did not "administer the sacraments." But he was not a preacher, merely. He knew his people well, and was often in their homes, a radiant, joyful presence, and in their sorrow a voice of tender consolation. He worked hard in winter, but he knew how to rest in summer. He had a passion for the mountains and the sea. He was an untiring walker. He went abroad with geologic bag and hammer. He made up a cabinet of minerals, but his excursions brought him better things than these crystalline clearness for his thought, and images of beauty for its illustration.

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Early in his ministry at Lynn we find him working at certain Eastern Lectures,' which grew at length into the bulky volumes on the Religions of India and China, and that on Persia, uncompleted at his death, alas for him and for us! But these deeper studies did not obscure for him the concrete aspects of the time. The antislavery struggle was progressing, and no phase of it escaped his vigilance. The inadequacy of Mr. Longfellow's biography and the papers following is on this side of Johnson's character and work. It may be doubted whether the noblest passion of the time found upon any other lips a more lofty expression. Here and there in the let ters is a passage that brings back to us the man; his impassioned presence is again before us, and we hear his ringing words. For example, "Who shall dare be silent even for a day, while the nation is persecuting its prophets, and sending its saints to the scaffold, while the public conscience seems to be drugged and stifled almost beyond rousing; and to look with a kind of vacant unconcern upon insidious processes by which the national legislature is being turned into a court of inquisitorial powers, and the national judiciary into mere machinery for the swift destruction of inalienable liberties!"

In 1859 we find him and John Brown together, and a letter to Mr. Longiel

low gives the impression made upon the peace-loving preacher by the man of war. In 1860 he again visited Europe, this time with Mr. Longfellow for his companion. He was absent fifteen months. It was mainly a play-time, but some work was done. The Book of Hymns was made over into Hymns of the Spirit, in a damp chamber of the "Pension Besson," at Nice; and there, too, Johnson wrote several of his most beautiful devotional pieces.

Johnson's letters from Europe are delightful reading. Though often dealing with hackneyed themes, they do it always in his own manner. Returning to his work in Lynn and to his home in Salem, the old duality engrossed him, — political interests and Oriental studies. To the problems of reconstruction he brought the standard of ideal justice. But its application was no easy matter. Right or wrong, his opinions were always his own. His correspondence with various friends from this time onward, as before, takes form and color from everything that is most vital in the passing days,- questions of education and reform, the labor agitation, the advance of science and its criticism on his Transcendental doctrines. Ever an affluent correspondent, his letters show how various were his reading and his thought. Some of his most notable letters are addressed to R. H. Manning, a man of business and affairs, living in Brooklyn, N. Y., whose sturdy protests from the standpoint of science frequently put him on the defensive, but never dull the edge of his regard. In the particular results of science no one rejoiced more heartily than he, but he was not in the least disposed to exchange its standpoint for his own. To convict other men of atheism was never his delight. He much preferred finding essential theism implicated in their negations; and he could detect an earnest thinker, and admire him, under whatever mask. Thus, for the writings of John Morley he had

