion of this new sentimentality. The occasion is nothing; the quantity and quality of feeling evoked are everything. Gefühl ist alles. We luxuriate now in emotion for emotion's sake. We count our tears as they fall, with a consciousness of our resources in feeling which renders the pain itself delicious and elevates it to the level of art.

I think there cannot be a particle of doubt that Sterne was perfectly honest when he wrote, "Praised be God for my sensibility." Whether he was equally honest when he declared that, after all his badinage on the verge of "indelicacy," his heart was as innocent as when in his boyish days he got astride of a stick and galloped away—that is a slightly different question.

There is no space here to recall the way Shandian sentimentalism took fashionable London by storm nor the opposition to it of a few stalwarts like Dr. John-

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 son, nor to describe the disgust of a few "immaculate" imaginations like Dr. Goldsmith's and Richardson's, nor the efforts of a few savage critics and shocked clericals to "Nicodemus" Sterne into nothing. The controversy between those who feel intensely and those who hardly feel at all still rages, and is probably destined to rage as long as two sorts of men recur in society.

But to the fashionable mid-eighteenth century in general, sentimentalism came like rain from heaven after a long dry summer. It was such a joy to weep again, and this country parson Sterne had invented a way of weeping copiously over little things; so that, all the time, one could be half smiling through one's tears; and it hardly hurt at all. No wonder he tickled the bluestockings and the great worldly ecclesiastics and the ministers of state; and became the vogue in Paris and the friend of Diderot; and penetrated into Germany and won the plaudits of Goethe and Lessing and later the enthusiastic homage of that kindred spirit, Heinrich Heine.

Sterne was a sensitive, intuitive person. He felt the winds of revolutionary change in European feeling before they had begun to blow. His type of consciousness ran ahead of his age. Sentimentalism seemed merely the fashionable return to superficial emotion. More deeply considered, it indicated "humanitarianism," the discovery of the individual, democracy, the French Revolution, Catholic Emancipation, Prison Reform, the liberation of black slaves and the Reform Bills. More deeply considered, it meant a revolt against the venality, the nepotism, the inefficiency, the selfishness and the obvious rottenness of the ancient regime—in the Church, out of which Sterne emerged;

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 in the universities; in the entire political and economic system of the State.

One is quite unprepared to understand Sterne in his times unless one sees his crack-brained humor as a product, more or less unconscious—a product, by reaction, of the brutal insensibility of generation after generation of upstanding, two-fisted, go-getting Englishmen, whose cities stank with unchanneled slops, whose gin-sodden peasants toiled like cattle, whose children were wasted in mines, whose prisons were crowded with fever-stricken victims driven there by debt and starvation, whose slave ships sailed blithely from Africa to the Indies with hundreds of blacks bound head to foot on the decks and dying in their chains.

It was time for a little "sensibility," high time.

In his "English Humorists," 1851-'53, Thackeray delivered a famous harsh lecture on Sterne as a man who would neglect his dying mother to weep over a dead ass. In 1864 Walter Bagehot, reviewing Percy Fitzgerald's "Life of Sterne," wrote an essay on "Sterne and Thackeray" in which he piquantly argued that "in spite of many superficial differences, there was one fundamental and ineradicable resemblance between the two"—namely, their exacerbated sensibility. Bagehot's essay is, however, in spite of suppressed struggling sympathies, "eminently Victorian," and is now as completely out of date as Thackeray's.

The "Life of Laurence Sterne" is as indisputably Dean Cross's as the "Life of Henry Fielding" is his. Since his "Development of the English Novel," 1899, he has been growing steadily more intimate with the subject from year to year through a quarter of a century. In 1904 he edited the Works of Sterne, to-

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 gether with Fitzgerald's Life, making many revisions and additions of new material. In 1909, after years of laborious research, he produced his own "Life and Times of Laurence Sterne." This work, as he slyly suggests in the preface to the new edition before us, seemed to be the special occasion for two new English biographies within the next two years. By this fresh and thorough revision Dean Cross reclaims what he had previously made his own, bringing the book abreast of the latest discoveries and enriching it with new materials, especially Sterne's Letter Book, printed from the manuscript now in the Morgan Library.

