and stories, and later as a dramatist. In the former kind Dorian Gray (1891) is his chief work, and its success was due, in part at least, to qualities not exclusively literary. The popularity of his plays The popularity of his plays was more legitimately earned. Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), The Ideal Husband, and The Importance of being Earnest (1895) were all of them successful on the stage, and are admirable specimens of light comedy, abounding in vivacious dialogue and dexterous situations. Wilde's career was abruptly terminated in the height of his dramatic success; and after undergoing two years imprisonment for an odious criminal offence, he was released in 1897, and passed his remaining years in France, where shortly before his death he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) embodies his experiences as a convict. George Moore, novelist, playwright, and art critic, was born in 1857, son of a Mayo landowner and M.P., who, like most of the Young Ireland party, to which he was attached, united literary talent with political activity. Educated at Oscott, Moore early gave proof that his father's taste for letters had descended to him. His earliest venture was in verse. Flowers of Passion appeared in 1878, and Martin Luther, a tragedy, in 1879. Following these efforts, Moore spent several years in the study of art in Paris, where he imbibed views which have coloured all his subsequent work. 1885 a translation of Zola's Pot-bouille expressly avowed the direction which Moore's artistic and literary sympathies had now taken; but in A Mummer's Wife, a novel published in the previous year, he had indicated his enthusiasm for 'realism' plainly enough. Vain Fortune (1891) and Esther Waters (1894) are in the same vein. His later career has been chiefly associated with what is known as the Celtic Revival, and is somewhat at odds with his earlier tendencies. That his intimate connection with the modern school of art and letters in France should have led him to the conclusion that the English language has ceased to be an apt vehicle for literary purposes, is less surprising than that the disciple of realism should find the elixir of a new literary life in the idealism of the Celtic movement. With Mr Yeats, Mr Martyn, Dr Hyde, and others, he has been a contributor to Ideals in Ireland (1901), and has written The Bending of the Bough for the Irish Literary Theatre. It is perhaps as an art critic that he has most deservedly won distinction; his best work in this kind is to be found in Modern Painting (1898). In 1903 he renounced the Roman Catholic faith, mainly on Celtic-national grounds. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of a clerk in the Exchequer Office in Edinburgh who possessed a share of the artistic gifts of his famous brother Richard Doyle; born in 1859, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Edinburgh University for a medical career. He practised medicine on land and on an Arctic ship, but was writing for Chambers's Journal when still a student, and in 1887 and 1888 attracted notice by A Study in Scarlet and Micah Clarke, which were followed in 1890 by the still more popular White Company; and save that he exercised his medical profession with the troops during part of the war in South Africa, and that he stood in 1900, unsuccessfully, as Unionist candidate for a seat in Edinburgh, he has since 1890 been known as a successful author by profession, especially as the creator of a special type of detective story, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first published in the Strand Magazine, and in 1891 in book form. Brigadier Gerard, Rodney Stone, and The Hound of the Baskerviles are amongst his most successful stories. He also wrote The Great Boer War (1900) and a short work on The Cause and Conduct of the War, issued to explain and defend the action of Britain against misrepresentation in Europe and America. For his services in this connection he was knighted in 1902. In a straightforward, unaffected, vigorous style he writes stories full of invention, movement, and interest. Sidney Lee, to whom Britain is largely indebted for the carrying out of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, was born in London in 1859, studied at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford. From the beginning of the Dictionary of National Biography to the twenty-first volume (1883-90) he was assistant-editor; in 1890-91 (vols. xxii.-xxvi.) he was joint-editor with Sir Leslie Stephen; and from 1891 to the conclusion of the work (with the sixtythird volume), besides supplement (3 vols.) and epitome (1891-1903), was sole editor. In 1883 he produced a new edition of Lord Berners's translation of Huon of Bordeaux; which was followed by a recension and continuation of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's autobiography; he wrote on Stratford-on-Avon from the earliest time till Shakespeare's death, and on the first folio Shakespeare; and he has published Lives of Shakespeare and of Queen Victoria, expanded from the articles on them contributed by him to the Dictionary. The article on Shakespeare in this work is from his pen. Israel Zangwill, born in London in 1864, the son of an immigrant, was successively teacher and journalist; has written essays, poems, and plays; but is best known as author of Children of the Ghetto, Ghetto Tragedies, The King of Schnorrers, Dreamers of the Ghetto, and other stories