There is a good deal of honest thinking and good
writing in the new number of the Church Quarterly Review, but it suggests too much the idea of a collection of long and belated reviews of books. Thus there is no questioning the good taste displayed by the critic of Mr. Prothero's biography of Arthur Stanley, although his theological standpoint is not the same as the Dean's, and the paper on the "Letters of James Russell Lowell" could not well have been more sympathetic. But both are too old and too strictly confined to their subjects. There is life in other papers, such as "Mr. St. George Mivart on The Happiness in Hell" and "The Primitive Saints and the See of Rome;" but it is to some extent polemical life. "Au English Princess at the Court of Louis XIV " gives a pleasant sketch of Henrietta of Orleans, and a criticism of Professor Vinogradoff's remarkable work on villainage in England suggests many things,—among others that we greatly need an authoritative work on the history of English law. The short notices of all sorts of books in the Church Quarterly Review axe remarkably well done. But, consider- ing the circumstances of the time, ought not the longer essays in such a periodical as this to be contributions, not so much to ordinary and, therefore, evanescent criticism, as to permanent literature 7
Previous page
