different Departments of the Extension Division likewise announced to those present the courses which would be delivered in different parts of the city during the year. The remaining hours of the day were occupied by class-study instructors in holding informal conferences with those students who desired to arrange for class work.

During the six years in which the work of the classstudy department has been in progress, the enrollment has gradually increased from 129 in 1892-3 to 1560 in 1897-8. It will be observed from the second table given above that the total number of classes conducted is 567, and the total enrollment for the entire period is 5785.

(iii) CORRESPONDENCE-STUDY DEPARTMENT. The following is from the annual report of the correspondence-study secretary, Mr. Hervey F. Mallory. In submitting a summary of the past year's work it seems opportune to call special attention to two or three features which cannot fail to interest all who are following the history of Correspondence instruction.

The hesitancy in according support to this movement which has been shown in some quarters is rapidly disappearing. The spirit of disinterested helpfulness manifested by the instructors in this department, coupled with the beneficial results derived by students from correspondence instruction as observed in later class-room work, is effecting this change of attitude. Furthermore, it is the constant aim of this department, both by urging the substitution of formal courses for informal courses wherever the change can be satisfactorily accomplished, and by providing an official examination at the end of each course, to bring about uniformity and thoroughness both in the work of the instructor and that of the student.

The personnel of the correspondence-study student body is gradually undergoing a change. The new students are coming more and more from the ranks of the secondary teachers in towns and cities. They are persons who appreciate and eagerly improve the opportunities afforded by this method of instruction. Evidence of this lies in the fact that during the past

year there has been an increase of 300 per cent. in the number of those who have successfully completed the correspondence courses, and received the Univer sity Extension certificate.

There is perhaps no more accurate gauge of the. tendencies and lines of special activity in the educa tional world than a University Correspondence-study Department. From its very nature it must meet actual demands, and must recognize at all times and provide for the prevailing interests. In this connection it is interesting to note that the highest registra tions have been made in the Departments of English, Semitics, Latin, and Pedagogy; the enrollment rank ing in the order named. To meet the requests it has been found necessary to add seven new courses in the Department of English, three in the Department of Latin, and three in the Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy. The result is a much more comprehensive announcement especially in the Departments of English and Pedagogy.

The following is a conspectus of the Department for the year:

Instructor Courses 7

I

4

5354

93655

3

Germanic Languages and Litera

Biblical Literature in English..... Mathematics.....

Enrollment

WALTER A. PAYNE.

1898.]

Reviews.

Ernest Renan.*

"He was, if not the greatest thinker of our time, at least the most original, the most captivating, the most seductive". Such is the judgment which an eminent French critic pronounced upon Ernest Renan in his obituary notice. The life of such a man must have an interest of its own, whether its events have been otherwise important or not. We should not be surprised if we met stirring vicissitudes in the history of a man who shares with Victor Hugo the literary glory of the nineteenth century in France. But we shall seek for them in vain. Unlike Hugo or Lamartine, unlike his fellow-Bretons, Chateaubriand and Lamennais, Renan had a life marked by no bouleversement but one, and that, although the most serious of all to the serious man, took place in the domain of the spirit and once for all. From that day, the stream of his life flowed on its quiet way to the end, never once bent from its straight course, nor once disturbed in its crystal limpidity. And yet the biographer has here anything but a dull task, for what author has ever so charmingly "related" himself as Ernest Renan in his prefaces, his academic addresses, and above all, his exquisite 'Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse'? In truth, his English biographer had only to serve us with a sympathetic translation and a judicious selection of these materials, supplemented by something of a running connective of narration and a summing up at the end-and with nothing more a very readable book could have been constructed. But there is much more than this in the recently published biography by Mme. James Darmesteter. This gifted woman, better known to many by her English name of Mary Robinson and as the author of poetry of no mean order both in French and English, has had the advantage of an intimate acquaintance with Renan and his family. Her husband, the younger of the two Darmesteter brothers, both cut down when they had begun to win the highest distinction in linguistic and archeological science, was one of the most eminent Orientalists of the younger generation, and was thus naturally brought into close relationship with Renan. Mme. Darmesteter has consequently an intelligent sympathy with Renan's work to aid her fine tact in presenting a lifelike picture of her subject.

*The Life of Ernest Renan'. By Madame James Darmesteter (A. Mary F. Robinson). Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. 1898.

At once on opening the book, we feel ourselves in the hands of a writer who knows the art of expression and who has an artistic eye. Our author has a style of her own which is captivating in its fine melody, if occasionally disturbing by something of the dithyrambic. But did it not need a poet to do justice to the shade of the savant who mingled so much poetry in his work and in his life?

In our desire to know the origin of Renan, we welcome Mme. Darmesteter's artistic picture of the generic, the typical Celtic coast landscape which she says may be found in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, as well as about Tréguier, the birthplace of Renan. There are the "small grey cities, at once damp and so scantily foliaged, under the incessant droppings of the uncertain heaven.

