geration, and the fact that a college is not a drawing-room, puzzle us. Do English teachers take this tone with their students, and do the students like and tolerate it? There is some evidence that they did not all like it. Jowett's reputation as the "great Balliol tutor" was built up in his younger years. After he became master, the average undergraduate, while admiring him from afar, greatly impressed by his occasional sermons, and awestruck by his reputation and the distinguished guests who visited the Lodge, got little from him personally. He worked chiefly with small groups of favored students, chosen it was sometimes thought for capricious reasons undiscoverable by the college at large. The dissentients even went so far as to argue that the successes of Balliol men both in university competitions and in after life were due, not to the quality of Jowett's teaching, but to the fact that his reputation drew to the college the picked men of the university. But after all deductions the fact of an unexampled personal influence remains. And the explanation, given the character and the fine intelligence of the man, is not far to seek. He worked with and for his students. Of what avail are the most scrupulous politeness and justice if the man withholds himself? And what matter a few oddities, mannerisms and human partialities if the man gives himself? The real source of Jowett's power was the stream of young men bearing essays, versions, exercises in prose and verse composition that entered his chambers every night from eight till twelve, when other teachers are busy with their families, their career, their pleasures. Here was a genuine and fruitful commerce of mind with mind in which all the self-consciousness of what is mis-called social intercourse disappeared, and the difference of age and position ceased to be a barrier between the older and younger man when each could say: "But he was rich where I was poor, The stories of the stiff breakfasts and the silent walks make better anecdotage. But it was in these long hours of personal, individual teaching that Jowett's true life lay and his best work was done. Such teaching is the realization of the Platonic ideal when a "man finding a congenial soul with the help of true knowledge sows and plants therein thoughts which have the power to defend themselves and their author, not fruitless but bearing a seed from which growing again to a new and different life in other souls they preserve this power undying." Such teaching is impossible in the overgrown classes of the modern college. But it is by such teaching freely offered to those who can receive it rather than by forcing an artificial social relation, that the wise teacher will endeavor to bridge the gulf which the years are ever widening between him and his pupils. Jowett's first important publication was his edition (in 1855) of "The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, with critical notes and dissertations." Though now little read, the work, as often happens with a scholar's first book, contains some of his best writing, notably the essay on "Natural Religion," and the fragment on the "Character of St. Paul." The accusation which the book brought upon him in old fashioned circles, of latitudinarianism (a long word to fling at a fellow as he wrote to a lady friend) was confirmed by the essay on "The Interpretation of Scripture" which he contributed to the famous collection known as "Essays and Reviews" published in 1860 within a few months of the publication of Darwin's "Descent of Man." We can hardly realize today the tempest in a tea-pot produced by these innocent and now forgotten essays. Writing of Darwin's book in 1861 Dr. Asa Gray says: "The book I have no doubt would be the subject still of a great row, if there were not a much greater row going on about 'Essays and Reviews.'" Jowett at once became a dangerous heretic by his affirmation of the elementary principle that the Bible must be studied and interpreted by scholars and critics like any other book-a proposition which would excite nobody today except a yellow editor trying to make trouble for a professor in a denominational college. "He reads Plato on Sunday," it was whispered about. He was for some years rarely invited to preach except at Westminster where his old friend, Dean Stanley, always welcomed him. And the heresy hunters magnanimously contrived to delay the endowment of his Regius Professorship of Greek until the year 1865. The translation of Plato proved to be Jowett's chief work. He did not so intend, for he thought ten years of life all that a man ought to give to any one task, and as is the way with scholars, he overestimated his own strength and could not realize the shortness of our working hours. He was in the habit of drawing up lists of agenda, courses of reading, books to be written, educational reforms to be achieved. These lists grow pathetically longer as the end approaches. On his seventieth birthday he prepares the following scheme for eight years of work: One year: Politics, Republic, Dialogues of Plato. Two years: Two years: Life of Christ. One year: Sermons. Two years: Greek