31 MARCH 1894, Page 26

Religious Thought in Old English Verse. By the Rev. C.

S. Abbey. (Sampson Low, Marston, and Co.)—This volume has an aim of its own which it would not be easy to find attempted elsewhere. It is, in short, a history of English religious poetry from Caedmon down to the end of the last century, including naturally sundry writers, as Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, who lived a consider- able way into the nineteenth. Purely nineteenth-century writers —writers, that is, manifestly influenced by nineteenth-century influences, as Keble—are not included. The book is one of con- tents so varied, and ranging over so large a province of literature, that we cannot attempt to give more than this general account of it. Mr. Abbey is as well acquainted as any man with the religious literature of the eighteenth century, and he has extended his studies with excellent effect into earlier times. His volume may be commended without reserve.