"THE IMITATION OF CHRIST."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." J SIR,—In reviewing the new translation of Thomas b. Kempfs's -" Imitation of Christ," you say : "We do not remember any praise of it from the pen of any distinguished English writer." Surely you must have forgotten chap. iii. in the Fourth Book of"The Mill on the Floss," entitled "A Voice from the Past," containing the following beautiful sentence :—" I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness : while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph,—not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations : the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and re- nounced—in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and
with a fashion of speech different from ours—but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weari- ness." The "small old-fashioned book" is Thomas k Kempis's
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