4 JUNE 1864, Page 22

and Co.)—Eight lectures bound into a volume and called "Work

and Play" because the first essay is on that subject. The author had much better have named his book, after the very happy description he gives of his second essay, "Secular Sermons." How far they were made endurable by a happy delivery we know not. As essays they are decidedly tedious, and show nothing but a remarkable knack of talking fluently round a subject. Nor does it increase the reader's faith in Dr Bushnell to find that he imagines that the Hanseatic League consisted of "the four commercial cities," of Germany—probably meaning free cities, and even then being quite inaccurate—and also that "the noble Rienssi perished a martyr to liberty" in the Inquisition at Avignon.