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than merely weave together the three accounts that we have of it. It was his chief aim to bring before his readers 'the Scotland which Johnson saw, the Scotland which he had come to study.' The 'wild objects' he left rather to his artist colleague, Mr. Lancelot Speed, in whose company he visited very many of the scenes of Johnson's wanderings. ""The peculiar manners which interested Johnson far more than natural objects' were Birkbeck Hill's special study.

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With the severe winter of 1890-1 the comparative freedom from ill health which he had for some time enjoyed was broken by a severe attack of bronchitis complicated by asthma, his old and constant enemy. He was forced reluctantly to the conclusion that the climate of Oxford was not sufficiently suited to his health to suffer him to continue to make a home there. Five successive winters he and his wife passed abroad-1892-3, 1893-4, 1894-5 near Clarens, and 1895-6, 1896-7 at Alassio; during the summer months they made their home chiefly at Hampstead with their second daughter, Mrs. Crump.

In 1891 he made a selection for the Clarendon Press of Lord Chesterfield's Worldly Wisdom, a volume similar to the selection of Johnson's Wit and Wisdom, three years before.

For some

Meanwhile he had not lost sight of his main work. time he had been engaged in editing Johnson's Letters, and the year 1892 saw the completion of his task. He again found a publisher in the Clarendon Press. This collection includes about ninety letters published by him for the first time.

The same year appeared Writers and Readers, embodying a series of six lectures which, under the titles of 'Revolutions in Literary Taste' and 'The Study of Literature as a part of Education,' he had read in the Hall of New College before the members of the Teachers' University Association who were in residence in Oxford during part of the Long Vacation of the preceding year. In these lectures Birkbeck Hill spoke to his audience almost as he talked to his friends, taking them into his confidence, and no book of his has more of the personal element than this. Pleasant old memories of his undergraduate days and early life occur here and there. A similar strain of recollections runs through his Talks about Autographs, the Rossetti Letters, and his book on Harvard.

In 1893 he and his wife crossed the Atlantic on a visit to their

eldest daughter and her husband, Mr. W. J. Ashley, then Professor of Economic History at Harvard (now Professor of Commerce in the University of Birmingham). With them he passed the summer and early autumn, partly at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and partly in a pleasant village on Cape Cod. A result of this visit was Harvard College by an Oxonian, published in 1894. The summer of 1896 again found him in America, renewing pleasant intercourse with the friends he had made in his first visit. It was during this second visit that the honorary degree granted him by Williams College in 1892 was actually conferred. That same year he brought out Talks about Autographs, which had appeared originally in the Atlantic Monthly. The following year saw the publication of the last piece of Johnsonian work which he lived to complete. At the suggestion of Sir Leslie Stephen he edited all those writings which have long been included under the general title of 'Johnsoniana.' In the Preface to the Letters of Samuel Johnson he had spoken of his hope of completing the main work of his life as a scholar by a new edition of the Lives of the Poets. Of this he had already laid the foundations as far back as 1892; but he now put the work aside for a time in order to turn to this new task. The result was the two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies published by the Clarendon Press in 1897. Their publication had been delayed by three years of ill health, and by the necessity of passing his winters abroad. In the six volumes of the Life there is,' he tells us, 'scarcely a quotation or a reference in the notes which I did not verify in the proof by a comparison with the original authority. The labour was great, but it was not more than a man should be ready to undergo who ventures to edit an English classic.' On the banks of the Lake of Geneva or on the shores of the Mediterranean he could no longer do this. Often he cast 'a long look' towards the Bodleian and the British Museum. His next book, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1897, was a new departure. Yet the letters brought back to him his undergraduate days, when he was not seldom in Rossetti's company, or memories of the old house in Red Lion Square where Burne-Jones and William Morris had their rooms. One hot morning he recalls when he had watched Burne-Jones painting a cluster of crown lilies in the square garden, perhaps the first

time that the painter ever worked in oils. He was, moreover, able to draw on the reminiscences of his old friend, Mr. Arthur Hughes, who, though not one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, lived in great intimacy with them. A considerable portion of these letters had already appeared under his editing in four papers contributed to the Atlantic Monthly during the preceding year.

