almost exclusively about themselves, using my hero as a peg to hang their own remarks upon.  The worst offender of all wrote me long reminiscences of his own conversations, in the following style:  “How well I remember the summer of 18—­, when dear P——­ was staying at F——.  I and my wife had a little house in the neighbourhood.  We found it convenient to be able to run down there and to rest a little after the fatigues of London life.  I remember very well a walk I took with P——.  It was the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and I was full of indignation at the terrible sacrifice of life which appeared to me to be for no end.  I remember pouring out my thoughts to P——.”  Here followed a page or two of reflections upon the barbarity of war.  “P——­ listened to me with great interest; I cannot now recall what he said, but I know that it struck me very much at the time.”  And so on through many closely written pages.

Well, the editor of the Professor’s letters has not done this at all; he keeps himself entirely in the background.  But, after reading the book, the reflection is borne in upon me that, unless the hero is a good letter-writer (and the Professor was not), the form of the book cannot be wholly justified.  Most of the letters are, so to speak, business letters; they are either letters connected with ecclesiastical politics, or they are letters dealing with technical historical points.  There are many little shrewd and humorous turns occurring in them.  But these should, I think, have been abstracted from their context and worked into a narrative.  The Professor was a man of singular character and individuality.  Besides his enormous erudition, he had a great fund of sterling common sense, a deep and liberal piety, and a most inconsequent and, I must add, undignified sense of humour.  He carried almost to a vice the peculiarly English trait of national character—­the extreme dislike of emotional statement, the inability to speak easily and unaffectedly on matters of strong feeling and tender concern.  I confess that this has a displeasing effect.  When one desires above all things to have a glimpse into his mind, to be reassured as to his seriousness and piety, it is ten to one that the Professor will, so to speak, pick up his skirts, and execute a series of clumsy, if comic, gambols and caracoles in front of you.  A sense of humour is a very valuable thing, especially in a professor of theology; but it should be of a seemly and pungent type, not the humour of a Merry Andrew.  And one has the painful sense, especially in the most familiar letters of this collection, that the Professor took an almost puerile pleasure in trying to shock his correspondent, in showing how naughty he could be.  One feels the same kind of shock as if one had gone to see the Professor on serious business, and found him riding on a rocking-horse in his study, with a paper cap on his head.  There is nothing morally wrong about it; but it appears to be silly, and silliness is out of place behind a gown and under a college cap.