showing his keen insight into all aspects of Jewish life and his sympathy with his race, as well as his literary skill and power. Anthony Hope Hawkins, born in 1863, the son of a London head-master and clergyman, was educated at Marlborough and Balliol College, and called to the Bar in 1887. The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) was not his first book, but it was that which made his pen-name of 'Anthony Hope' familiar; and, compounded of romanticism, satire, modernity, and burlesque, has served as a model to many attempts in the same genre. The amusing Dolly Dialogues belong to the same year; and other notable works are Rupert of Hentzau, The King's Mirror, Quisante, Tristram of Blent, and The Intrusions of Peggy. Rudyard Kipling,* journalist, writer of short stories, poet and novelist, was born at Bombay on 30th December 1865. His father, Mr John Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E., is an artist of considerable knowledge and skill; his mother (née Alice Macdonald) has, in conjunction with her daughter, published a volume of poems (Hand tions include Departmental Ditties (1886), Plain Mr Kipling is still a young man with many years of work, it may be hoped, before him. No attempt could therefore in any case be made to fix the place which he will eventually occupy in the literature of his age and country. The task would be made additionally difficult by the curious and almost freakish developments and changes which have marked his literary power during the last eighteen years. He became known originally as a writer of short stories dealing with Indian life, and particularly with the life of the British soldier in India. These showed him to be possessed of a method at once vivid and strong, and of an uncompromising directness of expression somewhat rare amongst the writers of the day. The stories were not less remarkable for the extraordinary keenness of observation displayed by the writer. He may be said (although not a few soldiers might hesitate to concur in this dictum) to have represented the common soldier with a faithful accuracy that left but little to be desired; there, limned to the life, were the Cockney, the Yorkshireman, and the Irishman, three types of the great mass of their fellows who make up the rank and file of the army. Their weaknesses and the peculiar code of morals that is supposed to distinguish the regular soldier from his civilian fellow-countrymen were set down as faithfully as their courage, their fatalistic endurance, their admiration of manliness, and their resourcefulness. The success of Soldiers Three and Plain Tales from the Hills was incontestable, and they were followed by sketches displaying the same graphic power in conjuction with imaginative insight and a vein of tenderness in some of the tales that formed a strange contrast to the somewhat brutal but intentional roughness of other writings by the young author. Less successful was The Light that Failed, Mr Kipling's first attempt at a novel. The same qualities and the same contrast are to be observed in this book as in the collections of shorter stories, but the coarseness outweighs and overpowers the tenderness; and the style of writing which, in spite of its jerkiness and its lack of emotional restraint, carried the writer triumphantly through the few pages of the short story seems to lag and halt when forced into his service for a novel. While the two Jungle Books and Kim must not be forgotten by those who endeavour to estimate Mr Kipling's position, it may safely be said that of late *Copyright 1903 by J. B. Lippincott Company. RUDYARD KIPLING. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. in Hand, 1902) showing no small literary power combined with rare delicacy and refinement of feeling. Mr Rudyard Kipling was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, North Devon. Afterwards returning to India, he became a journalist and acted at Allahabad as assistanteditor on the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in which were printed the stories which, when collected and republished in book form, first drew the attention of the reading public to his merits. Mr Kipling has travelled in China, Japan, Africa, Australia, and America. It was during his seven years' residence in the United States that he all but succumbed to an attack of pneumonia, which called forth an extraordinary manifestation of sympathy on the part of the American public. After this he returned to England, but he has since then made more than one visit of considerable duration to South Africa. Mr Kipling's publica Mr Kipling's chief triumphs have been gained by his poems. The best of these, such as, to take only two examples, ‘The Ballad of East and West' and "The Recessional,' reach a very high level indeed. In the Ballad' is to be found that union of fiery descriptive power with nobility of feeling and an artfully simple metrical dexterity which stamps all great ballads. The subject fortunately forbade that overwrought attention to its technical details which is a mark of some of Mr Kipling's pieces both in verse and prose; but there is, on the contrary, a downright and straightforward narration of a heroic and knightly incident which makes its appeal to the reader without any adventitious trickery. No doubt many of Mr Kipling's pieces in verse, notably the Barrack Room Ballads, with their coarse dialect jargon and their almost affected brutality of sentiment, are destined merely