There is much virtue in inverted commas, and no doubt "thought" is absent from the _Antigone_, the _Divina Commedia_, _Hamlet_, _Paradise Lost_, _Tintern Abbey_, and _The Ring and the Book_; but we cannot follow Mr. Hill in his contention that these poems lack truth or passion. Nor indeed can we remember any poem of which his remark would be true. Mr. Hill's observations on Emerson's style and his biographical portions of the essay are not quite so off the mark. Few readers will accept his very high estimate of Emerson, and he fails to remove our suspicion that the great American writer, who was never known to laugh, was at times perilously near being an ordinary prig. As to Emerson's influence on his contemporaries and successors, it is generally underestimated. The _Essays_ in particular are always a delight to youth, and are read with avidity by boys at the most impressionable age. A great deal of modern individualism, of modern defiance, which is often put down to the discredit of Ibsen, or Nietzsche, or Blake, is really due to Emerson. He was the first eminent man to preach disobedience as an ethical duty; his conscience was always uneasy if he caught himself conforming; and this uneasiness, which a more vigorous man in a more natural society would have recognised as an emotional mood, Emerson distorted into a kind of council of perfection. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," he proclaims exaltedly, not seeing that this sentiment has, as a generalisation, already been contradicted by his birth and his marriage, and is to be finally quashed by his death. SCIENCE A TREATISE ON GYROSCOPIC AND ROTATIONAL MOTION. By ANDREW GRAY, F.R.S. Macmillan. 42_s._ net.