tamper with his very shroud to discover the secret of that deformity, which he had allowed to be the curse even of his immortal spirit. Yes, so poor, so petty an infliction, as the blemish which marred his personal appearance, was allowed by this man of rare and noble talent, to be the poison which embittered his whole soul; the mind that should have been given to toil for the glory of GoD with all the powers of genius, was ever intent only on concealing this defect of physical beauty.

We have no space or fancy for describing the horrible details of the burning of Shelley's body by his friends. But we cannot withhold the expression of our regret and disgust at this most uncalled-for revival of a narrative, which every person of right feeling must desire to see buried in oblivion.

The Master of Churchill Abbots, and his Little Friends. By FLORENCE WILFORD. Masters.

THIS book gives better promise than the generality of semi-religious Tales, of which there has been so great a profusion of late. There are many indications in this work of that unworldliness of spirit, from which alone any true teaching can be obtained. We would, however, recommend the authoress in any future attempt to avoid all that savours of the novel in her style and incidents. The introduction of titled personages and the details of love-making, with the inevitable matrimonial catastrophe, ought really to be expunged from books purporting to aid the inward and spiritual life. As a specimen of the author's quiet, unexaggerated style of writing, we give the following:

"Five years before the date of this story, the tidings had come that these children, now grouped in Mrs. Eden's dining-room, were orphans in a foreign land, and left almost totally unprovided for.

“The grandmamma's kind heart opened at once to receive the little ones, 'they must all come here,' she decided. Anna, a child herself, eagerly welcomed the idea; upon Harriet fell the burden of carrying out the plan. Mrs. Eden was not rich, her husband, the comparatively poor descendant of a once proud and wealthy family, had been able to leave her nothing but the house in which she lived, and an income sufficient to maintain her and her daughters in comfort, but not in luxury. To enable her to receive these new inmates of her home something must be given up; Harriet at once decided that if possible it should not be anything of which her mother would feel the loss; her own pleasures she had no hesitation in sacrificing. She had really a good deal in her power to resign, for her father, whose pride and darling she had been, had delighted to bestow on her comforts and advantages whose costliness she had never considered till now that she felt obliged to give them up. And give them up she did, voluntarily, ungrudgingly, without waiting for a hint or suggestion from any one. She sold her horse and dismissed her groom; she sent away her lady's maid, and began to occupy herself with needlework; she turned her study into a school-room and sold her harp; she put away her Greek and German, Painting and Poetry; and began to read up History and Geography, French and Latin Grammar, that she might be competent to teach her little nephews and nieces, and so save the expense of a governess. Her mother saw the daily sacrifices she made, thought them quite natural in the cause of poor Charles's children,' and would have proceeded to give up her own comforts in the same way if her daughter, by persuasion, argument, and

entreaty, had not prevailed on her to retain them. Harriet asked for no pity, made no complaint, and her conduct was taken as a matter of course by the rest of the family; they would only have been surprised if she had acted otherwise. Her brother William wrote her an affectionate letter, begged her to apply to him if she wanted anything, regretted that his French wife's preference for her own country obliged him to reside too far away to be any assistance to his mother in her new charge, and hinted that he should have been glad to have adopted his eldest nephew and niece, and brought them up with his own little girl, if Therèse would have consented to the plan.

"Only one person, her friend from childhood, understood the extent of the sacrifice she was making, and he to a certain degree shared in it, for these new duties of her's cut her off from him, and postponed the hopes he had formed concerning her to an indefinite future. This friend was Arthur Churchill. He opposed her plans by one of his own, a very generous if not a very feasible one, namely, that she should marry him at once, and that they should adopt all the children, and take them to live with them at Churchill Abbots. He refused to see a single objection to this scheme, but Miss Eden saw a great many. In the first place, she said it was not fair that he should be burdened with her relations; in the second, her mother would not have liked it; in the third, it would have greatly displeased all his friends, who were already annoyed at his intention of making so bad a match as 'that poor Miss Eden;' and in short she found so much to say against it, and was so determined to adhere to her own plan of remaining with her mother till Anna was old enough to take charge of the children, that King Arthur was reluctantly obliged to give it up, and make up his mind to an engagement of an indefinite length. And as he was not one of those people who, when disappointed in their own plans, will not lift a finger to help forward anyone else's, he proved the greatest support that Harriet Eden had in the task she had so unselfishly undertaken.