Sterne is not an author for all times or for all ages or for all sorts of people. He is for those who are ripe and perhaps on the verge of being overripe. He made, for example, little appeal to me when I was a young man, though I remember, about 1899, reading "Tristram Shandy" through one golden afternoon, lying behind a screen of boughs in a clear space in the midst of a New England wood, where an eccentric parson had stationed me to wait for partridges, according to his own mild method of hunting them. I grew tired of the book long before the parson came to guide me out of the wood, for I waited till after dark and the parson never returned at all. He was a Shandian fellow—irresponsible; perhaps he had left his partridges to write his sermon. But that was no way to read Sterne, in great gulps. Sterne wrote dainty little chapters, and for a reason. He wrote them for tired business men to read between stations in the subway. Last year I read both "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey" during leaps of the I. R. T.; I found them entrancing and wished for more such alleviants of the rush and jolting of life.

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 Sterne is an author for governors who have grown weary in well doing; for secretaries of state who have been baffled at the task of establishing the peace of the world; for judges who have grown skeptical not merely about the possibility but even about the wisdom of enforcing a law; for bishops who find that the Kingdom of God on Earth arrives tardily; and for deans of old New England colleges in hours of relaxation from screwing up the standards. When Dean Cross himself first began to write of Sterne, his sympathy with Sterne's temper and with his form was considerable but not complete. The shadow of Victorianism was still over his author and over him. But Dean Cross, like many other survivors of the august and virtuous Queen, has mellowed with the years, become gently whimsical, mildly epicurean, and now in the perfect sympathy that comes with perfect understanding he takes Sterne kindly by the hand and leads him back to us, and presents him to us as a humorist whom the whirligig of time has made once more singularly in accord with the spirit of a distracted and skeptical age.

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T is generally understood nowadays that George Washington has been poorly transmitted to us—partly his own fault or deficiency, partly the fault of others.

If we assume that he wished to live in the hearts of his countrymen, he had bad luck. He did indeed happen to stand out as the conspicuously fit man for doing two big jobs: commanding the Continental army during the War for Independence and navigating the ship of state on her first two voyages. That may perhaps be reckoned his good fortune. But in consequence of his performance of these two tasks, he was immobilized, marmorealized and demi-godded in his own lifetime.

After the war he never got a chance to unbend, and unbending was not easy to him at the best. Whenever he might otherwise have had an hour off, he was obliged to powder and curl his hair, don his broadcloth and lace, his silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoon, grasp the hilt of his tasseled sword, place one finger upon some epoch-making state paper, compose his features into an expression of august virtue and unutterable majesty and pose for a Roman medallion by Ormsby, a bust by Houdon, a portrait by Stuart, an oration by Patrick Henry, a Latin "Georgii Washingtomi Vita" by Francis Glass, of Ohio, or a biography

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 of the perfect statesman by Senator Lodge or President-to-be Wilson.

In olden days people had to have these classicized representations of the Mount Vernon farmer to hang in the legislative halls of the new states, and to erect on public squares, and to exhibit in Europe, and to include in the Statesman's Series. The poor old hero resigned himself in the end to being sublime, just as he had resigned himself to being commander-in-chief and President. He never visibly winced under it. He saw it through, thrusting his prominent chin out further than ever; in which, as Roscoe Thayer suggested, an ill-fitting set of false teeth—wooden—probably assisted. But his eyelids are a little weary.

It is a curious fact that the first great popular biography of Washington, published in the year following his death by the parson of Mount Vernon parish, the celebrated Mason L. Weems, was a protest against transmitting to posterity this classicized warrior and statesman, the official Washington. In the period when Sir Joshua Reynolds was explaining to the Royal Academy that an historical work in the grand style must not be allowed to run into "particularities," but must exhibit the hero only in his heroic aspects and with "as much dignity as the human figure is capable of receiving"—in this grand classicizing period this miserable Parson Weems strongly revolted against demi-godding his neighbor.