History and Biography. Studies in Church History, by Henry C. Lea (Henry C. Lea's Son & Co.), is an enlarged edition of the work published by the author in 1869. Mr. Lea then collected his papers on The Rise of the Temporal Power, Benefit of Clergy, and Excommunication, and has now added a chapter on the Early Church and Slavery. The larger part of his volume is a close study of the growth of worldliness within the church, and a most instructive examination of ecclesiasticism. It is, perhaps, rather for the student than for the general reader, but its worth lies in the severity of Mr. Lea's treatment, and his freedom from mere prejudice. The important series of Campaigns of the Civil War is to have a companion in The Navy in the Civil War (Scribners), the first volume of which is The Blockade and the Cruisers, by Professor J. R. Soley, of the Naval Academy. The treatment of the South is fair, and will do much to commend the book, and the author draws some conclusions pertinent to the present condition of affairs. — Letters to a Friend, by Connop Thirlwall, edited by Dean Stanley (Roberts), will give incidentally something of the life of a remarkable man. Bishop Thirlwall has not been a very familiar name to American readers, who have associated him chiefly with a little-read history of Greece, and it is to be hoped that Dean Stanley's introduction will do something to make him better known. Aside from its disclosure of the social side of the Bishop's life, the book is valuable as a stimulant to thought.. Dean Stanley himself appears in a volume of Recollections of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, by his successor at Westminster, George Granville Bradley (Scribners). Dean Bradley gives his reminiscences in the form of three lectures, a form very well adapted to the material, since he is speaking directly to friends of a friend. - The autobiography of James Nasmyth, edited by Samuel Smiles, to which we referred last month, has been issued by the Harpers, in cloth, as well as in the Franklin Square Library. The literature of ante-mortem biography has been increased by a volume upon Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet, littérateur, scientist, by W. S. Kennedy (S. E. Cassino & Co., Boston). Mr. Kennedy ingeniously quotes Dr. Holmes himself in defence of his work, by placing upon a fly-leaf the words, "It is an ungenerous silence which leaves all the fair words of honestly-earned praise to the writer of obituary notices and the marble-worker." We have become so used, however, to having the curtain drawn in famous houses from the outside that the appearance of such a book fails to make one feel so creepy as it once would. Mr. S. C. Hall's Retrospect of a Long Life (Appletons) covers the period from 1815 to 1883, and as Mr. Hall was a man of letters by profession, as he announces on the title-page, and connected with a great variety of literary enterprises, his work, which is in

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effect an autobiography, will be found very attractive to those who are already at home in modern English literature, and enjoy every new account of the persons who figured in it. There are four American reprints of Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, two by Scribner's Sons and two by the Harpers. The work is reviewed elsewhere in this magazine. Literature and Literary Criticism. The new volumes in the Riverside Hawthorne are the American Note-Books, and the French and Italian Note-Books, furnished like the previous ones with etchings and with preliminary notes by Mr. Lathrop. Selections from the Poetry of Robert Browning (Dodd, Mead, & Co.) is introduced by Mr. R. G. White, who gives an interesting account of the method of the selection, and adds some random criticism upon the poetry. He has done well in bringing forward the marvelous poem of Child Roland, which never seems to have received the attention which is its due. The selection seems weak only on the side of simple sentiment in such poems as Two in the Campagna. Living English Poets (Roberts) is a reissue of an English anthology published last Christmas, and devoted to a few poems, each from the leading current poet of England. "The poems are not always the greatest of the respective writers. Dr. Hake, for example, might better have been shown in his Old Souls, but probably considerations of space have had something to do with the selection. In the American edition Jean Ingelow is added, although no note is made of it. We wonder if the original preface does not therefore need correction. The anthology gives one a good chance to make a survey of current English verse. - American Humorists, by the Rev. H. R. Haweis (Funk & Wagnalls, New York), is a collection of lectures by a man without humor upon the extraordinary combination of Irving, Holmes, Lowell, Artemas Ward, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte. He seems to have resorted to the practice of chopping his lectures into fine bits, in a desperate attempt to make them look either witty or wise. - Chats about Books, by Mayo Williamson Hazeltine (Scribners), is a series of brief papers on poets and novelists, which appeared originally in the Sunday edition of the New York Sun. They are book notices of a liberal character, and though it is always agreeable to run one's eye over a group of books, as one can here do, we cannot say that we find any singular insight in Mr. Hazeltine's reviews. Libraries and Readers, by William E. Foster (Leypoldt), is a little volume which gathers the papers published first by the author in the Library Journal. They have an interest as the result of observation by an experienced librarian, and remind us again how valuable a person in the community is the librarian of the new school, who is no longer a mere custodian and cataloguer, but a real administrator of a public trust, and a friend and adviser of the ingenuous reader.

Education and Text-Books. The Diadem of School Songs, by William Tillinghast (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y.), contains songs and music for all grades of schools, a new system of instruction in the elements of music, and a manual of directions for the use of teachers. The same publisher adds to his dime question books one on Algebra, by Albert P. Southwick, and collects into one volume under the title of the Advanced Question Book, the ten books already published in the Dime series. The Harpers add to their Greek and Latin Texts the Libri Socratici of Xenophon. -The Board of Education of Cincinnati issue a volume containing for its first part the fifty-third annual report of the Board, and for the second part a hand-book for the school year, which contains, besides the rules and regulations, the courses of study, and examination papers.

