All, as it behooves a poet, is the transcript of personal experience. We must not look for the inclusion of elements, however important in themselves, which the author has not found in his own life. The omissions are in this case as characteristic as the inclusions. We look in vain, for instance, for any appreciation of Christianity or of all that side of human nature and experience on which faith in Christianity rests; we hear nothing of love and its ideal suggestions, nothing of the aspiration to immortality, nothing of the whole transcendental attitude toward experience. These are grave omissions. They may seem to condemn Jean Lahor, if not as a general philosopher, at least as a representative of an age in which religious thought has so largely centred about these very questions. But our century has been an age of confusion; and a man who at its end wishes to attain some coherence of life and mind, must begin by letting drop much that the age has held in solution. It is by not being an average that a man may become a guide. Only by manifesting the direction of change and embodying that change in his own person can he be a sign of progress. It remains for time to show whether what survives in a given man has fortune on its side and contains the inward elements of vitality. The presumption in this case, when we abstract from our personal prejudices, will seem to be wholly in favour of our author. The three influences to which he has yielded and which have moulded his mind are the pantheism of the Hindoos, our contemporary natural science, and the ideal of Greek civilization. These three elements might at first sight seem incongruous, and the principle of selection by which they are preferred above all others might seem as hard to find as the principle of union by which they are to be welded into one philosophy. But a little study of these maxims and of the autobiographical sketch which precedes them will, I think, enable us to discover both the principles we miss. The selection of the three influences in question is due to the poetical temperament and scientific tastes of the author, to an individual disposition and to studies which drew him successively to these different sources of instruction. The principle of synthesis, or rather, we should perhaps say, of subordination, by which these various habits of thought are combined in one philosophy, is a moral principle. It is a native power to conceive the ideal and a native loyalty to the ideal when once conceived. This moral enthusiasm is in no sense vapid or sentimental; it hardly comes to the surface in any direct or enthusiastic expression; but it is betrayed and proved to be sincere, now by a passionate pessimism about the natural world, now in detailed and practical demands for a better state of society. A genial individuality and a well-reasoned form of pessimism are, then, the two factors in the development of this interesting thinker, the two keys to the apparently