Somehow he got it fixed in his poor pious little head that the lovable Washington was the "private citizen," the man whom he had seen year after year planting his turnips and being diligent in business and serving the Lord once or twice a month in Pohick Church, along with Mrs. Washington and Patsy and Jacky

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 Custis. And so Parson Weems in the odor of parsonage sanctity excogitated and devised his George Washington, a hero whom he and a piety-loving posterity could understand; Washington, the pure-lipped model of all Sabbath school virtues, the boy who could not tell a lie, the friend of the widow and fatherless (didn't he, for example, marry a widow? with $100,000 to be sure), the affectionate son and brother, the devoted farmer, the mirror of industry and frugality. Weems's Washington was an incredible prig to whom school children for a hundred years have been taught to perform lip-service and genudections.

Since the time, say, of P. L. Ford's "The True George Washington," 1896, there has been accumulating a protest against the heroic demi-god of the classical painters, on the one hand, and the perfect prig of the Weemsian tradition, on the other.

Contemporary biography has learned the A B C's of the art. It is for putting back into the popular conception of the man the "human" traits which the earlier undertakers and sextons of his fame so carefully expunged, including the pockmarks which he got when he accompanied his consumptive brother to the Barbados, where he feasted pretty gaily with the gentlemen of the Beefsteak and Tripe Club and observed that the ladies generally were "very agreeable but by ill custom or . . . affect the Negro style . . . "

Some words are deleted in the diary at that point. Presumably they would have helped the sense and the interest of the passage. But it was a fixed rule with old-school editors to omit everything specially lively. Such a rule obviously bears hard on a diarist like our Father George, who only verged on liveliness half a dozen times in a half century.

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 Washington, we now learn, had huge hands and enormous feet, and stood six feet and three inches in his No. 13 boots. His big nose got fiery red when the wind blew. His hot temper is now a thing to brag about. He hurled leaden ink wells at dastards, and, in the presence of cowardice in battle, he swore past belief. As for lying, why couldn't he tell a lie? asks one biographer savagely—didn't he have a tongue in his head? Then comes along Mr. Henderson and demonstrates quite neatly, out of the diaries, that George did tell a lie—oh, a quite justifiable little white lie, to be sure—in order to be rid of the dust of a troublesome voluntary retinue which persisted in riding before him on his tour through the South. Gradually we recover other little touches of the Virginian gentleman which Weems overlooked; his romantic attachment to an early flame, his dancing all night, his card-playing—losing two to three pounds in an evening, too; his theatergoing, his rapacious appetite for food, his hard riding after foxes, sometimes six or seven hours a day, often ten times in a month, in some years every month.

These are trifling "particularities," but they help destroy the plaster bust.

Now, as I take it, the elaborate publication of Washington's private journals in their entirety is a most significant part of our contemporary effort to recover the whole man. The importance of this contribution will, I am convinced, grow upon us immensely as the record is "creatively" studied, as its laconic, factual memoranda are gradually pieced together, illuminated from other sources and reasoned upon by biographers and historians who know how to utilize a vast collection

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 of apparently insignificant detail in the interpretation of a tremendously vital yet bafflingly inexpressive sort of man—an "extravert," I fancy our psychologists would call him, a man with a "reflex mechanism" which expressed itself so adequately in muscular and practical activities that all the forms of emotion and reflection which result in most men from checked impulse are almost non-existent in this record.

But has not the public had access to these diaries hitherto? To certain parts of them, yes—to some of the rare and therefore uncharacteristic purple passages in them. For example, when young Washington, twenty-three years old, returned from his thrillingly venturous mission with his Dutch interpreter and four chiefs of the Six Nations to the French commandant at Fort Le Bœuf, in 1755, Dinwiddie, the Governor of Virginia, gave him just one day's warning to write up his notes of the trip for the inspection of the Legislature, and straightway rushed the narrative through the public printing office, as any newspaper man with the faintest sense of an amazingly live "story" would have done. It has the very whiff and smell of powder and rum and tobacco twist in it, and the intrigue and nervous tension of the frontier at the moment when English, French and Indians were reaching for one another's scalps. Of that hotly printed edition two copies are extant.

There are other fragments, too, that got into print long ago, and contrary to expectation and desire. The notes extending from March to June, 1754, were cap* tured by the French at Fort Necessity, published in Paris, retranslated and published in London, and thence returned to their author. Here again was a great news story of the highest interest to three na-

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 tions, and the ordinarily dull, incommunicative pen of Washington could not kill it.