SO

There is a vibrating 'other wordliness' in the air; the gift of prayer is constant; religious eloquence the brightest privilege, and religious fervour a commonplace. And

over all the grey, veiled, melancholy distinction, which first strikes us as the note of such a place, there is the special poetic, Celtic quality, the almost immaterial beauty which has so lingering a charm". The material features of the country are not gentle, "these weather-beaten moors of wet heath and harsh gorse, of wild broom and juniper. Look at them, overhung by the wreathing hill-mists, traversed and seamed across by the deepsunken river valleys which hide such unsuspected wealth of hanging woods. There is scarce a tree on the upper level-a stunted pine perhaps here and there, or half a dozen ladybirches, mixed with thorn, clustered round. some menhir by the yellow upland tarn. The keen sea has torn and twisted the scanty trees and blown their branches all one way. purple heather barely hides the rock which pierces the sterile soil, as a bony arm frays a worn-out garment. The ocean, the melancholy ocean of a Celtic shore, bounds the horizon with its illimitable grey". It is the landscape which Pierre Loti has rendered so infinitely pathetic for us by his pity for the men that live their poor lives by the cruel sea, with the shadow of great annihilation creeping upon them.

The

Here, then, in melancholy Brittany Renan was born on the 28th of February, 1823, the son of a fisherman who should have been independent had he not been a Celtic dreamer, and of a bright-witted mother with Gascon blood in her veins. These two strains Renan always maintained to have been incompletely blended in him, so that he resembled that hypothetical animal of the scholastics, the hircocerf, with its dual nature. Accepting this account of the matter, it is the Breton which

most appears in his work until after his fiftieth year, when he begins to yield more to his Gascon proclivities, which certainly do not diminish the attractiveness of his writings, although they occasionally carry him a little too far in the direction of irreverence and inconvenance. By birth, by race, by education, by cast of mind, Renan was destined to become a priest and ultimately something much greater in the hierarchy-perchance an archbishop or a cardinal. "The characteristic of the Breton race," he tells us in his 'Souvenirs d'enfance', "in all its ranks, is idealism, the pursuit of an aim moral or intellectual, often erroneous, always disinterested". It is this characteristic which makes Renan all that he is. He was by every tendency about him forbidden to seek material ends, and he remained all his life absolutely unfitted for practical life. He could never have made a bourgeois, he was unable to enter the army, and had not fortune enough to spend his life as an aristocrat; hence his way led into the church. He went on as far as he could, that is to say till in October, 1845, his doubts regarding the truth of Catholic dogma became so overpowering that he left the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, where his success as a student and as a tutor in Oriental languages had been extremely promising. This was his great renunciation and it cost him intense distress, most of all on account of the pain he was to cause his beloved mother, for whom he preserved to the end the greatest reverence and affection.

This momentous decision-for it meant the upheaval and disjointing of his whole lifehad been encouraged by his sister Henriette, his senior by twelve years, who was from his childhood and till her own death, his guardian angel. "Life, had shaken the very foundations of the faith of Henriette. The Paradise of her old dreams appeared to her as a poor piece of men's work, a projection of human fancy; and the adorable Mary, the hierarchies of saints, nay even the Good Shepherd, in whom she had believed, seemed so many sacred and pitiful ghosts. But out of the ashes of this old faith, reverently lifted on to the high places of the soul, there leapt a brighter flame, a new religion, imprecise, without test or dogma, and almost wholly moral: a belief in the vast order of the universe, speeding through cycles of time towards some Divine intent, and furthered in its grand and gracious plan by every private act of mercy or renouncement, by all the tendency of effort which makes for righteousness."

These eloquent words in which Mme. Darmesteter gives us the essence of the change of mind undergone by the heroic and lonely young woman, struggling then and for years

afterward in distant Poland to pay the debt which her father left to burden his poor family, might be taken with little change to epitomize the philosophy which her brother slowly worked out for himself.

Young Renan conceived the ambitious aim of doing for his century what no one had yet done: to write a critical 'History of the Origin of Christianity'. At last in 1863 he began and for twenty years he continued his task, completing it in 1883.

The first of the seven volumes, the Life of Jesus', which appeared in 1863, aroused immense interest throughout all Europe. The mere enumeration of the storm of books and review articles which it called forth, fills pages. (See Thieme's Bibliography of nineteenth century literature in France). It constructs a life of Christ devoid of all supernatural elements, but reverent and full of sympathy with the teaching of the founder of an incomparable religion-a work of very different nature from that of Strauss, some twenty-four years earlier, and owing much less to the Tübingen school of criticism than is usually believed.

