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268 BOOKS [CIL!.P. XIX
books, and those difficult and dull. It there "had been
another eight, however, I should have ploughed through
them. Young boys require a clue to these mysteries, but
nowadays of course they are helped far too much and
lose the joy of using the brain rightly. -
Lately I came across Mr. Doran, who trains· boys and
girls to act Shakespeare. He generally insists on a crowd
of children being included In the audience ; but he .uses
hB rare gift of speech to explain the plot to them at the
beghullng. _
At Cambridge Seeley's enigmatical book Ecee Homo.
took us all captive for a time with its fascinatingly fresh
view of the Gospel narrative and its peerless style. May
not Seeley be ranked with Newman and Church, and
perhaps Mozley, as a princely writer of English prose?>
Some will remember how in Ecce Homo the author fore·
shadowed a supplementary treatise which we vaguely
supposed would be called Ecce Deus. During the later
seventies there was some disappointment felt at the
non-appearance of the work ; but Jebb, about 1878 or a
little·earlier,recounted to me a singular incident in one of
the very first talks I ever had with him. It was that he
had challenged Seeley with the question whether and
when the book was to e.ppear, and the answer was that it
had appeared. It was the Life of Stein, the Prussian
statesman and educational reformer I That biography
was written as an antidote to the influence of the Macaulay
sehool, studiedly pruned of all,purple patches, eloquence,
and enthusiasm ; a cool, dispassionate, very dry narrative
of the achievements of tlie Prussian builder of society.
As Jebb remarked, this answer to a plain question was
so strange that no one would have dared invent it for a
novel. I conjecture that.Seeley desired to complete tlie
portrait of Christ in a more satisfying way than his first
attempt ; but failing in clearness of vision and being
slightly _harassed by questioners, invented a paradox,
absurd enough to deter further enquiry-that might
have been coined by Mrs. Cornish, of Eton fame.