The general tranquillity with which the public has regarded Washington's private records seems indicated by the fact that his diaries for the important years 1789 to 1791 waited for publication till Benjamin Lossing brought them out in Richmond in 1861. In 1920 Joseph A. Hoskins published at Summerfield, N. C., "President Washington's Diaries, 1791 to 1799," and much of his material then first came into print.

Within the last two years the diaries have been burrowed into twice by men with imagination. In 1923 Mr. Archibald Henderson made a big and handsome book, "Washington's Southern Tour," all in elucidation of diaries which occupy only fifty pages of our fourth volume in telling the story of the first President's first swing around the circle. As indication of the relative novelty of the material, Mr. Henderson notes that "neither Woodrow Wilson nor Henry Cabot Lodge," two of the chief biographers, "even so much as makes mention of the Southern Tour"—which one hopes is an extraordinary instance of historial indolence. In 1925 P. S. Haworth made a fresh attack upon the august sphinx in a book called "George Washington: Country Gentleman," which was based on the Mount Vernon farm journals.

Obviously within the last five years the suspicion has got abroad that those forty or fifty old diaries in the Library of Congress and elsewhere are worth a thorough working over. And yet Editor Fitzpatrick informs us that till the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union put its fair shoulder to the task "hardly one-sixth of the available record" had been

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 published. These four fine volumes, therefore, very greatly augment the dimensions of Washington as a diarist. They will greatly augment our consciousness of the real nature of his personality and his career if we have the wit and the imagination and the industry to use them—and only so.

Let us be plain about this. There is a little batch of diaries, perhaps half a dozen, which are of vivid interest throughout—to anybody. But for hundreds of pages an unprepared and incurious reader will regard Washington as the "dumbest" diarist who ever employed the line-a-day method. There is nothing which Greville would have called a "character" in all the four volumes, and upon all the famous men that he met in half a century he utters only with the utmost rarity a two-line judgment. In general, neither births nor deaths nor weddings nor funerals nor good fortune nor calamity nor pestilence nor hurricane betrays him into the recording of the faintest emotion of elation or sorrow or hope or regret. He almost never attempts a picture or reports a conversation. Of himself as a dramatic object of consciousness he seems to have been aware on only two or three occasions in the course of his life. There is virtually no indication that he ever felt the slightest curiosity regarding the "subjective" condition of any other being. He seems to have been absolutely uninitiated into the pleasure of associating ideas. And these characteristics make great tracts of the record—months and years of it—as dry as chopped straw, as dry as Aristotle or Euclid, as dry as the fossil teeth of a dinosaur.

Nevertheless the only way to give this man a chance to reconstitute for us his character and career is to take a clear week and plow straight through the

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 diaries systematically from end to end, going just as slowly and working the imagination just as hard through the long desert places as in the occasional astonishing oases.

We start from an oasis. The first diary begins early Friday morning, March 11, 1748, when in his sixteenth year George Washington set out with his neighbor, young George Fairfax, on a jolly surveying and turkey-shooting expedition in the wild lands of Lord Fairfax beyond the Blue Ridge. At sixteen George had high spirits and a sense of humor, such as he seldom betrayed during the next fifty years. He relishes the joke on himself when, in a backwoods lodging, he strips "orderly" for bed, to find himself lying on a little matted straw under one threadbare blanket "with double its weight of vermin such as lice, fleas, etc." He gets up, dresses and lies, "as my companions," outdoors by a fire. Next day: "We cleaned ourselves (to get rid of the game we had catch'd the night before)." The next week, meeting thirty-odd Indians with a scalp, the boys give them some liquor: "it elevating their spirits put them in the humor of dancing." Then follows the first and last description of a dance in all George's four volumes.

If I were bent on making merely a readable article about the diaries, my cue would be to dwell at length on this first batch of them, written when the young fellow admitted finding a charm in the whistling of bullets. Then I should pass swiftly to the diary kept during Washington's attendance at the Continental Congress in 1775, and I should pause there and say that the diarist disappointed me bitterly in that emergency. Specimen entries during the month of May are here presented:

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Something happened; for Washington was made commander-in-chief; but the incident gets no more space or comment in this singular journal than planting turnips back of the garden. During a considerable period of the war he was too busy to-write at all.

