445 SIR WALTER BESANT (1838-) OMETIMES we tire of being subjugated by our intellectual superiors and coerced by those who set up their moral excellencies in overwhelming array against us. As the schoolboy, when the woods are green with the first fresh tints of June, longs to escape from the majesty of his teacher to the company of vagrant boys whom, through the solid walls of the schoolroom and a mile of intervening fields, he can see splashing in the forbidden stream, so do we long for the delight of freedom in the company of minds of our likeness. And this longing, necessary for our growth, deserves indulgence at all times and gratification as often as possible. After we have been disciplined and instructed, taught with all necessary birching or the threat of it,— "To do the thing we never like, - the time ought to come in the natural order of a well-conducted universe when we can do what we like. That, when it does come, is of all others the time for reading Sir Walter Besant's essays, novels, tales, or anything else he has written. For whatever it is, whether essay, tale, or novel, we shall find it the same thing in the end-to wit: what we like! If fifteen years ago it happened that, without waiting for the suggestions of eminent critics, we read by chance either "The Golden Butterfly," or "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," there is hardly a chance but that it alone of all the novels we read that year will stand the severest test to which any book can be putthat of whether or not the reader really liked it. For what a man really likes he assimilates-and in the nature of language and of things he can assimilate nothing else. To know Besant and not to like him is impossible. Hence, when the whole generation of unlikable people is forgotten, Besant will be remembered. "From the beginning," says Charles Dudley Warner, "he was one of those who come with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner." If we ask how, we do not have far to seek for the answer. It is because he likes what we like. His mind holds easily all we have tried to hold in vain. Our impressions, which faded out before we could fix them, he fixed and held in trust for us, that he might give them back in due time as thought-ours and his in perfect likeness. He was born at Portsmouth, England, August 14th, 1838. After graduating from Christ College, Cambridge, he was for seven years senior professor in the Royal College at Mauritius. When he returned to London, it was with a determination to adopt literature as a profession, and although it is said that he burned his first novel because a publisher rejected it, he was successful from the beginning. His studies of French poetry and his essays on "The French Humorists" show his superiority to the style and to the literary tradition of the English Critical Review. They are unmistakably literature in their own right and not mere commentaries on it. The partnership as a novelist formed with James Rice in 1871 resulted in "Ready-Money Mortiboy," "The Golden Butterfly," and other novels which at once attained international popularity. Rice died in 1882, and in the same year appeared the first of Besant's independent novels, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," one result of which was the building of the People's Palace in East London. In 1884 he was elected first president of the English Society of Authors, and in 1887 was again elected, serving until 1892. In 1895 he was knighted and in 1900 became a member of the Advisory Council of the World's Best Essays, of which in his own right and as the special representative of England, he is honorary chairman. He has been active in promoting closer relations between England and America, and has taken special pains to promote the convenience and pleasure of Americans visiting London. W. V. B. TH WITH THE WITS OF THE "THIRTIES HE ten years of the 'Thirties are a period concerning whose literary history the ordinary reader knows next to nothing. Yet a good deal that has survived for fifty years, and promises to live longer, was accomplished in that period. Dickens, for example, began his career in the year 1837 with his "Sketches by 'Boz" and the "Pickwick Papers." Lord Lytton, then Mr. Lytton Bulwer, had already before that year published five novels, including Paul Clifford" and "The Last Days of Pompeii." Tennyson had already issued the "Poems by Two Brothers" and "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical." Disraeli had written "The Young Duke,” "Vivian Grey," and "Venetia." Browning had published "Paracelsus" and "Strafford." Marryat began in 1834. Carlyle published the "Sartor Resartus" in 1832. But one must not estimate |