Jourmas of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols.
(Macmillan and Co. 10s.)—Although these volumes follow Professor Knight's edition of Wordsworth's works, they are not numbered consecutively, and will therefore be welcome in many libraries which do not need a new edition of the poetry. The Journals are now published for the first time in a complete and satisfactory form. Principal Shairp, it may be remembered, edited in 1874 the "Recollections of a Tour in Scotland," and some of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals were included in Mr. Knight's "Life of Wordsworth," but all that she wrote, with the exception of trifles not worth recording, is now brought together in these volumes. The literary as well as familiar services ren- dered to her brother are visible on every page. She did indeed give him, as he said, eyes and ears, and "love and thought and joy," and in the Journals we read also the influence she exercised on Coleridge. Apart, however, from their connection with two great poets, these diaries possess an interest not easily to be exaggerated, and they make it evident, we think, that had Dorothy Wordsworth been less devoted to her rather exacting brother, she might herself have made a conspicuous name in literature.
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