Belated would I watch and make my prey:
Love is my goal; and Love how fair it is,
When friend meets friend sole in the silent night,
Thou knowest, Hesper!

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL

(1850-)

Those to whom the discovery of a relishing new literary flavor means the
permanent annexation of a new tract of enjoyment have not forgotten what
happened in 1885. A slender 16mo volume entitled "Obiter Dicta",
containing seven short literary and biographic essays, came out in that
year, anonymous and unheralded, to make such way as it might among a
book-whelmed generation. It had no novelty of subject to help it to a
hearing; the themes were largely the most written-out, in all seeming,
that could have been selected,--a few great orthodox names on which
opinion was closed and analysis exhausted. Browning, Carlyle, Charles
Lamb, and John Henry Newman are indeed very beacons to warn off the
sated bookman. A paper on Benvenuto Cellini, one on Actors, and one on
Falstaff (by another hand) closed the list. Yet a few weeks made it the
literary event of the day. Among epicures of good reading the word
swiftly passed along that here was a new sensation of unusually
satisfying charm and freshness. It was a _tour de force_ like the
"Innocents Abroad", a journey full of new sights over the most staled
and beaten of tracks. The triumph was all the author's own.

[Illustration: AUGUSTINE BIRRELL]

Two years later came another volume as a "Second Series", of the same
general character but superior to the first. Among the subjects of its
eleven papers were Milton, Pope, Johnson, Burke, Lamb again, and
Emerson; with some general essays, including that on "The Office of
Literature", given below.

In 1892 appeared "Res Judicatae", really a third volume of the same
series, and perhaps even richer in matter and more acute and original in
thought. Its first two articles, prepared as lectures on Samuel
Richardson and Edward Gibbon, are indeed his high-water, mark in both
substance and style. Cowper, George Borrow, Newman again, Lamb a third
time (and fresh as ever), Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, and Sainte-Beuve are
brought in, and some excellent literary miscellanea.

A companion volume called 'Men, Women, and Books' is disappointing
because composed wholly of short newspaper articles: Mr. Birrell's
special quality needs space to make itself felt. He needs a little time
to get up steam, a little room to unpack his wares; he is