CURRENT LITERATURE.
Wives, Mothers, and Sisters in the Olden Time. From French, Italian, and Latin authors. By Lady Herbert. 2 vols. (Bentley.)—The aim of Lady Herbert in these handsome, coroneted volumes is truly beyond all praise, namely, to set before the women of the present day thsir " great apostolate, and the immense work each and all might do for God, if they would." The translations are, in fact, the lives, or rather devotional writings about the lives, of Paula, friend of St. Jerome, Olympias, friend of St. Chrysestom, and Marcellina, sister of St. Ambrose. All these holy persons and their biographers extol the estates of virginity and widowhood, in strains always rapturous and ocoasionally mawkish. We fear that this unfair depreciation of a third "holy estate" may teed, in the eyes of those to whom these pages are primarily addressed, to lessen the force of the examples, and, perchance, of Lady Herbert's practical remarks and Bishop Dupanloup's eloquent warnings in the pre- faces. The blemishes of the work are, the undue emphasis continually laid upon the high birth and noble alliances of most of the eompany we are introduced to, arid its emotional and ecstatic style. Considering that the manifold perfections of nearly everybody are copiously enlarged upon, it is quite refreshing to come upon an account of St. Gregory of Nazianzen having been unavoidably prevented from attending a wedding by so very mundane a cause as a bad fit of the gout. (Vol. H., p. 137.)
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