attacks on Demosthenes charging him with unchastity. These," he
observes, "the whole man's life and his portrait-statue forbid us to
believe." We do not quite understand how the fact that Demosthenes was a
"whole man" tends to rebut the charge referred to, and if what Mr.
Mahaffy meant to say be "the man's whole life," this is simply begging
the question, a part of that whole being the point of dispute. But the
evidence of the "portrait-statue" is, of course, resistless, and one
cannot but regret, in the interests of public decency, that testimony so
conclusive is not admitted in modern trials involving a similar issue.
One great characteristic of Mr. Mahaffy's style is an unsparing use of
the first personal pronoun. "I think," "I do not think," "I conceive,"
"I believe," "I advocate," "I infer," "I would select," "I had
predicted," are forms of expression strewn abundantly, often in
clusters, over the pages of the work, the subject to which they refer
being generally one on which most other people do not "think" or
"conceive" as Mr. Mahaffy does. One is reminded of an epigram on
Whewell, master of Trinity College (Oxford, not Dublin), after the
appearance of his _Plurality of Worlds_:

His eye, as it ranges through boundless infinity,
Finds the chief work of God the master of Trinity.

William Cowper. By Goldwin Smith. (English-Men-of-Letters Series.)
New York: Harper & Brothers.

Much thoughtful and sympathetic criticism has been written on the life
and writings of Cowper, without any new facts being brought to light or
any decided progress made. His character reveals itself and his life is
minutely recorded in his correspondence; but the few points which his
letters leave unexplained still remain obscure after long search and
study. The question of his rupture with Lady Austen, for instance, is
just where Hayley left it. His poems present elements so apparently
irreconcilable that, while their qualities are universally recognized,
their place in literature is still an unsettled one. The reader of _The
Task_ may ask himself in one breath whether it is poetry at all, or
whether it be not great poetry. There is no trace of the instinctive
poetic utterance of bards such as Shelley and Keats, but there is a
constant appeal to the strongest and most elementary human feelings,
rarely met with in any but the greatest works of art. It was never
Cowper's fate to be exposed to that brilliant but unsympath