On entering Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention in 1787 he was for a few moments impressed with his reception by his old officers and by his own conduct and appearance. But his memoranda of the sessions are perfectly barren. We learn the names of a great number of Philadelphia ladies and gentlemen with whom he "drank tea"—at one place he "drank tea in great splendour"; we learn that he sat to Mr. Peale for his portrait, attended charity concerts, visited Morris at his country place, went trout fishing and rode away from his fishing companion to visit the site of one of his old cantonments.

What did he feel on August 19, 1787, standing on the old camp ground from which he had marched to his winter quarters in Valley Forge? I do not know. All that he says is: "traversed my old incampment, and contemplated on the dangers which threatened the American Army at that place." All that he says of the faintest color, when the great business of the four months' convention is over, is that the mem-

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 bers adjourned to the City Tavern, dined in good humor and he, after he had finished up some odd jobs with the secretary of the convention, "retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed." Those eleven words indicate about the extent to which the soul of the man will expand and flow—on paper.

The diaries of the first years of the Presidency seem, relatively speaking, of an absorbing interest to one who is trying to press nearer to the man. Of course, there was a big budget of national business without guiding precedents: diplomatic missions to be established, Moroccan affairs, Indian affairs, national militia, finance, ratification of state constitutions, Quaker slavery agitation, Spain and France threatening the flanks of the new nation, problems of uniting the seaboard and the Western frontier by land and water and by the ties of commerce. But, after all, this was nothing but national housekeeping, of which Washington had mastered the principles at Mount Vernon, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and in the army. He conducts business now with Cabinet officers instead of overseers; but he goes at it in precisely the same thorough, methodical, orderly, realistic fashion. An able, un-agitated executive.

What strikes the student of the diaries is that the Presidential office made Washington conscious of himself and of Mrs. Washington as parts of a dramatic exhibition, which they were "putting on" for the edification of their countrymen. The Father of His Country obviously gave anxious thought to all the details of the visible spectacle when he made his appearance to deliver his first message before the two houses of Congress; and the diarist records the picture—his equipage and his costume, his entrance and his exit

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 with evident feeling that the little show, now set up to rival the performances at Versailles and the Court of St. James, came off fairly well.

One feels this new self-consciousness of his with almost pathetic poignancy in his notes on the success of his Tuesday levees and of Mrs. Washington's Friday teas. He is particularly sensitive about the "Fridays." One day: "The visitors to Mrs. Washington were respectable, both of gentlemen and ladies"; another day, "not numerous, but respectable"; another, "rainy and bad; no one but the Vice-President." On the 29th of December, 1789: "Being very snowing, not a single person appeared at the Levee"; but on the following New Year's Day, thank goodness, "all the respectable citizens" turned out, and the Federal Union once more seemed secure.

When one considers what George Washington had been through without turning a hair—such things as having two horses shot under him and his clothes riddled with bullets in a single battle, and when one considers the events in which he participated without leaving a word of them in his daily record, one is almost justified in guessing that the very deeps of his nature must have been troubled on those Fridays when he set down for everlasting remembrance the reason why the attendance at Mrs. Washington's tea was light.

The two of them liked it superficially when there was a big gathering of "respectable" persons, but inwardly I think they both hated the officializing of their social intercourse, and were unspeakably happy, when the second heavy term was over, to be back again in the easy casual coming to and fro of their Virginia kinsmen and neighbors.

I have been dwelling on what, as it seems to us,

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 must have been the high spots in Washington's life. How did they seem to him? Well, there is no emphasis or proportioning in the diaries to suggest that Washington himself regarded his soldiership and statesmanship as living and the rest of life as débris and dross. On the contrary, the Revolution and the two Presidential terms dwindle and sink in this long record—sink into troublesome but by no means overwhelming incidents in the half century. So far as the record goes, the planting of a consignment of Chinese flower seeds in his garden made a vastly greater impression upon him than meeting Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia; and I am certain that he took more pleasure in making inventories of his stock, servants and tools in preparation for the spring planting than he did in making inventories of his regiments in preparation for the spring fighting. It is only when his public life is set in his private that one can see it as he saw it.