The second and third volumes of the series are the most masterly, those on the Apostles and on St. Paul, and they show Renan's remarkable powers of historical revival at their best. His research is more thorough and his fairness more evident.

The final completion of the history of Christianity involved the tracing of its underground roots, and that task Renan began at the age of sixty, publishing three volumes before his death and leaving the remaining two all but ready for the press. This work he entitles the History of the People of Israel'. It is as fascinating to the general reader as it is startling to his orthodoxy, if he has not already got into strange ways of regarding the Old Testament. No one need, of course, go to Renan for the last word on that subject.

In the forty or fifty volumes which compose the literary remains of Ernest Renan there is scarcely a great question which he has not touched, and upon which he has not thrown the light of his clear and simple mind. Some of his writings are full of the wisdom of a prophet, all are redolent of his unswerving loyalty to truth. He offers us the all too rare spectacle of a man who finds his whole happiness in simple and disinterested devotion to his work, without a thought of popularity or of amassing wealth. His aims were always single, and when he was appointed to his professorship in the College of France he felt that there was no other honor to long for except that of being spared to complete the great labors he had undertaken. He died not

only professor but Administrator or Head of the College of France, member of the Institute and of the French Academy, and yet a comparatively poor man, though he could have made thousands by his pen.

Few men have so deeply influenced their age, and if his work and example have not in every smallest part that distinct making for the precise good which many of us would desire to promote, yet his spirit has always been the purest. His gospel, which builds all upon science, is not one of despair, though to many with a less happy temperament than his it may prove little better. His philosophy is summed up, as regards the existence of God, in an agnostic reserve. What he sees now, with the eye of a positivist, will, however, allow of the hypothesis of "a profound nisus, working blindly in the abysses of being, urging all to existence, at each point in space". This nisus, as yet neither conscious nor all-powerful, makes the most of the material at its disposal, but necessarily shows limits and gaps in its products, by reason of the insufficiency of the materials at particular points. Yet this nisus when it has come to act upon the sum total of the universe may become one day conscious, omniscient, omnipotent. As for us, we can distinguish in the universe no sign of reflecting volition; there has been none for thousands of centuries. But what are they in infinite time? What we call infinite time may be a moment between two miracles. "We know not", that is all we can say positively regarding what is beyond the finite. Let us deny nothing, let us affirm nothing, let us hope.

On the other great question of immortality he says, "To sum up: the existence of a superior consciousness in the universe is much more probable than individual immortality. On this latter point we have no other foundation for our hopes than the great presumption of the goodness of the Supreme Being. Everything will one day be possible for him. Let us hope that then he will be just, and that he will restore feeling and life to those who will have contributed to the triumph of good. It will be a miracle. But the miracle, that is, the intervention of a superior being-which does not now occur, may some day, when God is conscious, be the normal régime of the uni

verse."*

wisely so, to give it a formal place in his biography. Indeed she would have done better still if she had spared us some of the fragments of it which are scattered here and there in places where we are at a loss to know who is speaking and what it is precisely about. We are better satisfied with her account of Renan's work and the little events of his life, and above all with her sympathetic revelation of the exquisite gentleness and goodness and child-like simplicity that were in the man. His contentment were unfailing and he found reasons for thankfulness in everything. He was polite and considerate almost to excess, sacrificing all sorts of things in the mere civilities of ordinary intercourse, and unable, as he tells us somewhere, to give a harsh command even to a dog. His irony grew more prominent with his age, but it is always the kindliest, and it accompanies that unfailing sweetness of temper which robs it of its sting. Except in the single respect already mentioned, he grew every way more charming as his age advanced. All this is well brought out in Mme. Darmesteter's remarkable book, which is itself a piece of literature.

To complete fittingly this fragmentary sketch of a savant who was so much more than a mere savant, let me quote a paragraph from one of the last books he published. I shall take the liberty to translate it somewhat differently to Mme. Darmesteter, who seems to have missed the intention in one or two places: "In the midst of so many contradictions, leaving us but the choice of error, who can pretend to be without sin? He who fears he may be wrong, and calls no one blind; he who knows not precisely what is the goal of humanity and yet who loves humanity and its work; he who seeks the truth in doubt and who says to his adversary, 'Perchance thou seest better than I'; he in fine, who leaves with others the full liberty he takes for himself-He indeed may sleep in peace and await unmoved the judgment of the world, if there be one."

Renan died in his seventieth year on the 12th of October, 1892, courageous through much suffering and still faithful to his post, and happy in having done his work.

"So he passed away, and his death struck France with a sort of stupor. He was the greatest man of genius our generation had known: in style, sentiment, poetry of feeling, no less a Master than Victor Hugo; in history and philosophy the compeer of Taine; in philology the heir of Burnouf. There was scarce one branch of thought in France but it was impoverished by his disappearance.”

JOHN HOME CAMERON.