The Sun.
London, England, 1868-08-18 00:00:00

~~y.~.....~

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PRICI4 . 4d.
STAMPED 5d

2HE LATE MR. JOHN DOUGLAS COOK.

(From tree Pall-Mall Gazette.)
After some months' illness one who for many
yeArs has exercised no slight influence upon Eng-
list political and literary life has passed away. On
Mo.nday night Mr. John Douglas Cook, the editor
of the Saturday Review, died at his chambers in the
Ilbany. The immediate cause of Mr. Cook's death
w-as a disease of the liver which had troubled him
for many years. Towards the last it culminated in
an attack of jaundice, which prostrated him so eom-
plet,Bly as to leave hie friends no hope of his re-
covezy. It may, however, be truly said of Mr.
Cook that he died from want of rest. The habit
of work was a second nature with him. He gave
himself, it is true, a vacation every year, but
when he was away from his paper he was
always craving to get back to it. He could never
be induced to go abroad beyond the reach of letters
or business cares, and he was apt to think that
the time spent in taking exercise or recreation was
time wasted—a mistake which has brought many a
laborious man to his grave. He almost invariably
passed his holiday in Cornwall, where he had esta-
blished his favourite home, and whither he had but
recently removed his library. But Cornwall was
not far enough away from London. His paper
was the idol of his life, and it was scarcely ever out
of his thoughts. It happened this year that, for
the first time, he was unable to meet his contri-
butors on the one day when they all met together,
and the circumstance gave him great distress. In-
deed he had found himself unequal for months past
to the close and unremitting attention which his
duties demanded ; but he could never tear himself
away beyond sight or sound of his journal. Even
when his strength was gone his mind continued to
wear itself upon it.
It is common to talk of the " cynical" tone of
our contemporary ; with what justice it is not our
business to ditcuss. But the chief editor was not
a cynic—he hated false pretences and abuses of
every kind, and was always delighted when either
were efficiently and skilfully exposed. Among
those who knew.him there must be many who could
testify to the innate kindness of his disposition, to
the generous impulses which often prompted bis
actions, to the quick perception which he had of
talent in the young and unknown, and to the
patience with which he waited for the fruit of that
talent. He once said, " The only way to keep up
a staff which time and change are always touching
is to welcome young men, and never to despair of
them because their first articles happen to be bad.
Wait and see fairly what they really are ca-
pable of doing." In this respect he was
a faultless editor. He exacted a high stan-
dard of work, but he judged fairly of every
man's productions. He soon found out in what
direction a writer's talent lay, and turned it to the
best advantage with wonderful skill. If he attacked
many, there were very many more whom he was
tempted to attack and spared, and his mind was
singularly free from those prejudices which might
possibly interfere with perfect freedom in the
management of a paper. He scrupulously main-
tained the character of his paper for independence
from narrow cliques, and from interests which those
who labour for and in the name of the public must
always disregard. The only fatal defect of a con-
tribution in his eyes was that it was not a work-
manlike production.
Beginning his career as a journalist, like so
many other men who have since risen to distinc-
tion, on the Parliamentary reporting staff of the
Times, Mr. Cook had acquired a vast amount of
practical experience in all kinds of newspaper work
before he brought his matured powers to bear on the
editorship of the Morning Chronicle, and aubse-
quent]y of the Saturday Review. Only _those who
are familiar with the difficulties of journalism of the
higher order can appreciate the tact, the breadth of
view, the personal and genial good-humour, and the
business qualifications which enabled Mr. Cook to
place the Review, which he created, in the very front
rank of English periodicals almost from the day
of its first appearance. The immediate success of
the Saturday Review was indeed at that time a
thing without precedent. When, about twelve
years and a half ago, its earliest numbers began to
be talked about, no journal based upon the same
plan was in existence. It was, as it has still re-
mained, a collection of political and literary
articles and essays, supplemented with some six
or eight reviews of books. Whether such a pub-
lication, unaided by the addition of news, and
unspiced by the insertion of correspondence,
could make its way beyond the ;Jarrow limits of the
more cultivated class of readers, was a matter of
considerable doubt. 'Nevertheless, the success of
the Saturday Review, though gradual, was steady
and substantial. Mr. Cook himself was in the

habit of attributing its influence not so much to its

general plan, as to the staff of able men whom he
be had gathered around him as editor of the Morn-
ing Chronicle, and who were his coadjutors in his
new venture. And there can be little doubt that
he was substantially right. If the writers in the
Saturday were audacious, self-reliant, contemptu-
_

ous, and rigid in the enforcement of their own

canons of good taste, they were unquestionably as
able, as brilliant, as well-informed, and as sound in
their literary principles, as any men who wrote for a
generation becoming daily more and more fastidi-
ous. In those days Mr. Matthew Arnold had not
imported the German word " Philistinism" for the
benefit of his generation; but it was the special,
and prominent, and avowed aim of the Saturday
Review to attack Philistinism wherever it showed
its disagreeable and presumptuous head. Above
all, it was independent, alike in its politics and in

its literary and artistic criticisms. So far as its
politics were of any definite complexion, they were,
as was natural from its origin, of the Peelite type.
In regard to the cynicism" attributed to the
Saturday Review, it is necessary to remember that
when it started cynicism was in the ascendant
a

,mong the more cultivated classes of English-
That aptness for universal unbelief, and

for what may be described as a species of bitter

and contemptuous universal charitableness, which
was the result partly of political complications,
partly of the advance of Palmerstonianism, and
partly of the break-up of religious ideas which fol-
lowed the secession of Dr. Newman and his friends

. -
to Rome, found precisely the organ which it desired
in the unimpassioned, witty, unsparing, and unpre-
judiced criticisms on men, women, and books, which
under Mr. Cook's direction appeared week by week
in unceasing flow. It was, moreover, only through
this utter aversion from enthusiasm in its writers
that the Saturday exhibited that strange combina-

tion of High Church ecclesiastical tastes with a
recognition of the truth of liberal principles in theo-

logy which has been its characteristic up to the very
present hour. It needed no familiarity with its
editorial secrets to guess that among its numerous
writers were men of all sorts of opinions, political,

religious, and literary. Its " favourite aversions"

were the leaders of the Evangelical schools, and if

it was ever cordial in any thing, it was cordial in
its dislike to men of whom Lord Shaftesbury is the

type and the leader.

Yet its adhesion to the views

of such writers as Dean Stanley and Mr. Jowett
ha 3 always been, and still is, of the coldest and most

qualified kind. On the whole, the Satur day I?eview ,
under Mr. Cook's guidance, has been pre-eminently

a representative journal, and, as such, has well de-

served the power and the reputation it has gained.
"Without any effort, and without the slightest de-
termination of constituting itself an " organ," it

has represented the cast of thought, the feelings,
and the temper, of the highest order of London

political, and critical, and literary life.
Mr. Cook was little seen abroad, especially of
late years; but in those circles where he was well

known he will be remembered with sorrow and
regret.