cellaneous productions in verse and prose. They stand as a lasting monument to the genius of the greatest poet of Denmark, as the living memorial of their author's singularly rich, fruitful, and fortunate career.

Outwardly this score of years that crowned Oehlenschläger's life was comparatively uneventful. A journey to Norway in 1833 (commemorated in "Norgesrejsen") and a second visit to Sweden in 1847, where he received ovations at Stockholm and Upsala, were the most noteworthy episodes of this period. Meanwhile, in face of the poet's broadening fame and strengthened hold upon the minds and hearts of his fellow-countrymen, the wave of adverse criticism that had at one time risen so high was steadily subsiding, and even his most determined opponents came to recognize the indebtedness of the nation to the man who, whatever his lapses from a high ideal and however weak he had shown himself in his comparative failures, had nevertheless created a new literature for Denmark, and awakened the creative spirit that was now displaying itself on every hand. It was during these last years of Oehlenschläger's life-that is, during the thirties and forties-that most of the men arose who have shaped nineteenth-century Danish literature. Besides the continued activities of the older men-Grundtvig, Heiberg, and J. C. Hauch-these years record the appearance and early successes of the novelists Ingemann, Blicher, Goldschmidt, and St. Aubain; of Henrik Hertz, master of the lyric and romantic drama; of the poets Paludan-Müller, Winther, and Ploug; of Kierkegaard, in spirit and influence akin to our own Emerson; and of Hans Christian Andersen, dear to the childhood of all lands. Widely divergent as were the paths of these men, Oehlenschläger felt, and justly, that they were in some sense his successors, and that he had given the impulse which was resulting in so marked an expansion of the national literature. Nearly all of these men, old and young, joined to do him honor in the celebration of his seventieth birthday, which was carried out with great pomp and display of enthusiasm, and even evoked tributes of heartfelt admiration from Heiberg and Grundtvig, the

poet's most inveterate critics. A few weeks later he lay upon his deathbed. At his request his son read to him the scene from his own "Sokrates," in which the philosopher discoursed upon death. He also expressed the wish that this tragedy should be presented at the theatre as a memorial performance after his death. A few hours later, toward midnight, January 20, 1850, he passed quietly away, retaining full consciousness almost to the last moment. He was buried in the Frederiksborg churchyard, where a massive block of stone marks his grave. Hans Christian Andersen tells us that when, a short time after the entombment, fresh wreaths were brought to replace the old ones upon the grave it was found that a song bird had made its nest in the withered leaves. It is a pretty story, and serves well to end our account of the great national poet of Denmark.

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE.

[A condensed form of this essay was published in "A Library of the World's Best Literature." For permission to reproduce the matter appearing in that work, the author is indebted to the courtesy of the publisher.]

AN EDUCATIONAL REFORMER.'

THE reception accorded this volume has not been uniformly sympathetic. The subject of the memoir did not live in the public eye. His character was far removed from the conventional type which claims posthumous recognition in the shape of an official biography. His achievements, even in the field of education, were certainly not great enough to warrant his becoming a prey to the notoriety that pursues a man who has made some signal success. All this may fairly be granted to orthodox criticism, which resents a new claimant for its suffrages. Yet one cannot but be glad, after reading Quick's life, that many who never heard his name before and who can still confess their ignorance without shame, have been introduced by its pages to an attractive personality of no common sort.

Fortunately the writer intrusted with the task of presenting a picture of a man of such unique temperament has not followed the lines of an ordinary biography. The present volume could not be better arranged as a memorial of one whose life was not cast in a common mold. The editor, Mr. Storr, a lifelong friend, has been loyal enough to harmonize his biographical methods with the peculiar traits of the subject of his memoir. Quick's temperament was desultory and irregular in its impulses, and the arrangement of the pages of his memoir reflects in a very effective way these characteristic traits. Without chronological sequence or logical connection they give us the thoughts of a mind delicately organized, with a singular gift of originality, in words jotted down from time to time as the occasion prompted. For Quick was in the habit of keeping what might be called an intellectual log book, capable of furnishing attractive and stimulating extracts from true personal records. The

THE LIFE And Remains OF R. H. QUICK. Edited by F. Storr. New York and London: The Macmillan Company. 1899.

editor thus had abundant material to draw from, and he has certainly succeeded in bringing out on almost every page something that attests Quick's powers of observation and reflection. As a matter of fact the actual biography hardly covers more than a fifth of the volume, the remainder of which consists of excerpts from Quick's diaries, taken directly as they must stand in the original manuscripts, and without attempt at systematic classification. This is all as it should be, for the book could under no circumstances appeal to a large public, while those persons who do read it will be grateful to Mr. Storr that he has done no violence to Quick's words by placing them under restrictions and conditions alien to every instinct of his nature.

Very little is told us of Quick's early years. He was not precocious, so the records of his youth are given in less than half a dozen pages. Born in 1831 in London, he received the kind of education and training that the ordinary middleclass Englishman gets. His father was a London merchant comfortably well to do. The certainty of a competency not dependent on his own efforts undoubtedly produced in Quick a readiness to follow the caprices of his fancy to the complete sacrifice of his own material welfare. This may not have been a misfortune for him, since to a man of his temperament the obligation of following an occupation of routine labor might have been fatal to the development of the finer sensibilities of his nature.

At Harrow he had as fellow-students Butler and Calverly, whose names became in different ways well known to the public. His career both at school and at Cambridge seems to have been uneventful, illness interfering with the possibility of academic success. His voluminous diaries contain almost no reference to this formative period. It can be well understood that he looked back on the time spent at grinding on mathematics at Trinity College with no degree of satisfaction. Visits to the Continent had made him proficient in modern languages, but his knowledge of these was not scientific in the philological sense, his interests lying rather on the literary side. In this direction his university

work could give him no assistance, nor can the impulse to what he afterwards accomplished as a pioneer in educational theory be looked for in these college days.

After receiving the amount of academic distinction appropriate to one who worked seriously at a subject which failed entirely to excite his interest, Quick emerged from Cambridge, and, like multitudes of other graduates, took holy orders. A half century ago almost every one who had no taste for the medical or legal professions, unless he were strongly anti-religious, did exactly what Robert Hebert Quick did. As his biographer points out, no one could pretend that his motives for undertaking ministerial work were due to any such call as prompted men like Pusey and Newman to "see in the clerical profession the one and only worthy pursuit in life."

It would not be necessary to make an apologetic comparison of this nature had not ungenerous criticism questioned Quick's sincerity in selecting his career. He was comfortably off. His nature was twisted in no direction by unworthy ambition. His attitude toward religious matters is constantly revealed in his journals, and nothing could be freer from cant. His nature was deeply impressed by the reality of spiritual things. Simply because his temperament did not fit him, or rather because he fancied it did not fit him, for the work of a parish priest is no ground for casting reflections on his motives for accepting ordination in the Church of England. As a schoolmaster he may be said also to have failed. But no one would think on that account of denying his devotion to the cause of education.

After his ordination he became a curate without stipend in an East End parish. It is characteristic that his good nature and sympathy should have caused him at the very start to work among the poor. It is equally characteristic that he soon felt impelled to give up parish work for an educational career. From what is reported by those associated with him he was by no means a failure. There was much in his nature which admirably fitted him for just this type of clerical duty. But he already evinced that impatience of results