Episcopate of the Right Reverend Frederick Barker, D.D., Bishop of
Sydney. (Hatchards.)—This book, which is otherwise described as " A Memoir, edited by William M. Cowper, M.A.," is an unpre- tentious and painstaking account of the career in Australia of Dr. Barker, who was Bishop of Sydney from 1854 to his death in 1882, at the age of seventy-four. We do not get much, and, indeed, Mr. Cowper does not pretend to give much, about the private life of his friend and chief, although he seems to have been a kindly, loveable man, thoroughly happy in his domesticity. Mr. Cowper rather tells the story of Dr. Barker's work as an actively organising ecclesiastic belonging to the Evangelical party. No doubt this
narrative, which is occasionally too detailed, of visitations and charges, even when varied by controversies on such an im- portant subject as education, is intended more for Colonial and clerical than for English or lay readers. Nor can it be said that Dr. Barker figures in these pages as either a very pro- found thinker or as a great ecclesiastic. But "the High Priest," as he was on account of his stature pleasantly nicknamed by his English friends, was, we should say, a model Colonial Bishop so far as untiring industry is concerned, and his life is deserving of study and imitation. For Bishop Barker, although one of the least combative of men at heart, could stand up for his Church when he thought its rights endangered, as when it was proposed to deprive it of its lands. This book contains an excellent picture of the difficulties the Church of England has to surmount in such a Colony as Australia.
We have had already occasion to speak of the first and second volumes of Mr. Punch's Victorian Era (Bradbury, Agnew, and Co.), so that we need only say of the third that it covers the period bstween 1876 and the termination of the Jubilee celebrations in 1887, including, therefore, one great European war, three General Elections in Great Britain, the occupation of Egypt, the deaths of, among others, Gambetta and Lord Beaconsfield, and the rise—and exit—of Lord Randolph Churchill. This volume contains a por- trait of Mr. Burnand, and a general index to the whole work which, so far as we have tested it, is satisfactory.
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