Gray Days and Gold. By William Winter. (D. Douglas, Edin-
burgh.)—This little volume, intended as a companion to the author's " Shakespeare's England," is very pleasant reading; to an Englishman it is positively flattering. Mr. Winter is abso- lutely enthusiastic about our country. So lovely is it, that it can never be seriously disturbed by change. " Democracy is rife all over the world, but it will as soon impede the eternal course of the stars as it will change the constitution or shake the social fabric of this realm." Mr. Winter visited various homes of great Englishmen,—Stoke Poges and Laleham, for instance, Warwick and Wordsworth's country, York, Hucknall-Torkard, the burial- place of Byron, Lichfield, Stratford-on-Avon, and others. By Matthew Arnold's grave at Laleham, we find him sneering at " creeds and superstition " in a way that Arnold himself would have thought wanting in " edification ; " but this is almost the only jarring utterance in the book. As a whole, it is all that could be wished. We observe a curious mistake in the chapter on York. " The river Ouse—Cowper's ' Ouse,' slow winding through its level plain—divides the city of York." " Cowper's Ouse " is far away. Mr. Winter, on the journey which he describes by the Great Northern Railway, had crossed it some hundred and fifty miles to the south. The inscriptions quoted on pp. 177-78 show errors which, of course, may be due to the lapidary. We have " imitate " for "imitare," " prtepositor " for " prrepositus," and " coruente " for " corruente," while the punctuation is very vague.
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