Memorials of The Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer, M.A., late Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, and Missionary to the Mohammedans of Southern Arabia. By the Rev. ROBERT SINKER, B.D., Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co. London: George Bell & Son. 1888.

THE number of Christian biographies continually issuing from the press, of the class to which that whose title is above given belongs, is a notable literary feature of the modern time. There are a good many such; enough, and of a quality to make it a probable statement that Christianity is, in these latest generations, not only bringing forth, as hitherto, the noblest specimens of that universally acknowledged supreme type of humanity, the Man of Faith; but is producing an order of men as illustrative in their persons of the all-surpassing power and

glory of The Faith as ever were; peers in gospel grace of the worthies of any epoch of the gospel annals. Which vital phenomenon is a comment on the state and prospect of Christianity of the clearest significance.

But to proceed to the memoir before us. Its subject, which one is obliged to say is its principal merit, was the third son of the eighth Earl of Kintore. He was born in Edinburgh in 1856. His descent was illustrious through a long line; one of his ancestors having been Frederick the Great's famous Marshal Keith, and others of them men of renown in the history of Scotland. Of his parents, it must suffice to remark that they were worthy of their rank; intellectually and morally of a noble strain. The Earl, his father, was a man of earnest piety and active benevolence; a liberal patron of all enterprises of education and religion. The boy who was born to such station, was born also to wealth; a circumstance to be noted as not usual in the case of those who win the kind of honors he did. How rich he was we are not told; but all through his life he seems to have had plenty of money. He used a good deal of it in one way and another.

His education in its early stages was conducted after the accustomed manner in noble families. His nurse,-half nurse and half governess-in his childhood, was, judging by her contribution to the biography, a person of considerable culture. The tutor under whose hand he next passed was a member of the household, and in the discharge of his office accompanied the family on their occasional tours and seasons of residence abroad. At the age of thirteen he was sent to the Old Harrow School in England where he remained four years, till within a few months of his entering Cambridge University in 1874.

Physically he was a superb specimen of manhood. In his maturity he was six feet three inches in height, but of such symmetry of build that he did not seem so tall; sturdy, alert, very strong, full of animal life and spirit as he could hold, a really magnificent fellow, a strikingly impressive figure seen anywhere.

He was one of the foremost athletes of his time, at school and at the University. His exploits on the bicycle especially made him a public character, before he was well through his

boyhood. For some time he held the first place among the amateur bicyclists of Great Britain. He rode a great number of races, and won abundance of prizes; on one occasion, in a long close contest beating the national professional champion. He once rode from Land's End to John O'Groat's House-994 miles-within thirteen consecutive days, an average of over seventy-six miles a day, counting in nearly two days lost by weather. For ten successive years he was elected president of the London Bicycle Club; and all his life was in much request as judge in bicycle tournaments and in like capacities.

Fond, however, as he was of athletics, he did not at any time make it other than a strictly subordinate interest. In one of his letters he thus states the view on which he justified himself in that considerable degree of attention he devoted to it. "If (he says) we exercised and trained our bodies more than we do, there would be less illness, bad temper, nervousness, and self-indulgence; more vigor and simplicity of life. Of course, you can have too much of it; but the tendency, in most cases, is to indulge the body, and not exercise it enough; and athletic contests are an excellent means of inducing young people to deny themselves in this respect."

In addition to his physical advantages, nature also endowed Keith-Falconer with a generous temper and disposition to match; which were expressed in a genial smile, a brave, breezy, hearty voice, and most winning manners. He was a thoroughly companionable person. The spirit in him was sociable and sympathetic by his make. Though of gentle blood he had a native faculty for getting along side his neighbor whoever he might be. He made great friends, for instance, with that professional bicyclist whom he vanquished, who was a man not at all of his grade. These things in him it is interesting to note, in the light of his origin, but especially of other traits and qualities of his, yet to be remarked, in which his substance as a man consisted.

His intellectual gifts were the counterpart of his physical and social. He was not, indeed, a genius. His mind was not of the creative order. But it was in the highest degree acquisitive, sound, robust, tenacious, critical: a first-class mind for learning. And through his entire life he is to be seen ap

plying it with all his might, with unremitting diligence, zest, and enthusiasm to some task worthy of its powers. He was ever one of the hardest working young men in Great Britain, this earl's son. The story of his achievements and successes in scholarship is quite too long to rehearse. At Harrow he rose to the head of the school; and at Cambridge his career was brilliant in the extreme. Many prizes as he took as a bicyclist, he took a good many more, in those same years, in academic competitions:—and in various branches; beginning, for example, at Harrow with prizes in both German and Mathematics. Yet in all his letters there is no sign that he was ever ambitious for honors on their own account; but much to suggest that in themselves he little cared for them. He was vastly interested in his work for its own sake. He was an "all-round" man; good at everything he tried; and in his accomplishments a sort of Admirable Crichton. To vent his eager and overflowing energy, he was wont to take up outside his regular tasks, now this and now that by-occupation or hobby; and whatever he did in that way he did thoroughly. For example, he became immensely interested in the new Tonic Sol-fa system of musical notation, and so mastered it that about the time he entered the University he was awarded two honorary certificates of proficiency by the principal academy in London where it is taught. He also, while yet a lad became remarkably skilled in phonography, and ultimately an expert on the subject,—a recognized expert. The article on Short hand in the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica,—an exhaustive essay, historical and bibliographical,—is from his pen. The Rev. Mr. Hensley, in whose house he lived and with whom he studied mathemathics in the interval between his leaving Harrow and his matriculation at Cambridge, he was then seventeen, says of him at that time, that "he would rise at seven to take lessons in the Tonic Sol-fa system, or at other times might be heard singing to himself as he lay in bed at the same early hour. In short, he was always doing something. If he had but a quarter of an hour before work time, he would be busy with his short hand, or would spring on his bicycle and dash round the town, and be home again at the appointed hour."

As to the direction of his studies, when in due time it had to be determined, he finally settled to the choice of the Oriental languages; Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and their cognates. There, he felt, lay his best aptitude; and there his taste led him. Already, before taking his degree, he had won examination honors in the first two, and remaining at the University after his graduation, he threw himself with characteristic ardor into work in that field. As an instance of his facility it is related that once having indispensable use for the contents of a book in Dutch, with which neither he nor any one at hand was acquainted, he procured a Dutch grammar and went to work at it and in three weeks could read the book. Before long he was marked by the learned society of the place, which was observant of him as a man of whom the greatest things might be expected. He was appointed by the University an examiner for the Hebrew scholarships, the honors of which he had himself lately carried off; and presently a lecturer (or instructor) in Hebrew. He taught, as he did everything else, with all his heart and with conspicuous success. "He took just as much pains," says one of his associates, "in teaching the stupidest man as the cleverest." He assumed a large amount of extra work in the private tutoring of his backward students, refusing, however, the ordinary fee for such service,-except in one case; and then he sent the money as a contribution to a hospital, half in his own name and half in the name of the student from whom he received it. Of course, being pecuniarily independent, he could afford this; but it shows his spirit. He was generosity itself.

Later still he was offered and accepted the distinguished and ancient chair of "Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge," an appointment which was a good deal of the nature of a decoration since the duty involved was confined to the delivery of one or two annual lectures. In the year 1885, at the age of twenty-nine, he published, as what may be called the first-fruits of his scholarship his volume, "Kalilah and Dimnah," otherwise known as the "Fables of Bidpai," a translation from the Syriac, with an elaborate introduction and copious critical notes, of one. of the great Indian classics, a part of the original Buddhist literature and