have taken a hint from the lawyer who charged Fathom with three hundred and fifty attendances, of which the explanation was that "he had incurred the penalty of three shillings and fourpence for every time he chanced to meet the conscientious attorney, either in the park, the coffee-house, or the street, provided they had exchanged the common salutation." That the Eolian Harp was an invention of Smollett's time may not be generally known, and it is curious to read that there was at the middle of the eighteenth century scarcely "one physician of note in this kingdom who had not derived the greatest part of his medical knowledge from the instruction of foreigners." Gambling was, of course, at its height, and there was nothing future about which people of fashion would not bet.

The whole mystery of the art was reduced to the simple exercise of tossing up a guinea and the lust of laying wagers, which they indulged to a surprising pitch of ridiculous intemper

London Times.

ance. In one corner of the room might be heard a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other -that is, betting sums on the longest liver; in another the success of the wager depended upon the sex of the landlady's next child; and one of the waiters happening to drop down in an apoplectic fit, a certain noble peer exclaimed, "Dead for a thousand pounds." The challenge was immediately accepted; and when the master of the house sent for a surgeon to attempt the cure, the nobleman who set the price upon the patient's head insisted upon his being left to the efforts of nature alone, otherwise the wager should be void. Nay, when the landlord harped upon the loss he should sustain by the death of a trusty servant, his lordship obviated the objection by desiring that the fellow might be charged in the bill.

We do not recommend "Ferdinand Count Fathom" for example of life or instruction of manners. But if Dickens had not read it, we might have missed some of the choicest pieces of humor in the English language.

Three Wordsworth books are announced by Mr. Henry Frowde, chief among them being "Poems and Extracts, Chosen by William Wordsworth for an Album presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christmas, 1819," printed literally from the original, with facsimiles, an introduction by Professor H. Littledale, and a preface by Mr. J. Roger Rees. The other Wordsworth items announced by Mr. Frowde are "Wordsworth's Literary Criticism in Prose," with an introduction by Mr. Nowell C. Smith, and "Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes," with an introduction by Mr. E. de Selincourt.

Mr. William Henry Johnson of Cambridge, who has done some admirable work in popularizing the fruits of historical research, has departed from the graver walks of history for those of historical romance. He has written a novel of the period of the Huguenot settlement in Florida, the foundation of Port Royal and the savage attack thereon by the Spaniards, and the French expedition which went out to take revenge upon the Spaniards. These were stirring times, and they furnish background and incidents for romance of which little use has been made hitherto. Herbert B. Turner & Co. are to publish Mr. Johnson's book.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron,

(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) will be generally accepted as final. To begin with, it is actually complete. All that Byron wrote in verse,-good, bad and indifferent, noble, puerile and vicious,the whole mass of his poetical product is here. The text was ready several years ago, but publication was withheld in order to include the new material contained in the new sevenvolume English edition, edited by Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Mr. Paul Elmer More, who edits the Cambridge edition, has compared every line of it with the Coleridge edition, and has made use of corrections based on the manuscripts which are accessible to Mr. Coleridge. But not only is the text complete, and edited and annotated with painstaking care, but it is presented with such typographic attractiveness that, although it fills more than a thousand double-columned pages, the book is not cumbersome to hold and the page is a delight to read.

Messrs. Macmillan have arranged with Professor Saintsbury for the publication, in three volumes, of "A History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day." The first volume, which it is hoped to publish next year, is nearly completed, and covers the period from the origins to Spenser. The treatment in the text will be a strictly historical survey of the verse forms in all important poets and poems, minor as well as major, with copious illustrations and justificatory extracts at the page-foot. There will be summaries at the end of each sub-period; and appendices in some number at the end of each volume will deal with general points, such as the principal metres, rhyme, alliteration, &c. In the two later volumes it is intended to make the history and discussion of previous prosodic theories an important feature.

From one point of view, and that not the least important, the history of the Christian religion is a chronicle of its revivals. The Church of Christ was born in a time of revival, and from revival to revival seems to be the law of its growth. For these times of the awakening and re-quickening of religious life are not peculiar to any one of the many divisions of the Christian Church; they belong to all-Greek, Roman or Reformed. They have not been confined to one generation. Every age and every century of the Christian Church has experienced them, has seen them come unexpectedly, unobtrusively, almost imperceptibly in their first beginnings, has watched them grow in intensity and spread out on all sides no one knows how, has noted them die down and pass away. What is more, they have all a family likeness in whatever branch of the Church they arise and whether they have come in ancient, mediæval or modern times. They have all strongly marked common characteristics which make them akin to each other and different from everything else. They take a local coloring without doubt. They take on the tints of time and place as everything on earth must do, from a scientific theory to an old stone wall or a workman's jacket; but they are nevertheless always the same and are the most unchanging embodiment of the religious spirit. The simple institutions of the Primitive Church have grown in course of time into gorgeous ceremonials. Its lack of organization has given place to elaborate polities. Every portion of Christian theology is the marriage of an immortal with a mortal; for the living revelation of God through His Word and Spirit must be represented in some form of human

thought which changes with the generations, grows old and dies-perishing with the using. But the revival is always the same. Space and Time, so potent over all things human, seem powerless to change it. What it was

in Achaia in the first century, or in Italy in the thirteenth, or in the Rhineland in the fourteenth, or in England in the eighteenth, it is in Wales to-day.

In St. Paul's first letter to the Christians of Corinth we have the earliest recorded account of the meetings of the Primitive Church for public worship, and they describe scenes common to revival meetings in every age. I have endeavored elsewhere to piece together the scattered sentences of the Apostle and reconstruct a picture of these earliest Christian meetings, and may be permitted to reproduce it here for the sake of comparison.1

St. Paul introduces us to a company of men and women full of subdued emotion which might easily become unrestrained. The silence is broken by invocations of the name of Jesus and confessions of His Lordship over their hearts and over all things. Suddenly one begins to pray; then another and another; and each prayer is followed by a hearty and fervent "Amen." Some one starts a hymn; then another and another; for several of the brethren have composed or selected hymns at home which they wish to be sung in the congregation.

We give Thee thanks, O Lord God, the
Almighty,

Which art and which wast;
Because Thou hast taken Thy great
power and did'st reign.
And the Nations were wroth,

1 "The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries," pp. 44 ff., where the references for what follows will be found in the notes.