The appointment of Mr. Leslie Stephen to the chair of English literature at Cambridge leaves little room for anything but congratulation. The Clark professorship is the first, and, so far as we know, the only endowment for the study of English at either of the older universities. There are chairs of Anglo-Saxon, certainly; but the connection between Anglo-Saxon and modern English literature is not very close, and our Anglo-Saxon scholars, for the most part, have very rightly devoted themselves to comparative philology rather than to literary criticism. In Mr. Stephen Cambridge has secured as a professor one of the most distinguished men of letters of the day, and one who has a reputation at once as a scholar, a thinker and a popular writer. This last qualification is by no means to be despised. Young students are much more likely to become enthusiastic about a teacher who is widely known to the great reading public than about one whose reputation has not travelled beyond common rooms, and whose fame rests on unread papers in the transactions of some learned society. - [St. James' Gazette.
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