These effusions are, after all, only amusing manifestations of the Omar Khayyám Distemper. It has, however, unhappily a deeper significance. Mr. Fitzgerald's success has arisen mainly from his playing into the _pessimistic and cynical mood_ of the time, and here lies its moral danger, especially to young, unguarded and unthinking, readers. Let them be assured that all this is bad thought, bad taste, bad effort. The _Byronic_ mood is not only unhealthy, but is critically antiquated, and cannot be permanently recalled in any relation whatever. Better—much better—than this is the healthy, if somewhat rabid, physical progression of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, even to 'ride with the reckless seraphim on the brim of a red-maned star'! If they will not take it from us, let them listen to the powerful and earnest words of a lofty, original, spiritual thinker with which he corrected the kindred morbid tendencies of his day, and which are again singularly relevant here. Says Professor Ferrier in a noble and indignant outburst: 'These aberrations betoken a perverse and prurient play of the abnormal fancy—groping for the very holy of holies in kennels running with the most senseless and God-abandoned abominations. Our natural superstitions are bad enough; but thus to make a systematic business of fatuity, imposture, and profanity, and to imagine, all the while, that we are touching on the precincts of God's Spiritual Kingdom, is unspeakably shocking. The horror and disgrace of such proceedings were never even approached in the darkest days of heathendom and idolatry. Ye who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth—ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom, thus making sin, death, and the devil, the lords paramount of the creation—have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred? Oh, ye miserable mystics! when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways, and in the laughing sunshine of the universe, and that all intellect, all genius, is merely _the power of seeing wonders in common things_!' With this impressive appeal we pause, for the present. The standpoint and genius of Jeláleddín could not possibly be better expressed than in Ferrier's closing words. GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. THE VISION OF GOD As represented in Rückert's Fragments. Rendered in English Rhyme by W. HASTIE, D.D. Price 2s. nett. KANT'S COSMOGONY As in his Essay on the "Retardation of the Rotation of the Earth," and his "Natural History and Theory of the Heavens." With Introduction, Appendices, and a Portrait of Thomas Wright, of Durham. Edited and Translated by W. HASTIE, D.D., Professor of Divinity, University of Glasgow. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. nett.