R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

200 Frederick S. Boas' noble company, which has been teaching and delightingthe world for more than 1000 years'. These words givethe key to the spirit in which the little book is written.It deservedly ran through more than a dozen editionsbefore it was enlarged in 1896, and we can scarcely blameBrooke if it was perverted from its true purpose by schoolboyswho learnt pages of it by rote for the benefit ofexaminers. It has recently been re-issued with anadditional chapter on literature since 1832 by Mr GeorgeSampson, and has thus entered on a new lease of life.The year of the publication of Brooke's Theology in theEnglish Poets, 1874, was marked also by the appearanceof the first collection of critical essays by a writer of avery different school of thought. Leslie Stephen hadalready given proof of his versatile powers in his satiricalSketches from Cambridge (1865), his essays on mountaineeringentitled The Playground of Europe (1871), and theEssays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873) inwhich he anticipated the attitude of An Agnostic'sApology in a later year. In 1871 he had become editor ofthe Cornhill Magazine to which he contributed a seriesof literary essays called 'Hours in a Library', and thistitle he retained for the three volumes (1874-9) in which herepublished them and kindred pieces. Stephen's affinitieswere predominantly with the rationalistic elements ineighteenth-century thought of which he was at this timewriting the history, and his sober-coloured style andmethod of analytical dissection are seen to advantage inthe articles on the novelists and poets of that century.Thus in the essay on 'De Foe's Novels' he characteristicallyrepudiates any romantic associations with theposition of a solitary like Alexander Selkirk marooned foryears on an island:We may infer, what is probable from other cases, that a manliving fifteen years by himself, like Crusoe, would either go mad or