3 FEBRUARY 1912, Page 25

James Fraser, Laird of Brea. By the Rev. Principal Whyte,

D.D. (Oliphant, Anderson and Fortier. 2s. 6d. net.)—James Fraser (1639-1(398) was a Scottish minister and a fervent Covenanter who suffered many things—imprisonment at the Bass Rook among them—for his faith. He left a record of hie spiritual experiences, a book which Dr. Whyte describes as standing "empty un- paralleled and unapproached for intricacy, and sincerity, and complication, and reticulation, and involution." For this reason, we suppose, we do not get here so much of James Fraser's Memoirs as of Dr. Whyte's interpretation of them. There are twenty-eight chapters, which we suppose to have been originally so many sermons. In some of them, we imagine, there is more of Dr. Whyte than of James Fraser. In xi., " Silent Prayers,' Fraser does not, so far as we can detect, appear at all. There are many good things in the book, an appreciation, among them, of Samuel Rutherford. But we do not quite know why the book is entitled "James Fraser, Laird of Brea," and, in spite of our admiration of Dr. Whyte, we must own to a certain sense of disappointment.