In 1898 he published nothing, with the exception of a small selection from the letters of Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, which formed a volume in a series entitled Eighteenth Century Letters under the general editorship of Mr. Brimley Johnson. For some time, however, he had been engaged in preparing a series of unpublished letters written by Swift to Knightley Chetwode between 1714 and 1731. The book appeared in 1899. The knowledge gained in the editing of these letters doubtless did much to prepare the way for the view which he takes of the Dean's character in his notes to Johnson's life of Swift.

In 1899 two articles by him, Boswell's Proof Sheets1 and The Boswell Centenary, were included in a collection of papers on Dr. Johnson written by members of the Johnson Club2, and published in book form under the title of Johnson Club Papers by Various Hands. Since Birkbeck Hill had been a member of the Johnson Club, serving as Prior in 1891 and 1892, the meetings at the Cheshire Cheese and elsewhere were a source of much pleasure to him; he especially enjoyed the visits he made to Lichfield, Bath, Ashbourne, Stratford, or other places associated with Johnson, in company with the members of the Club.

In 1900 his last work was published-an edition of Gibbon's Autobiography under the title of The Memoirs of the Life of Edward Gibbon, a title found by him in Gibbon's handwriting on the manuscript of the various sketches of the Autobiography now preserved in the British Museum. In this edition one of his chief aims was to throw light on Gibbon's character from his own writings and correspondence. For the text he made use of both the first and the second editions of Lord Sheffield's version Respect for Mr. Murray's copyright checked emendations; but, as is the case with all Birkbeck Hill's work, the Memoirs are enriched with copious footnotes and appendices.

During the last three years of his life he gave his time and

1 Boswell's Proof Sheets first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.

2 Founded Dec. 13, 1884.

strength to completing the edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets. His own increasing ill health and that of his wife often compelled him to lay the work aside; but after every check he resolutely returned to his labours, with the result that on his death the work was almost ready for the printer's hands. A few additions and some research, rendered comparatively easy by the precision with which he worked and the good order in which his papers were kept, were alone needed.

In the spring of 1902 the health of his wife, which had been for some years previously the cause of much anxiety to him, began rapidly to fail. She was a woman of marked intellectual ability, and, with the aid of her rare forethought, courage, and firmness of character, he had weathered many of the troubles of life. It was a source of comfort to him, during the brief span of life left, that his own failing strength had permitted him to tend and watch over her till the last. She died in their pleasant little country home at Aspley Guise on Oct. 30, 1902. The blow fell heavily on Birkbeck Hill. Yet it was hoped that there were, in spite of his own infirmities, some years of quiet work before him. It was not to be. Hardly four months did he survive her. He died at Hampstead, in his daughter's home, on Feb. 27, 1903, at the age of sixty-seven.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His Critics. London, 1878.

Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica, edited with a Preface, Introduction, and Notes. London, 1879.

The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the History of Penny Postage, by Sir Rowland Hill and his nephew, George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. London, 1880.

Colonel Gordon in Central Africa, 1874-9. From original Letters and Documents. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill. London, 1881. Second edition, 1884.

Boswell's Life of Johnson, including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., Pembroke College, Oxford. 6 vols. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1887.

Johnson: History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, edited with Introduction and Notes by George Birkbeck Hill. Clarendon Press Series. Oxford, 1887.

Goldsmith: The Traveller, edited with Introduction and Notes. Clarendon Press Series. Oxford, 1888.

Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, now first edited with Notes, Index, &c. By G. Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., Pembroke College. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1888.

Wit and Wisdom of Samuel Johnson, selected and arranged by George Birkbeck Hill. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1888.

Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland), by George Birkbeck Hill, with Illustrations by Lancelot Speed. London, 1890.

Lord Chesterfield's Worldly Wisdom.

Selections from his Letters and

Characters, arranged and edited by George Birkbeck Hill. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1891.

Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., collected and edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., Pembroke College, Oxford.

Clarendon Press, 1892.

Writers and Readers. London, 1892.

2 vols. Oxford, at the

Harvard College by an Oxonian. New York and London, 1894.

Talks about Autographs. Boston and New York, 1896.

Johnsonian Miscellanies, arranged and edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., LL.D., Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. 2 vols. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1897.

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