Philosophy, Thales to Socrates. THE END. Of this program nothing was accomplished except the translation of the "Politics" and the revision of the Plato for the third edition. We need not greatly regret this. All the general ideas which Jowett could have put into these books will be found in the introductions to the dialogues of Plato. He did not possess the learning, the patience, or the critical method that would have enabled him to produce masterpieces of systematic scholarship. Instinct is often a better guide than ambition. And the thing a man actually does, rather than the thing he wishes to do, is what he is best fitted for. Jowett was eminently fitted for the work of translation and discursive commentary. It exercised and displayed his fluency and felicity of expression, his sanity of judgment, his genial suggestiveness. It did not demand the simultaneous grasp of huge masses of detail, the fierce concentration of all the power, the inexhaustible patience, the stiffer-clayed brain of the great constructive scholar. It was a task that interruption did not set back, but that could be taken up and dropped as occasion permitted. Once begun it was inevitable that it should fill all the interstices of academic and administrative routine and social dispersion, and so postpone indefinitely more systematic and strenuous labors. But when While still a tutor in 1847, Jowett had added to the traditional study of Aristotle's "Ethics" a course of lectures on Plato's "Republic," an innovation, the consequences of which are still felt in English and American University education. Aristotle is an excellent drill master. studied alone, his definitions are apt to be committed to memory as formulas of ultimate truth, and the result is scholasticism-an unhistoric, unesthetic, unphilosophic temper. Plato taken alone may be even more harmful to sentimental or unsystematic minds, but Platonism does not easily degenerate into formula and dogma. Plato shows us all ideas including those of Aristotle in the making. He awakens the historic sense, kindles the imagination, stirs the feelings. The addition of Plato to Aristotle in England, the substitution of Plato for Aristotle in America, is, then, a very significant fact in the history of education. In connection with his lectures, Jowett completed in 1855 the first draft of a commentary on the "Republic" which after many revisions was published thirty-nine years later by Professor Campbell as the Jowett and Campbell edition. The translations grew out of the analyses now prefixed to them. Jowett's first aim was to do what Grote did later in a very different style and what many Germans are attempting still-to resume in abbreviated analysis all the essential thoughts of the dialogues omitting no significant ideas. But while engaged in revising the "Republic" with a reading party of his students in the vacation of 1864, he became convinced that there is nothing in Plato which may be safely omitted as superfluous and that the "Republic" at least must be translated entire. From this, he was naturally led on to the translation of the whole. The first edition in four octavo volumes appeared in 1871, and was instantly recognized as an English classic. The habit of this kind of work once established, he went on to translate Thucydides and Aristotle's "Politics" and this, with the preparation of the second edition of the Plato which appeared in 1875, employed all his leisure. The second edition, though still revealing many errors to the critical eye, was a great improvement on the first. The prefatory essays were also enriched by the criticism of Utilitarianism in the introduction to the "Philebus," the account of Hegel in that to the "Sophist," the discussion of psychology in connection with the "Theatetus" and many other valuable additions. These essays, apart from their exquisite style, appeal to us by a wealth of suggestiveness due to their gradual enrichment by the deposits of a lifetime of reading, reflection and teaching. Everything that Jowett studied at any period of his life was, in his mind, related to Plato, and his matured opinions find their final utterance here. His old students recognized many a felicitous expression or neat epigram that had been circulating in Oxford notebooks for a generation. Mr. Bright thought that these essays together with the translations were evidences of a greater mind than that of the original author of the dialogues-whom he did not estimate very highly. It is not necessary to go to the other extreme in order to indicate some reserves. Charming as the essays are they will never quite satisfy logical or systematic minds. They touch delightfully but somewhat evasively on all subjects. They completely elucidate none. Jowett's critics said that he never went to the bottom of anything. His admirers retorted that he was the only scholar who ever came up from the bottom. In truth, his weakness was closely allied to that which constituted his strength-his cult of exquisite diction the ruling passion of his life and teaching. We cannot repeat of him what he said of Carlyle "that his power of expression quite outran his real intelligence." For |