exactly as it deserved; and although there are certain persons who have rejoiced at any apparent triumph of the Roman over the Anglican in the progress of the correspondence, no unbiased person can read the letters carefully without arriving at the conclusion that on the one side there is a consummate master of Jesuitry, and on the other an earnest and impulsive defender of the Anglican faith, whose only fault has been an unwillingness to pronounce against his own brethren, even when he sees, as he evidently does see, that they have fallen into mischievous errors or exaggerations of the truth.

From this war of words, and the strife of tongues which has resulted from it, we may turn with satisfaction to the records of two successful missions at Edinburgh and Leeds, conducted on the model of the London mission of February, 1874. In both cases the bishops have been at the head of the work, which has been done in the Church's way. Very different are the reports of the excited scenes at Sheffield and Birmingham, where the American revivalists, Moody and Sankey, have been gathering crowds by their emotional appeals to the feelings, and have, we regret to see, gained the sanction of the clergy. The willingness thus shown to join hands with men who have far less claims on the co-operation of Churchmen than the leaders of our own Nonconformist bodies, coupled with the encouragement of the still more mischievous Perfectionist heresy, is anything but a satisfactory sign of the times.

As the month closes we have to record a death which will be felt by every Churchman and every Englishman to be indeed a real and deep loss. Canon Kingsley was known as a preacher, but still more as an author all over the world, and no one who had come within the range of his influence could have failed to realize how earnest was his devotion to truth, and how uncompromising his resistance to error and vice in every form. Taken as a whole his sermons contained perhaps the most forcible condemnation of the self-deception and criminal worldliness of modern life and of modern society that has ever been uttered, while of his varied talents as a writer of prose and verse it would be impossible to speak in the space at our command. On the same day on which the Canon died, one of the most earnest of the London clergy, the Rev. J. G. Cowan, Vicar of St. John's, Hammersmith, passed away to his rest, after only three days' illness at a very early age.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Scripture Proverbs, Illustrated, Annotated, and Applied. By Francis. Jacox. Hodder and Stoughton.

MR. JACOX cannot at any rate be accused of wishing to sail under false colours, for on the very title-page of the present volume he quotes the Greek original of Acts xvii. 18, and in parenthesis applies to himself his own interpretation of σжεрμoλóyos, as "seed-picker or grain-gatherer"; while in the preface, with a further amplification, he translates it in Shaksperian phrase as "a snapper up of unconsidered trifles," under each of which descriptions he invites the reader to regard him in this and all his works. And perhaps as a bookmaker Mr. Jacox may be commended for his honesty, though at the same time we hold that there is in all he does far more originality than in many an elaborate volume which is put before the world under the guise of new work fresh from the writer's brain while it is in reality but a poor adaptation of other men's ideas, and even in some cases a misrepresentation of their views. With the author of "Scripture Proverbs" there is no risk in this latter direction. When he quotes he never forgets to use "inverted commas," and when he tells his tale after some earlier writer he invariably credits him with all that belongs to him. Thus, after all, Mr. Jacox may fairly be said to be original; and just as the arranger of the gems from an opera or an oratorio often intensifies our admiration for its beauties, by the relief into which he throws them by means of his skilfully arranged interludes, so our "annotator" gives us here old texts in new lights, and opens up many a line of thought by his skilful illustrations drawn from every available source. There is, too, another charm about the series of books of which this is but the latest issue-they are just as attractive to the reader who knows little of the works on which the author has drawn, as they are to the student who, like Mr. Jacox himself, has been a bookworm all his days. Chapter after chapter is, in fact, so neatly woven, that while to the uninitiated it reads like a piece of pleasant and varied gossip, to those whose reading has already led them in any of the numerous paths Mr. Jacox has traversed, there is an almost endless pleasure in meeting old friends at every turn. From such a book it is of course very difficult to give an illustration, but perhaps the following excerpt from the chapter on "The Heart's own Secret of Bitterness" (Prov. xiv. 10) may be cited as a fair illustration of the

author's style-"The heart knoweth his own bitterness;' and a stranger no more compasseth it than he intermeddleth with his joy. Of Him to whom we consecrate the words, 'Never sorrow was like His sorrow,' the proverb holds good with an emphasis all its own. As the poet of the Christian Year sings of His tears over doomed Jerusalem,

'But hero ne'er or saint

The secret load might know

With which His spirit waxeth faint,

His is a Saviour's woe.'

But of every man in his degree the proverb holds good at some point or other of his history, if not at very many points and day by day continually.

'The world's a room of sickness, when each heart
Knows its own anguish and unrest.'

Every one, in the words of king Solomon's temple dedication service, knows his own sore and his own grief. The tongue touches where the tooth aches, but the best dentist cannot guess at the truth unless one opens one's mouth, Riccabocca sententiously saith. We can detect, quoth Harley L'Estrange, when something is on the mind-some care, some fear, some trouble; but when the heart closes over its own more passionate sorrow, who can discover, who conjecture? It is true, observes a philosophic essayist, that we have all much in common; but what we have most in common is this, that we are all isolated. Man is more than a combination of passions common to the kind. Beyond them and behind them, an inner life, whose current we think we know, within us flows on in solitary stillness.' Friendship itself is declared to have nothing in common with this dark sensibility, so repellent and so forbidding; much less may a stranger penetrate to those untrodden shores. We may apply Wordsworth's lines,

6

"To friendship let him turn

For succour; but perhaps he sits alone

On stormy waters, tossed in a little boat

That holds but him, and can contain no more.""

In some of the pages of this varied collection there is a good deal of humour, and to lady readers may specially be commended the chapter on "The Continual Dropping of a Contentious Wife" (Prov. xix. 13; xxvii. 15). In this of course he quotes Xantippe as the typical shrew:-"Of shrewish Xantippe it has been shrewdly said that had she been married to a small tradesman of Athens she would most likely never have risen above the rank of a mere illtempered woman; but to have an eminent popular lecturer to badger

-a man who was one of the foremost figures of the day, whose carte de visite, so to speak, might be seen in every window, this was a chance too good to be neglected by a genuine sportswoman; and she seized it, and won herself a deathless name in Dr. Lempriere's dictionary, as the most accomplished Tartar of ancient times."

We might quote page after page of pithy sentences chosen most appositely from the most varied writers, always to the point and always attractively strung together; but we prefer to send our readers to the book for themselves, promising them more entertainment, more thorough refreshment, and we may add more genuine intellectual improvement than they will gain from several other books put together. We are glad to see from the preface that this volume is to be followed by a second, also founded on Scripture proverbs.

OUR LIBRARY TABLE.

In First Thoughts (Simpkin, Marshall and Co.), we have a handsome little volume supplying a text with a short commentary for every day arranged according to the order of the Church's year, and interleaved with MS. paper, which can be used as a diary or for devotional notes and kindred purposes. Of the importance of cultivating a habit of daily meditation and self examination, to which the editor alludes in the preface, we have often spoken, but we have never seen a work better calculated than this little volume to assist in the fulfilment of this most unquestionable duty. It would also serve as a note book for jotting down the golden thoughts of great preachers on the texts introduced, and for references to works in which the subjects commented upon are more fully dealt with. Among the authors upon whom the editor has drawn for his brief comments are St. Augustine, Archbishop Leighton, Dr. South, Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Hall, Bishop Tomline, Archbishop Secker, and several more recent writers. The selections seem to have been made, with great care and judgment, and the scheme of the book is so excellent that we cordially wish it a wide circulation. Each page has a neatly designed red border.

J. AND W. RIDEB, PRINTERS, LONDON.