cede to Mrs. Max Müller the right thus to praise her distinguished husband, and gladly confess that we have enjoyed reading it, nevertheless we are bound here to caution the reader that Max Müller was not quite so great, though he always seemed to us to be as good as his wife thought him. We do not say that he was not a great man, for he surely was, but we are perfectly convinced that he was not a very great, a supremely great, scholar. He cannot, for example, be classed as a scholar with Weber or Roth, Bopp or Brugmann, because so little of his work made any definite or measurable addition to the sum of human knowledge. His name is attached to no new law of the growing science of language; he wrote no grammar of a hitherto unknown tongue; he deciphered no documents which had never been read before. He was a popularizer of the very highest rank, a man who made learning lovely and beloved of men, a teacher of popular audiences, a statesman in the great field of educational development. His greatest book, the editio princeps of the Rig Veda, was, alas! not done all the way through by his own hand. He began it with high purpose and with abundant scholarship, but he soon wearied of the drudgery, and when school and university, society and the people invited him to read papers and deliver lectures he turned aside from great work to do easy and popular work. His edition then began to go slowly, and still more slowly, until the East India house began to complain and then he hired Theodor Aufrecht, of Berlin, to help him in the work. It was a sad and fatal blunder. Of course, he intended to use Aufrecht only for the mechanical part of the work, and he wrote thus to his mother: "Dr. Aufrecht is a very clever man, a Sanskritist, etc. We work together, and he helps me at my Veda, for which I pay him enough to live here. We shall try the plan at first for six months, and I hope it will all go well. It is very pleasant for me to have some one with whom I can talk about literary things, and my time is so filled up that I am very glad to have some one to whom I can leave part of my work; but I must wait a while to see how it works, and whether it brings me in as much as it costs." Gradually Aufrecht did more and more of the Veda work, and at the last it was generally said in England that Aufrecht and other assistants, such as Dr. Eggeling and Dr. Thibault, did so much that Max Müller's own share in the work was much diminished. Without joining in the attacks of his enemies, we cannot help feeling that he would rank far higher to-day in the world of scholarship if he had never had any assistance upon the Rig Veda. Laying all this aside, however, there still remains enough good work, though not the very greatest work, to make a first-class reputation. The story of his long struggle upward is told well in his letters, and the figure left standing before the eyes is the figure of a signally useful and very attractive scholar. He was born in the sweet Old World city of Dessau, and his father was the poet Wilhelm Müller, for some of whose poems

He came

Schubert wrote immortal music. His childhood was poor, but the noble self-sacrifice of his parents gave him the best education the university land of Germany could give, and another great name was added to the glorious roll of Leipzig's famous sons. to England befriended only by Baron Bunsen, then the Prussian ambassador near the court of St. James, and soon settled in Oxford, where the Taylorian professorship of modern languages gave him a living. When the Boden chair of Sanskrit fell vacant he confidently expected to be elected, and the defeat embittered his life for years, and is again almost savagely debated in these volumes. But he was finally made Professor of Comparative Philology and with the passing of time became more and more a conspicuous ornament of Oxfordian educational circles. This story of his life is full of instruction and inspiration, not to say warning, for every young and aspiring scholar, and we hope it may be widely read.

Archbishop Temple. By CHARLES H. DANT. Crown 8vo, pp. 244. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, cloth, $1.50.

Frederick Temple was a sturdy, hard-working, democratic sort of man, who "came up from the soil," as the aristocrats say. Born in poverty in one of the Ionian islands, he toiled upward until he became Bishop of Exeter, then Bishop of London, and finally, at the age of seventy-five, Archbishop of Canterbury, "Primate of all England." When a boy, with scanty food and no money, he worked at picking stones and scaring birds from the grainfields. At school he could not afford a fire in winter and subsisted on the hardest fare. The boys jeered at his patched shoes and patched clothes. A rough sort of a school it was that he attended. The boys had to perform their morning ablutions out-of-doors at the pump. If any boy seemed disinclined to wash his hands and face properly the others did it for him. There was plenty of fighting among the boys, and a fellow had to learn to use his fists in self-defense. When, by years of heavy labor and hard study, he worked his way up to Balliol College, Oxford, the fine young gentlemen there more than once attacked with jeers and horseplay and cuffs the poorly dressed country lad, but they soon learned to their sorrow the wisdom of letting him alone, for he had the frame and muscles of a field hand, and was a master of ambidextrous fisticuffs, getting in his right and his left in swift succession, to the damage of the features of the young college dudes. At Oxford he studied hard, and, when too poor to buy candles, stood out in the public hallways under the lights with his books so long as the lights were kept burning, and learned his lessons on his feet in the draughty halls. Such a boy as that is bound to go far. The stuff is in him, and the discipline of hardship and toil are toughening him into power. He has grit and grip. He could take up one of the soft, sybaritic, flabby sons of luxury, break him in two in the middle, and throw the fragments to the crows in the cornfield a mile away. When he was an old man and Archbishop of Canterbury,