All that one knows about Washington gets a new value when one comes at it faithfully in its place amid the long routine of his country life. The first obvious reward of reading straight through the diaries is that one receives an almost oppressive sense of lapsing time, filled with the ordinary "inanities" of existence—so important an element in "artistic illusion." One gets the sense of streaming time not merely or mainly in the crowded years of war and statecraft but most richly and sumptuously in the long, quiet, orderly flow of the years on the Mount Vernon estate in the '60s and the early '70s, when one follows the crops and the weather, the first haul of shad in the river, the breeding stock and the litters of puppies, the blossoms in orchard and garden, the harvesting of hay and

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 wheat, of apples and of ice, and the fleeing of hunted foxes, or of ducks in the swampland, day by day, month by month, season by season, year by year—up at sunrise, breakfast with guests who have spent the night, then off on horseback to visit "my mill," "my ferry," "my fishlanding," "my swamp," "my sick people," or to see what Cupid and Sambo, "my Negroes," two or three hundreds of them, are doing on "my" remoter plantations.

"A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from lawn," as Byron remarked of George III. Our "Farmer George," as you see, had a lively sense of property. He liked branding his stock "G. W." It expanded his sense of being. And he enjoyed all the details of good husbandry. Twice he made actual experiment with tallow and spermaceti candles and recorded in fractions his demonstration that tallow is cheaper. And so on.

The last diary ends on December 13, 1799—a snowy day with the mercury falling from 30 to 28 and a northeast wind blowing. On that day the Father of his Country developed an acute sore throat from the previous day's exposure, having come in from the farms with his neck wet and snow hanging in his hair. On the next day he died very quietly under the bleedings and blisters and wheat-bran cataplasms of the attending physicians. He expressed a desire not to be put in the vault till he had been three days dead. Beyond that he betrayed no anxiety about the hereafter.

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Y devotion to American biography has been rewarded and exhilarated by Mr. M. R. Werner's "Brigham Young."

In the production of a classical work, we are told, everything depends on the choice of a subject. This is Mr. Werner's subject: An impecunious Vermont boy with only a few weeks of schooling rises to be prophet, priest and king, head of a church, general of an army, governor of a territory, possessor of an estate worth $2,000,000, husband of twenty-seven wives and father of fifty-six children. I should like to say that this subject is of "epic sweep"; but since critics have got the habit of describing every midwestern novel which shows a section of cornland under cultivation as of "epic sweep," the phrase has become a little colorless. What one has in mind about Mr. Werner's subject is, that it begins in Vermont, ascends to heaven, descends to western New York, and traversing the great West to the Rocky Mountains presents such events as the councils of God, the revelation of laws to man, the founding of cities, the martyrdom of saints, the building of temples, the waging of wars, the massacre of infidels and the establishment of civilization in the wilderness.

To whom hitherto have most "Gentiles" been in-

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 debted for their conception of Mormon leaders and Mormon civilization? To Congressmen viewing with subconscious envy the efficiency of the theocratic "machine" in Utah and the Oriental prerogatives of the Mormon "boss." To lone, lorn hysterical women, without even a thirtieth share in a husband, seeking to free the Mormon wives from "bondage." To clergymen diverting their minds from domestic troubles by proposing a foreign war—like the Rev. De Witt Talmage, who, as Mr. Werner reminds us, paused in interpreting the Gospel of Christ one Sunday morning in 1877 to suggest to the national government that the time was ripe, now that Brigham Young had died, to send Phil Sheridan to Utah and to confiscate as much of the rich Mormon lands as would pay for their subjugation. To comic journalists like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, who in quest of copy and a national guffaw, interviewed the Governor of Utah, and led off with such questions as this: You air a married man, Mister Yung, I bleeve?' sez I."

We are officially under obligation to think of a man with a non-monogamous mind as a monster. But deep in the sinful heart of man lurks a kind of atavistic sympathy and curiosity regarding the private life of Brigham Young: he had a human experience so rich and so varied. He had the wisdom possible only to one who has the comparative point of view. While this subject is before us it should be said that Mr. Werner goes into it as carefully as one can desire in three really instructive chapters on "Puritan Polygamy," "Brigham Young and His Wives" and "Polygamy and the Law."

