Quaker Worthies. By W. Garrett Horder. (Headley Brothers.) —The "
worthies " celebrated in Mr. Horder's little volume are John Woolman, Amelia Opie, Bernard Barton, and John G. Whittier. The sketches, which are slight, have the interest which a writer thoroughly interested in his subject rarely fails to produce. Mr. Horder explains that he is not a " Friend," but may be permitted to reckon himself " a Nonconforming member of their honoured Society, to use Dean Stanley's well-known phrase." Woolman, who was reverenced by Coleridge and by Lamb, is not, we think, so little known in the present day as Mr. Horder would seem to imply. His Journal, with the poet Whit- tier's introduction, was republished in this country several years ago, and an admirable "study" of the Quaker Saint from the pen of the Rev. Thomas Green did much, probably, towards making him as well known as a man of so singular a character is ever likely to be. Canon Ainger, it must be admitted, has not done Woolman justice in his few words of description. He was, no doubt, "an illiterate tailor," who had "misgivings about the institution of slavery," but his originality of character and saintliness of life mark him off distinctly from the mass of religious men whose friends bury them a second time in bio- graphies. In a book so small as this, errors are inexcusable. The satirist who wrote under the nom de plume of Peter Pindar was not Dr. Waller; Cowper wrote no letters to Lady Herbert ; Sydney Smith had not two ways of spelling his Christian name; and Capel Loffit was unknown to Bernard Barton, who is said to have consulted him. We may add that Mr. Horder's ignorance of the Church of England does not excuse his lack of charity and of taste in sneering at English Bishops as men "who talk much about the cross but rarely touch it with their jewelled hands."
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