Frederick Temple was one day walking in the country with a pompous city rector, close to a field where a man was plowing. To the astonishment of his companion he asked the farmer's permission to take his place between the plow handles, and in a moment the archbishop was steering a straight and steady furrow down the field, to the astonishment of Hodge and the rector, to whom he said when he came back: "I learned that in the hard school of necessity. When I was young I worked on a farm and prided myself on plowing as straight a furrow as any man in the parish." After graduating from Balliol he became principal of the training college at Kneller Hall; later he was one of Thomas Arnold's successors as headmaster of Rugby; and in 1869, at the age of forty-eight, he was nominated by Mr. Gladstone to the Bishopric of Exeter. No wonder that this prelate was always beloved by the common people, who realized that he knew their lot and could feel a close and intelligent sympathy with them. Once, and probably oftener, when he met a poor woman and a little girl, both carrying heavy loads, the bishop lent a hand and helped them along with their burden. When in Cornwall he loved to mingle with the rough fishermen of the coast, and to drop into their places of worship. And the story goes that once, when he was joining heartily in the singing at one of their meetings, a Cornish fisherman behind him poked him in the back, saying, "Hi, you be out of tune, guv'nor; you be out of tune." During his thirty-three years of episcopal service he was so earnest and vigorous an advocate of temperance that at times mobs raged against him and threatened him with violence because of his utterances; and his influence in favor of temperance was great throughout all England. Extraordinary powers of endurance and capacity for long labor had this hardy bishop. His biographer tells us that he often worked straight through an entire day and night. As an administrator he did not interfere with his clergy, even when they went to extremes and were eccentric in methods or manners. So long as a clergyman was spiritually minded and devoted himself earnestly to his work, the archbishop did not trouble him, but let him work in his own way. When Frederick Temple was bending under the weight of years it devolved on him as Archbishop of Canterbury to conduct the funeral of Queen Victoria, and later to kiss King Edward's cheek at his coronation, offering the loyalty of the Church to the new sovereign. The aged archbishop, after offering this official homage, was so feeble that he could not rise from his knees unaided, seeing which King Edward quickly advanced a step and, taking him by the hand, tenderly assisted him to his feet. A few months afterward his body was laid to rest in the Cloister Garth of Canterbury Cathedral. Now, the land where a poor friendless boy can make his way from the plow tail to the archbishop's palace and the primacy of all England, and where a lad fending off starvation by scaring crows away from freshly planted grain may possibly sometime arrive at a moment when a king shall spring forward to act as his body-servant-that

would seem to be a tolerably free country and about as democratic as any other, a pretty good sort of a place to live in, and a land worthy to be held dear and rejoiced in by all who value liberty and brotherhood, especially by us to whom, though at the distance of two hundred and fifty years, it is the Mother Country.

MISCELLANEOUS.

Mary North. A Novel. By LUCY RIDER MEYER. 12mo, pp. 339. New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company. Price, cloth, $1.50.

The author of Mary North has superior qualifications for a task of this character. Her position at the head of the deaconess movement has brought her into fellowship with multitudes in their misfortunes; she has borne their griefs and carried their sorrows, has kept their secrets and won their confidence, all which is reflected in the sad yet fascinating story of Mary North. Further than this, the author has the courage to name, expose, and flay vice under whatever form it is manifested. While she is becomingly delicate and modest in dealing with social evils, she is in no sense prudish. Her style is dignified, graceful, fascinating. The everyday incidents in the early life of her orphaned heroine are such as any vivacious New England girl might encounter; but, while this is true, judgment in selecting, skill in grouping, and vividness in portraying these incidents invest the story from beginning to end with an irresistible charm. By an easy and rapid transition we are carried along through Mary North's childhood to her mature womanhood, and from the village school to a select conservatory of learning in the city of Boston. On the eve of her departure she becomes acquainted, by chance on her part, with a pseudo-Frenchman, Jules le Cygne, whose real name is Sloan, an accomplished adventurer and scoundrel, whom she had known as a boy in her early school days but had forgotten. Following her to Boston, he thrusts his attentions upon her, wins her affection by his blandishments, enters into a conspiracy with a "pal" whom he pays to impersonate a clergyman and perform a mock marriage ceremony by which Mary, in her guilelessness, becomes, as she supposes, the lawful wife of the designing villain, and ultimately the mother of his child. Pretending to have engaged passage for France, the alleged home of his parents, he persuades her to convey to him her inheritance, after which, to her utter horror, he is brought home to their lodgings in a drunken stupor on the eve of the day they are to sail. On returning to consciousness he brutally confesses his villainy and gloats over her ruin, whereupon she flees to Chicago, leaving him in ignorance of her whereabouts, where she remains in seclusion for years. Her experience ends with her rescue by the deaconesses and her marriage to Stephen Bayard, a worthy man who had loved her in her earlier life. The exposure of Le Cygne's crimes and his tragic death on the eve of his arrest are thrillingly described.

METHODIST REVIEW.

SEPTEMBER, 1903.

ART. I. SCIENTIFIC PROOFS FOR IMMORTALITY.

THERE is no more certain or painful evidence of insanity than for the patient to become suspicious or hostile toward his nearest friends and chief benefactors. He even fears and hates those whom he should love most tenderly, and in paroxysms of madness may do them violence. Insanity is a perversion of the rational nature; so that when complete the moral and mental image of everything is reversed. So, instead of rejoicing in the society of those who love him most, the insane person seeks to destroy them and, to crown his madness, to take his own life, even at the expense of the acutest bodily suffering.

The most civilized peoples maintain that the suicide is always insane, and therefore irresponsible. So well established is it that Life Insurance companies, whose policies contain a special caveat against suicide, are not thereby exempt from liability. A man whose mind is in a normal condition desires to prolong life to its utmost possible limit. Or, if the weight of infirmities becomes so great that it is intolerable, so that he can no longer utilize what before made life desirable, it is the changed mental condition which has effected this result. There is no dividing line where we can say, Here the desire to live ceases. We naturally shrink from pain, and dread dissolution. The desire for life is the natural feeling for every person whose mind is sound, and whose body is qualified to be the instrument of the spirit for