"And at first-there is no denying it-the task was a hard one; the children were most of them delicate; some of them wilful, and all of them very helpless, and accustomed to be over-indulged. Her mother, with a grandmamma's usual soft-heartedness, wanted to indulge them still more, and in opposing this, poor Harriet got a character for hard-heartedness which she little deserved. And she who had loved her mother truly and tenderly all her life, and soon began to love these children very much too, was at first misunderstood by both, and held up by her younger sister as a miracle of harshness. "She did not take refuge in self-pity; she did not set up for an unappreciated angel,' her humility saved her from this. She blamed her own deficiency in warmth of manner; she deplored her own impatience of idleness and stupidity; when the children were tiresome, she thought it might be because she did not manage them properly; when her very heart died within her with weariness and disappointment, she complained of no one, and blamed no one but herself.

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"She turned devoutly to a wisdom beyond her own; she asked for help where no one asks in vain: she made mistakes sometimes, as who does not? she was sometimes discouraged, as who would not have been? but she triumphed at last, upheld by faith and love."-Pp. 157-160.

There is no circumstance in the progress of Church-feeling which we regard with greater satisfaction, than the increased attention that is being paid to the ecclesiology of our cathedrals. In this good work the Dean of Ely certainly set the example, as far as regards the decoration of the edifice; and so soon as the importance of these noble fabrics was in this manner vindicated, the turning them to a profitable

use could not long be delayed. At the present time there is scarcely a cathedral which is not being employed to good purposes. Concurrently with such a fortunate change in the national appreciation of our cathedrals, it has followed almost necessarily that there should be a demand for better information respecting their architecture and history. The desideratum has been supplied by Mr. MACKENZIE WALCOTT, in his Guide to the Cathedrals of England and Wales. (London: Stanford.) The writer is well qualified for the task; and we recommend his little manual as admirably calculated to supersede the vulgar and extravagant local histories, with which every cathedral city abounds.

The Guide to the Church Services of London and its Suburbs, (Rivingtons,) is made specially interesting by a comparison with what was the state of things at the publication of the "Pietas Londinensis," in 1714. The Offices of the Church, it is sad to relate, are now said less frequently than they were in the last century. The weekly celebrations of the Holy Eucharist however have increased from 11 to 26.

It is a bold experiment for a Lady to write out from her Diary, and publish the Notes on men and things, which she has jotted down during her Summer Wanderings. (Masters.) This is what Miss RoSA RAINE has done; and as the Notes have already been subjected to criticism, in an abbreviated form in the pages of the "Churchman's Companion," she has had the opportunity of proving that they are acceptable to the public. The tone of them, we need scarcely say, is very good.

The Dial of Meditation and Prayer, (Masters,) is new to us, although it has reached a third edition. The idea is good, and the arrangement of subjects is skilfully done; but it is marred in the execution by extreme poverty of resources. No Prayers are given save what are found in the Book of Common Prayer; and consequently they have little or no suitableness to the event commemorated. Thus at the first hour of the evening we are taken to be with the disciples at Emmaus-and what does the reader suppose is the Devotion given ?the General Confession!

The Choral Service, by the Rev. W. R. WROTH, (J. H. Parker,) is another useful sermon, for which we are indebted to the Anniversary Festival of S. Peter's, Sudbury.

Emigration has found an earnest advocate in Captain PARKER SNOW, who has himself experienced almost all latitudes and climates. His pamphlet, entitled British Columbia, (Piper and Co.,) contains information on many Colonies besides this the last that has been organized, and is written in an earnest and Christian spirit. The pamphlet would have been the better for compression.