to a passing popularity. Of many of his other pieces, too, it may be said that the strenuous and often aggressive patriot has submerged the poet; but if he be judged by the best of his work in poetry, it may be affirmed that amongst writers of the day he is unsurpassed for vigour of diction combined with an imaginative power that holds the reader in its spell even when the subject dealt with by the poet is most terrible and distressing. RUDOLF C. LEHMANN. Stephen Phillips, born at Somerton near Oxford in 1868, is the son of an English clergyman, and was educated at the Grammar Schools of Stratford and of Peterborough, where his father was Precentor of the Cathedral. After studying a while for the Civil Service, he went on the stage, playing parts of all kinds in Benson's Company, and subsequently became an army tutor. Finally he turned to literature, and in 1897 drew critical notice by his striking poem Christ in Hades, afterwards included in the volume of Poems published in the same year, which was 'crowned' by the Academy journal. In 1899 appeared the first of three poetical dramas, Paolo and Francesca, followed by Herod (1900) and Ulysses (1902). The author's theatrical experience helped, with their own dramatic and poetic merit, to secure success on the stage for each of these plays, and especially for the last. As a poet Mr Phillips is admitted by the best critics to have true and high poetic endowment, with a real gift for epigrammatic and memorable lines. William Butler Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, of Anglo-Irish parentage, has steeped his imagination in the legend and myth of the Irish Celt, and it has been apparently the chief ambition of his maturer years to give reality to that conception of an individual Irish literature, divorced from English influences, which has inspired the movement of which the Irish Literary Society and the Irish Literary Theatre are the organised champions. Yet it may be doubted whether the Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), over which he has brooded in The Celtic Twilight (1902), in which he loves to sit, are really Irish ideas, or whether his art is as Celtic as he supposes. Certainly, in spite of his 'Cathleens' and 'Maires,' his 'Finns' and 'Brans,' one may read the latest and most carefully revised edition of his Poems without finding any very direct evidences of a distinctively Celtic imagination. Mr Yeats was born with a delight in the vague, the mystical, and the unreal. These are poetical qualities; but they are not the peculiar characteristic of Irish folklore any more than they are the peculiar characteristic of the Scandinavian sagas. In every race and in every literature, if you go back to the primitive myth and unrecorded tradition, you go back to the vague, the mystical, and the unreal. If the past be, but remote enough, even realities become unreal, and action no more than a dream. Whatever his tongue, the bard or story-teller can only speak of 'old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.' Mr Yeats is a poet of imagination, and he has found in the realm of Celtic myth, which Ferguson was the first to explore, material which mates with his fancy. But to speak of his verse or of his prose tales-charming as many of the latter are-as an interpretation of Irish character is to profoundly misinterpret that character. It is characteristic of Mr Yeats's delight in dreams and shadows that the poet who has most attracted and influenced him is William Blake, whose works he edited in 1892 in conjunction with Mr E. J. Ellis. It is nineteen years since Mr Yeats, then a lad of nineteen, first appeared in print in the pages of the Dublin University Review. Since then, though he has published many volumes, he has written comparatively little verse. He is to be commended for the restraint he has exercised, and the fastidiousness with which he has pruned his poems. Though he has published since 1888 several volumes of poetry, the collected edition, which contains all of his published poetry which he cares to preserve,' is still of modest size. As an interpreter of Celtic myth and tradition, and an exponent of the Celtic influences in literature, Mr Yeats takes himself, as we have seen, very seriously. Every one may not take the same view of his mission that he does himself. But no one can doubt that he is a poet. When he is least selfconscious Mr Yeats can fulfil with real charm of manner and of language one of the highest functions of a poet, that of expressing in the language of the imagination the dimly realised feelings of less gifted persons. If he can give the world more of such poetry as the lyric in which he has sung for every prisoned toiler in the smoke of cities the haunting charm of nature's lonely solitudes, the world will forgive him readily enough for many affectations: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. COMPLEMENTARY LIST OF RECENT AND CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AUTHORS, IN VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS OF LITERATURE. George Long (1800-79), sometime professor in University College, London, edited the Penny Cyclopædia, contributed much to Smith's Classical Dictionaries, and was an accomplished translator and commentator on classical texts. John Colquhoun (1805–85), army officer, wrote The Moor and the Loch, Rocks and Rivers, Salmon Casts, and Sporting Days. Charles George William St John (1809-56), for a while a clerk in the Treasury, wrote Wild Sports of the Highlands and valuable Note-books on sport and natural history. John Bright (1811-89) wrote little directly for pub lication, though he contributed a few prefatory notes to other people's works, and was co-editor with Thorold Rogers of Cobden's speeches. His own Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, which may fairly claim to rank as literature, were published in 1868 (new ed. 1878); his Public Addresses in 1879; and his Public Letters in 1885. Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy (1812-78), professor in London University and then Chief-Justice of Ceylon, wrote The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. William George Ward (1812-82), Fellow and tutor of Balliol, became a Tractarian, and wrote The Ideal of a Christian Church, whence he became known as Ideal Ward;' becoming Roman Catholic, he edited the Dublin Review, and maintained Papal infallibility against liberalism in theology. Edward Forbes (1815-54), Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh, published more than two hundred works or papers on various departments of zoology and paleontology. George Jacob Holyoake (b. 1817) has written many books on the history of co-operation and on secularism (of which he was the foremost exponent), as well as the autobiographical Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life. John Campbell Shairp (1819-85), Principal of St Andrews University and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, was a poet and accomplished critic, amongst his works being Kilmahoe, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, Culture and Religion, Aspects of Poetry, and a small book on Burns. Alexander Campbell Fraser (b. 1819), at first a Free Church minister, and for thirty-five years Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, published the great edition of Berkeley's works with notes and life, as also of Locke's Essay, with smaller books on Berkeley and Locke, and defended theism in his Gifford Lectures. Francis Galton (b. 1822), traveller and anthropologist, has by a long life of patient research made himself the supreme authority on all that concerns heredity in man, amongst his books being Tropical South Africa, Hereditary Genius (1869), English Men of Science- their Nature and Nurture, Human Facuity, Natural Inheritance, as well as an important work on Finger Prints and a Fingerprint Directory. Sir Edward Bruce Hamley (1824-93), LieutenantGeneral and Commandant of the Staff College, contributed to Blackwood and Fraser, and, besides books on wars and campaigns, wrote on Voltaire, on Shakespeare's Funeral, and Lady Lee's Widowhood. Lord Kelvin (b. 1824), long known as Sir William Thomson, the most eminent mathematician and physicist of his time, has published not merely innumerable Mathematical and Physical Papers, but also three volumes of Popular Lectures and Addresses. Augustus Jessopp (b. 1824), rector of Scarning, has written much on local and ecclesiastical history, Arcady and The Coming of the Friars amongst many other books. Sir William Huggins (b. 1824) has, as an astronomer directing his own private observatory, made himself a supreme authority on spectroscopic astronomy, and has contributed largely to the Transactions of the learned societies. George Bruce Malleson (1825-98), colonel, wrote books on the French in India, on the Indian Mutiny, and other periods of military history. Frederick James Furnivall, born in 1825, has given a great impulse to the scholarly study of English literature by over a hundred works he has published, largely annotated editions of old English texts for the learned societies of which he has been an important member. Lord Dufferin (1826-1902), statesman and orator, was author of Letters from High Latitudes, first published in 1859. And see page 385. St George Mivart (1827-1900), Professor of Zoology at the Roman Catholic College of Kensington, wrote The Genesis of Species and other works from the standpoint of a sincere evolutionist save as regards mind, but an opponent of natural selection; and was for his eschatological views ultimately debarred from the sacraments of his Church. Simon Somerville Laurie (b. 1829), from 1876 till 1902 Professor of Education at Edinburgh, has published a Life of Comenius; works on the institutes of edu cation, on the history of mediæval education, on the philosophy of ethics, and on British theories of morals; and as Scotus Novanticus,' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta and Ethica. William Michael Rossetti (b. 1829), editor of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Germ in 1850, has written much on his father, his brother and sister, and on the PreRaphaelites; produced a Life of Keats; and edited many of the English poets, including Shelley, Blake, and the series of Moxon's Popular Poets.' Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff (b. 1829) has published, besides political speeches and miscellanies, Studies in European Politics, books on Sir Henry Maine, M. Renan, and Lord de Tabley, and four series of Notes from a Diary. Stanley Leathes (1830-90), Prebendary of St Paul's, was Boyle lecturer, Hulsean lecturer, and author of many conservative theological works. George Tomkins Chesney (1830-95), general and member of the Council of the Viceroy of India, wrote, besides The Battle of Dorking, The Private Secretary and The Lesters. Joseph Parker (1830-1902), preacher at the City Temple in London, was a copious and popular theological writer. Hamilton Aïdé (b. 1830) has written poems, novels, and plays, among his recent works being Jane Treachel, The Snares of the World, and We are Seven (1902). John Knox Laughton (b. 1830), Professor of Modern History at University College, London, is an authority on the science of navigation and on naval history, his books on Nelson, on Nelson and his Companions, and on Sea Fights and Adventures being among the most popular; his Life of Sir Henry Reeve is his most important work on other than nautical themes. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), Professor of Physics at Cambridge, was one of the most creative thinkers on electricity and magnetism, produced epochmaking books and papers on these and other branches of physical science, and was a brilliant letter-writer. Edward Spencer Beesly (b. 1831), formerly a professor of University College, London, wrote what he thought a fairer estimate than heretofore of Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius, and a book on Queen Elizabeth, and was one of the translators of Comte's Positive Polity. George Manville Fenn (b. 1831) has produced about a hundred novels and boys' stories, including The Parson o' Durnford, The Silver Salvers, The Canker Worm, Black Shadows (1902). George Alfred Henty (1832-1903), journalist and novel ist, was author of eighty books for boys; Colonel Thorndyke's Secret being one of his later novels. Lord Roberts (b. 1832), a distinguished soldier, fieldmarshal, and commander-in-chief, is a successful author in virtue of his Rise of Wellington and Forty-one Years in India. Thomas Fowler (b. 1832), President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, has written manuals of deductive and inductive logic, books on the principles of morals, and works on Locke, on Bacon, on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, besides two histories of his own college. Henry Fawcett (1833-84), Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and M.P., is best known for his Manual of Political Economy, largely a popular exposition of Mill, and a book on Protection and Free Trade. Richard Watson Dixon (1833-1900), vicar of Warkworth and honorary canon of Carlisle, published seven volumes of poetry, but is remembered as author of a scholarly History of the Church of England in the Reformation period. Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-94) wrote A Painter's Camp in the Highlands, Etchers and Etching, The Graphic Arts, Lanascape, two Lives of Turner, and books on The Intellectual Life, on Human Intercourse, and on French and English. George Du Maurier (1834-96), artist and Punch illustrator, was author of Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (1894), and The Martian (1897). William Westall (1834-1903), originally a business man, then journalist and novelist, published Larry Lohengrin in 1879, The Old Factory in 1881; Strange Crimes, A New Bridal, Her Ladyship's Secret, The Sacred Crescents, are but a few of his many stories. James Bass Mullinger (b. 1834), University Lecturer on History at Cambridge, is author of the great history of his university and of one of St John's College, of books on the ancient African Church and on The Schools of Charles the Great, and, with Dr S. R. Gardiner, of an Introduction to English History. Philip Stanhope Worsley (1835-66) was the author of verse translations of the Odyssey and twelve books of the Iliad. George Birkbeck Hill (1835-1903), at one time headmaster of a school at Tottenham, wrote Dr Johnson, his Friends and his Critics, and produced the masterly (but over-annotated) Oxford edition of Boswell's Johnson; besides editing and writing much in the way of Johnsoniana, as well as editing Hume's and Boswell's letters. Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1835-1903) discovered the gorilla, recorded his Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), wrote several books on African experiences and African subjects, and produced books on Sweden and on the Viking Age. Sir Archibald Gelkie (b. 1835) is not merely a very distinguished geologist, but an accomplished writer on his science, his Lives of J. D. Forbes, Sir Roderick Murchison, and Sir A. C. Ramsay, as well as his book on The Founders of Geology, taking a permanent place in biographical literature. Walter William Skeat (b. 1835), Professor of AngloSaxon in Cambridge, has by some sixty works done more than any scholar to the knowledge of Middle English and English philology generally; his edition of Chaucer and his Etymological English Dictionary his most famous works. Sir Norman Lockyer (b. 1836), Director of the Solar Physics Observatory at South Kensington, has written innumerable works on astronomy, solar physics, and spectrum analysis, some of his bestknown books being Star Gazing Past and Present, The Chemistry of the Sun, Earth Movements, The Meteoritic Hypothesis, The Dawn of Astronomy. John Wesley Hales (b. 1836), Professor of English at King's College, London, has written Shakespeare Essays and edited Percy's Folio MS. Oscar Browning (b. 1837), Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, has produced The Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century, A History of England (4 vols.), The Flight to Varennes, books on the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the Condottieri, and Lives of Goethe, Dante, Peter the Great, Charles XII., and George Eliot. |