14 FEBRUARY 1863, Page 20

The Lamps of the Church. By the Rev. Henry Clissold,

MA., Author of "Last Hours of Eminent Christians," Ake. (Riving-tons.)— Mr. Clissold is no friend to railway novels. He is pained at the eight of "those countless works of fiction which daily issue from the press, in their red and yellow attire, with their frequent appeals to the unhallowed passions of a fallen nature ;" and is anxious to replace this dangerous

class of literature by something equally attractive and considerably more edifying. With this object in view, he has compiled the volume before us, which consists of a collection of very alight biographical notices of a number of individuals, distinguished for eminent personal piety, who have died within about the last hundred years. Mr. Clissold, who laments the difficulty of abridging biographical memoirs, has solved the problem by the summary and effectual process of saying scarcely anything about the actual history of the subjects of his sketches, and confining himself almost entirely to their religious ex- periences.