SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Under this heading lee notice such Books of the week as have not been reserved for renew in other forms.] Forty Years in a Moorland Parish. By the Rev. J. C. Atkinson. With Prefatory Memoir. (Macmillan and Co. 5s. net.)—This work was first published in 1891 (reviewed in the Spectator, May 9th, 1891), and was reprinted four times in that and the following year. It now appears with a memoir of the author (who died in 1900), very appropriately written by Mr. G. A. Macmillan, " but for whom," as the author put it in his dedication, " these pages would not have been written." The "Moorland Parish" was Danby.in.Cleveland, and Mr. Atkinson held it for fifty-three years. More than four-fifths of that time had passed when, in his seventy-seventh year, he set about writing this work, one which, as his biographer well puts it, "is a book not only to make Denby men love their parish, but Englishmen love England." Mr. Atkinson was anything but a Dryasdust. He was not an antiquarian parson of that kind which is not interested in a parishioner till he has been dead for at least a century. The living man was always the first among his many interests in the past and the present. No small addition has been made to the value of an excellent book by the admirable picture which Macmillan has given us of its author. He had his reward in the love of his people, visibly shown by restoring after his death the parish church in which he had ministered so long. Other rewards were, more Anglicans, of the slenderest. The income of his benefice was about £150. After more than forty years of service he was honoured with a canonry of the laudatur et alget kind, and for the last two years of his life a Civil List pension of £100 enabled him to obtain the help of a curate.
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