LITERATURE OF THE DAY.


The Intellectual Life. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Boston: Roberts
Brothers.

A man of fair culture and a frequenter of cultured society pleads in
these pages the attractions of an intellectual bias or life-training:
he pleads to all accessible classes--to the curate and to the
nobleman, "to a country gentleman who regretted that his son had the
tendencies of a dilettante," "to a lady of high culture who found it
difficult to associate with persons of her own sex," and so on.
Over seventy different addresses are included, each in the form of a
letter, which, though not necessarily ever posted, is really aimed at
a specific person known to the author and distinctively spoken to. The
effort is to reconcile culture with the world of practice and morals,
and answer or forestall the objections of religion or utilitarianism.
Mr. Hamerton talks with great self-possession to the highest class
within ear-shot, and matches a late stricture of Mr. Ruskin's--that
English noblemen exist to shoot little birds--with another on the
influence of railways in sending back the upper ranks to a state of
nomadic barbarism. "Their life," he says, "may be quite accurately
described as a return, on a scale of unprecedented splendor and
comfort, to the life of tribes in that stage of human development
which is known as the period of the chase: they migrate from one
hunting-ground to another as the diminution of the game impels them."