In the palmy days of plurality Heber Kimball, eminent saint, declared in the pulpit: "For a man of God

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 to be confined to one woman is small business." Kimball was a sincere man; he married forty-five wives. Brigham Young and his associates believed that a man "cannot be saved without a woman at his side." Young avowed that he was a "great lover of good women." He liked them plain and honest, clean and chaste, with their hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly back from the forehead. He said, I think honestly, that there were "few men who care about the private society of women as little as I do.do." [sic]

Everything that he did bears that out: his marrying three or four on the same day, his assembling them in large numbers so that the intimacy of his family life was less like a solitude à deux than a church social. With much justice he contended, in that great vacant territory, that the purpose of matrimony was to replenish the earth with saints. Mr. Werner notes that in 1851 Brigham Young became a father in January, February, March and April, and in 1852 in March, April and May. He seems to have been a "natural born" father. There is something heroic in the way he faced the consequences of his beliefs. There was little romantic sentiment about him. To women who whined for love he said in effect: "What difference does it make?" If they had a child, they ought to be content, and to exclaim with joy: "Hallelujah! I am a mother—I have borne an image of God."

Brigham Young's uxoriousness can be overemphasized, his philoprogenitiveness, not. But let us pass to other matters by way of a quotation from Young's "Journal of Discourses," giving the public reflections of the Governor on Gentile curiosity relating to his domestic arrangements. I make this extended quotation to emphasize my own chief discovery about Brig-

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 ham Young, namely, that he is a great stylist, as John Bunyan was a stylist. He is an unhesitating master of the colloquial idiom. He is invariably vigorous, direct, candid, racy, often gross, often astonishingly eloquent, sometimes, as here, scathing:

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 When I heard that the biographer of P. T. Barnum was about to produce a life of Brigham Young, I trembled for the Saints in glory. I was a little afraid that Mr. Werner, being a biographer of the new school which discards the use of biographical whitewash, would put me into an unsaintly, if not into a positively frivolous, state of mind. Mr. Werner has not, in excessive development, what phrenologists used to call "the bump of veneration." He inclines with Anatole France and the late James Huneker to sweep prophets of all sorts rather bruskly into the large category of fakirs. To prepare and fortify my mind against the expectable mockery of an unbeliever, I thought it wise and just to read first an account of Mormon achievements by a member of the household of faith. I read a little book which, in its second edition, came recently to my desk, Levi Edgar Young's "The Founding of Utah."

Professor Young is descended from "a pioneer of 1847," and is related to the Patriarch. He is also a member of the First Council of Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and head of the department of Western History in the Pniversity of Utah. He looks back to 1847 as historians in Cambridge look back to 1620. Incidentally he looks back from a city which Rebecca West recently declared one of the most beautiful in the world. Whether he gazes out over the wide valley with its vast blue inland sea from the commanding height of the University on its mountain bench, or whether he strolls under the bright stimulus of the mountain air through the clean wide green avenues and parks of Salt Lake City, inevitably he judges his ancestors "by their fruits." They made the desert blossom like the rose, the pioneers of

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 1847, not by praying for rain but by introducing the first extensive irrigation system in the United States. It is impossible, if I may judge by my own experience, to visit Salt Lake City without a thrill of pride in the Mormons.

Professor Young's book is charming. It glows with affection and pride in the state, based upon intimate extensive acquaintance with it. It is free from offensive chauvinism: one-fourth of it is devoted to the history of the Great Basin before the Mormons entered it. It begins with an account of Rocky Mountain sunshine, flowers and topography and proceeds in successive chapters to a generous appraisal of the native Indians, the Cliff-dwellers, the Spanish adventurers, the fur-traders, the scientific explorers, who made the old trails and endowed the territory with ancient and romantic human associations. Then, as an integral part of the general westward migration, comes the tale of the Mormon colonization, made rich and vivid by many choice excerpts from the letters and journals of the pioneers, illustrating their trials and adversities, their courage, industry and enterprise. In all this Brigham Young figures largely.

