He was fond of Lord Bacon's saying, that literature is the eye of history, enabling us, as nothing else can, to penetrate into the depths of its life; and to study a great author with him was to live again amidst all the influences of a former age.

One of the most valuable points, accordingly, in his method of teaching English literature was that he was never content with lecturing about authors. He would read in class portions of their greatest works with the same minute thoroughness as he used to bestow, when a classical teacher, upon the great writers of Greece and Rome; he would take his class into fellowship with himself, invite opinions from them, enter into discussion with them, and thus introduce them, with all the pleasure of conscious companionship, into the very heart and life of the book before them. Looking back on his lectures twenty-five years ago upon such authors as Shakespeare, Lord Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Pope, or Coleridge, it is difficult, notwithstanding his own belief already mentioned in the essential superiority of classical training, to doubt that English literature might be so treated as to become almost as powerful an instrument of education as the literature of Greece and Rome-that it might exert an almost equal influence in giving accuracy, thoroughness, and depth to the mind, while it would often lay a more powerful

jected 'A Series of English Classics, designed to meet the Wants of Students in English Literature.' Several volumes of the series have been published, under the editorship of writers of distinction. Mr. Brewer was to have written A General Introduction to the Series;' but unhappily this part of the design was never carried into effect.

He

grasp upon the heart. Mr. Brewer used it with singular success in the education of women. taught for a while at Queen's College, London, and gave private lessons to a few privileged acquaintances. Some illustration of his method may be found in the paper read at King's College on the Study of Shakespeare,' which will be found in this volume; though it can convey but an imperfect impression of the personal life and sympathy by which, in this subject more especially, his instruction was animated.

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Such were his public occupations. But in addition to these he accomplished an immense amount of private literary work. During a portion of his struggling life in London he wrote leading articles for the daily press, and for a brief interval acted as editor of the Standard' newspaper. But though he felt a strong interest in politics, some of his best qualities unfitted him for political controversy; and except that he took a warm part in opposition to the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland, his energies were happily diverted from this field of action. He continued, however, to write articles for quarterly periodicals, and the majority of the essays contained in this volume are, with the kind permission of the proprietors, reprinted from two of such publications, the Quarterly Review' and National Review.' He wrote many others, as is proved by some of the letters he preserved; but it has been found impracticable to trace them. He was always extremely reserved respecting such contributions, and placed far too little value upon them. For the

University Press at Oxford he edited Fuller's Church History,' and he bestowed a similar labour upon other old writers. A list of the works he wrote or edited, so far as can be ascertained from the catalogue of the British Museum, will be found at the end of this memoir.

Strange to say, with all this work upon his hands, he was ever at leisure to a favourite friend or pupil, and would spare an hour at almost any time for an interchange of thought with them. On each visit his conversation would be like one of his old friendly lectures, delivered, as the Oxford Statutes have it, sine ulla solennitate. No matter how young his visitor might be, he would talk to him as if he were on an equality with himself, and while pouring out his stores of learning and reflection would be ever endeavouring to elicit thought and information from his hearer. His modesty in this respect was one of his most remarkable characteristics. Genuine modesty is rare, and is very different from the quality, however laudable, of sincerely endeavouring to be modest. Mr. Brewer, in all his conversation and intercourse with others, acted and spoke as if he were learning from them, when in point of fact, as they might accidentally discover at a later time, he had an acquaintance with the subject under discussion in comparison with which their own was insignificant. There was nothing whatever artificial in this attitude. By that respect for other minds and other natures which made him treat his pupils as if they were fellowstudents with himself, he was led to treat all genuine

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students and all thoughtful companions as capable of teaching him something even in the subjects he knew best. He would be vigorous and sometimes amusingly positive in stating his own views, but he was none the less eager to learn from even the rawest and least instructed companion; and one would often be surprised to find at the next interview that he had really been pondering over some suggestion which, at the time it was thrown out, he had summarily overridden. As a further illustration of this habit of mind, the following testimony from Mr. Gairdner, who was for twenty years his colleague in the Record Office, will be read with interest, and will confirm and supplement this sketch of Mr. Brewer's work and character:

'I think if I were asked to name in a single word the point which distinguished him most from all other able men of my acquaintance, I should say it was his thoroughness, and his consequent eagerness to be informed of every aspect of a question or a fact. No man, indeed, was ever so condescending in argument-if condescending is not, in fact, an altogether inappropriate word to describe one whose modesty in tone and unassuming courtesy always welcomed what an antagonist could say in reply as a thing by which he himself might profit. For the truth is, however thoroughly he had mastered a subject, he invariably put himself in the position of one anxious to learn something more about it. I used to say sometimes that when I had a question to ask of him it was very hard, for he would ask me

half a dozen before I got mine put to him; yet, after all, mine were easily disposed of, while his went to the very bottom of things, and required very careful consideration.

'Indeed, this questioning habit of mind was what constituted his peculiar strength. He did not place much reliance on mere logical deductions: he was a student of Bacon, and considered logic as a thing that went comparatively little way; yet no man appreciated the force of logic more than he did, and could discriminate with greater nicety how much a logical argument proved and how much it did not prove. But without entering into dialectics, one pregnant question from him would suffice to turn the point of an argument, and exhibit the subject in a very different light.

His natural field of thought, however, was not mental science or philosophy. His favourite studies were history and literature; and it was particularly with relation to the former that I had most to do with him. Here it was that his questioning habit was of particular use to me, and I had occasion sometimes to mark its influence upon other men who had bestowed much more attention on particular subjects than myself. It is needless to say that in such a very large domain as history even the best of general scholars cannot be so much at home upon any one subject as the specialist. Yet I believe no one was ever so thoroughly acquainted with any one particular epoch but he would find, in the course of ten minutes' conversation, that Mr. Brewer had a