Ephemera. By Lord Lyttelton, (John Marray.)—A. miscellaneous volume of speeches,
pamphlets, lectures, and letters, many of which have been published before. Such volumes do not seem to deserve much favour, but Lord Lyttelton has at least the courage to publish his occasional writings as he wrote them, even to the " opinions, anticipa- tions, suggestions, which precarious when made, have been proved futile by the course of events." There has always seemed to us some- thing particularly petty about publishing a book of this sort, so as to get a spurious reputation for foresight by preserving all your lucky hits and suppressing all your blunders. As to the political division of this volume, essays on bygone colonial and educational questions are not attractive, but Lord Lyttelton always writes with good sense on these, as on ecclesiastical topics. Of course he approaches the latter from a High-Church point of view, but still a common-sense one. He even defends the pew system, not as it exists in fact, but in law. The pre- tension of the rich to make pews an appendage to their houses is un- tenable,—but would the poor like the open-bench system better than their superiors ? And the sense of the dogma one so often hears—that in a church all distinctions of rank ought to cease—we never could understand. If they are un-Christian, how can they be justified out of church ?—if not, why are they wrong in church ? Of the literary papers we note one on the Rev. Sydney Smith with pleasure, and one on the death of the Prince Consort with pain. It never should have been exhumed from the Bagley Parochial Magazine.
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