Lexicography. The Imperial Dictionary in four volumes (The Century Company) comes not only with the weight of its own learning but with the promise of even more liberal scholarship in the future. The work is an English one, which has been bought by the Century Company for issue on this side of the water, and the publishers announce that they have engaged a competent body of American scholars to make the work the basis for an even more thorough and comprehensive dictionary. We welcome the book if for no other reason, because every fresh inventory of the English language reduces the tyranny of any one dictionary.

Political Science and Economy. Mr. F. W. Taussig, instructor in Political Economy in Harvard College, has published an interesting essay under the title of Protection to Young Industries, as applied in the United States. (Moses King, Cambridge.) The essay won the Toppan prize, and is a careful and interesting historical study.

The second part of the American Citizen's Manual, by Worthington C. Ford (Putnams), to which we have already referred, is devoted to the Functions of the Government, State and Federal, and escapes the danger of telling what these functions should be.

Theology and Biblical Criticism. Under the title of Sacred Scriptures of the World (Putnams), Rev. M. K. Schermerhorn has compiled, edited, and in part retranslated selections of the most de votional and ethical portions of the ancient Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, with kindred selec tions from other ancient Scriptures of the world. Mr. Schermerhorn hopes that his volume will be used in "churches, schools, and homes, or wherever else the devout and moral teachings of the world may be needed for purposes of religious inspiration or of ethical instruction." It is singular to see how bibliolatry prevails amongst men who most violently oppose what they would call bibliolatry. Old Testament Revision, by Alexander Roberts (Scribners), is a forerunner of the work of the Revision Committee. It does not proceed from that committee, but is the work of an independent scholar who has his own views as to what the revision should be. A Critique of Design Arguments, by L. E. Hicks (Scribners), is an his

torical review and free examination of the methods of reasoning in natural theology. Professor Hicks is a vigorous writer, who aims at reaching his result through a classification and criticism of previous works, especially those which still have influence on thought.

Science and Philosophy. The Alternative, a Study in Psychology (Macmillan), is a forcible presentation of the choice of automatism or conscious freedom in the philosophy of human nature. The writer, in spite of his devotion to a specific terminology, is one who clears the air. In his Philosophic Series Dr. McCosh has published a third number, Development: What it can do and What it cannot do. (Scribners.) He insists upon the inclusion of mental phenomena within any philosophy of development, but he refuses to find a sufficient explanation in physical processes. The Modern Sphinx and some of her Riddles, by M. J. Savage (George H. Ellis, Boston), is a series of examinations of current problems of life and philosophy. They are, so to speak, a preacher's editorials. The standpoint of the writer is one of extreme individualism. - Science in Short Chapters, by W. Mattieu Williams (Funk & Wagnalls, New York), is a popular treatment of all sorts of subjects in science, especially as related to human comfort and convenience. The chapters appear to have been originally newspaper essays.

Medicine and Hygiene. Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, by George F. Fort (J. W. Bouton, New York), is a contribution to the history of European morals, from the time of the Roman Empire to the close of the Fourteenth Century. It involves, of course, not medical science alone, as we now understand it, but the supernaturalism which pervaded medicine as well as all other departments of thought. It is a treasury of curious information. - Study and Stimulants, edited by A. Arthur Reade (Lippincott), is an en-, tertaining collection of notes upon the use of intoxicants and narcotics in relation to intellectual life, as derived chiefly from answers made by literary and scientific men to a circular letter asking questions. The final result reached is not very definite, but the reader will find amusement in the personal disclosures. It really seems as though the mention of wine had a somewhat weakening effect upon the intellect of some of these writers.

Alcoholic Inebriety from a Medical Standpoint, with Cases from Clinical Records, by Dr. Joseph Parrish (Blakiston), is a small volume drawn chiefly from a physician's own experience, and having a value through its reserve and freedom from generalizing. - Brain-Rest, by Dr. J. Leonard Corning (Putnams), is an amplification of the author's monograph, Carotid Compression and Brain-Rest. It will have an interest for people afflicted with insomnia. Insanity: its Causes and Prevention, by Henry Putnam Stearns, M. D. (Putnams), is a general work by a superintendent of a retreat for the insane, and while not devoid of interest to specialists is designed rather to give plain and sensible warnings and advice to all people who are interested in the subject.