Two silences are impressive: there is no mention of Joseph Smith or of polygamy. For all account of Mormon religion, Professor Young says: "The leaders of this religious people were men whose ancestors had lived in the pioneer districts of New England, and were Puritans and Methodists in belief." Incidents like the Mountain Meadows massacre are passed over quickly as among the things mainly attributable to the Indians, "which we wish had never happened." The object of Mormon missions is described as "the conversion of the Indians to Christianity." Professor

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 Young leaves the impression that political, religious, ethical ideals in the state to-day are democratic and idealistic and essentially indistinguishable from those of any other enlightened American commonwealth. He concludes his narrative with a picture of "Utah To-day" as a highly civilized state, with a notably low percentage of crime, insanity, pauperism, and illiteracy, but with high school attendance, flourishing agriculture, manufactures and mines and lively interest in the arts and sciences.

Professor Young has liberally whitewashed the founding of Utah. But I doubt whether he has whitewashed it a whit more than the average non-Mormon historian whitewashes the foundation of Massachusetts when he prepares a book for the use of Boston schools.

Mr. Werner's book ends with the death of Brigham Young in 1877, but as he has envisaged his biographical problem, the scope of his work and its larger purpose are not very different from Professor Young's. That is to say he too is interested in the founding of Utah, and he sees the divisions of his hero's life as steps in that long epical process. Before he is done with it he makes a nationally important and most impressive figure of Brigham Young. If he came to scoff he remained to quote respectfully Seward's remark that "America had never produced a greater statesman."

Unlike the Mormon historian, however, Mr. Werner does not suppress Joseph Smith. He appears to believe that Smith was a drunkard, a profligate, and, what was worse in the circumstances, a very poor business man, even when God had carefully revealed the plans for Smith's financial campaigns and had dictated in extraordinary detail the organization of his

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 stock company. Smith's religious leadership, he holds, originated with deliberate humbug and childish flummery; but he suspects that after long imposing on others Smith finally imposed on himself. But Mr. Werner does, I think, make an honest and fruitful effort to understand and explain the man as a "product" of his times and of the rather weedy Puritan culture of the New England village.

The prophet-martyr was born, without any celestial notification or portent, in Sharon, Vt., in 1805, to an old and poverty stricken but fertile American family—there were eventually nine children—with epileptic tendencies on both sides, and various relatives subject to religious visions. Both his parents were visited, as all Puritans from the time of Wycliffe to the present day have been, by dreams assuring them that none of the existing churches was truly representative of Jesus Christ and the ancient Apostles.

The old people didn't know what to do about it. Old people in Vermont never know what to do about anything. For example, old people in Vermont have abundant streams of pure water flowing from the mountains past their back doors—have had for three hundred years. But old Vermont villagers still pump their water from driven wells, a teaspoonful at a time. That is the way the Vermont mind works on its native heath. It is only when the Vermonter is transplanted to southern latitudes that he is transformed into a Yankee Mahomet. Utah is in the latitude of Virginia and Spain. There is hope for young Vermonters if they migrate early.

Joseph Smith, like his parents, had visions; unlike them, he had ingenuity and considerable "creative imagination." In one of these visions he was visited

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 by two mysterious presences. One of them proved to be God, for "pointing"—probably in the rustic village manner, by way of introduction—to the other stranger, he said: "This is my beloved son, hear him." At this interview God bore it in upon Joseph's mind that He had no true church in the world, and confided various other matters which were not then, as Mr. Werner puts it, "released for publication."

Joseph, for a time, went on with the ungodly life of a Vermont villager. But he meditated on these things. He also, it is reported, studied the memoirs of the itinerant clerical scalawag, Stephen Burroughs, and the autobigraphy of Captain Kidd. Kidd seems to have set his mind running on buried treasure, and Burroughs on the undeveloped resources of heaven, open to exploitation by an enterprising Yankee. When his family moved to western New York, then the asylum of footloose religions, he went out on a treasure hunting expedition. On Cumnorah Hill, near Palmyra, in 1830 he dug up the famous gold plates, subsequently returned to heaven, on which the book of Mormon was written. Together with them he found the "celestial spectacles," called Urim and Thummim, with the aid of which he was able to translate the "Reformed Egyptian" of the original "caractors" into somewhat broken Elizabethan English. God directed him to get the book printed and to offer it for sale at $1.75, but later advised that the price be lowered to $1.25.

Non-Mormon analyists of this book and of Joseph Smith's other translations from the "Reformed Egyptian" writings of Abraham, etc., regard them on the whole as very puerile flummery, full of ignorance, superstition and absurd anachronisms. I think they are. They were written before the Mormons had done any

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