We are greatly pleased with the two new numbers of Mr. JACKSON'S admirable series for servants. The two parts of Grave and Gay, or Ellen and Leah, are even more valuable than the former tales we have noticed with commendation, inasmuch as they treat of that most difficult period of a servant's life, when her affections are apt to run counter to her duty. We should be glad to know that these tales were circulated in every household in the kingdom.

England under the Norman occupation, (Williams and Norgate,) is an attempt on the part of Mr. JAMES F. MORGAN, M.A., to give the results of a careful perusal of the Domesday survey. It is not a work which can be said to be of general interest, but for that reason all the more deserves acknowledgment at the hands of reviewers. The book is printed at Leipzig, and shows marks of good scholarship and accurate information.

The Rev. C. S. BIRD is not, we believe, an inexperienced writer, nor is he without ability; but if any one wishes to see an entire absence of depth in the appreciation of Holy Scripture, he will find an example of it in his Eve of the Crucifixion, (Wertheim). How any one who has ever studied his Bible can be content (to take a noticeable example) with such a commentary as is here given on the seventeenth chapter of S. John, is to us a perfect marvel. Nothing seems to dwarf the intellect like Evangelicalism.

Second Thoughts, we know, are often the opposite of First Thoughts, and so HENRY POWER, Incumbent of Farringdon, has done well to add to his Thoughts in the Fields, (Wertheim) a second title of Reflections on important Christian Doctrines. The subjects of the " Holy Trinity," "the Atonement," are undoubtedly important-so important that we should advise Mr. Power to "reflect" a little more deeply upon them, before he publishes any more of his sermons.

Messrs. Mozley, we are glad to see, have printed the able Article on "the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland," which appeared in the last Christian Remembrancer, as a separate Pamphlet. The Scotch Bishops seem bent, not only on ruining their own Church, but on bringing discredit upon freedom of Church action generally. Episcopal censures without moral influence are simply worthless.

THE BISHOP OF LONDON.

ONE of the disagreeable necessities thrown upon the literary representatives of the High Church party by the circumstances of the day is that of frequently commenting upon the conduct of those who hold the highest places in the Church. All our instincts are in favour of obeying and submitting to the opinions of those who are set over us,'-over clergy and laity alike-in the LORD, and all our desire is to follow those instincts while we possibly can do

so.

Yet, what are we to do, when we see Bishops acting so unjustly as some do now act, and pronouncing ex cathedrá opinions which are so alien to what the High Church party have always professed to believe as the true doctrine of the Church? Such novelties as now occur in the conduct and sayings of several of the Bishops almost take our breath away. Startling distortions of documentary authorities which hitherto have been considered to have but one meaning by every educated Churchman and Dissenter: direct contradictions of principles which have hitherto been thought to be the foundation of the Church system: positive denial of justice to clergymen who claim it on the ground that they are obeying the Prayer Book and the other laws of their Church: abusive personalities at interviews, and ungentlemanly sneers in letters-these things make us ask what are we coming to, and what strange spirit is it that has taken possession of these members of the Episcopal Order? Must public writers, must even the clergy themselves, be silent under such irresponsible tyranny and reckless perversion of principles? Must they, in deference to the taunt that they go with the Bishops only so long as the Bishops go with them, see justice refused time after time, and endeavours made to overthrow and suppress all that they hold important and precious; yes, and see religion itself, so far as man can go, subverted, and yet say not a word against one of our spiritual fathers?

It must be remembered that the highest writers in favour of Episcopal authority—at least on our side-have never gone so far as to assert that a Bishop can do no wrong. They have never assumed that it is impossible for a Bishop to be a misbeliever or a heretic. They have never assumed that it is a duty to offer implicit submission to any Bishop of the Church of England (or of the Church of Scotland either) who is deliberately trying to subvert the discipline of the ecclesiastical body to which he belongs. They have always, indeed, distinctly affirmed that it is one thing for a Bishop to claim unlimited authority for his own individual dicta, and quite another for him to give forth his dicta fortified by the consensus of his clergy assembled in synod: that the latter can claim very VOL. XX.-DECEMBER, 1858.

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