The Autobiography and Reminiscences of William Macquarie Cowper. (Angus and
Robertson, Sydney.)—Dr. Cowper, who died last June, was Dean of Sydney for forty-four years. When he was laid aside from active life in his eighty-eighth year he began to put together what we find in this volume, to write, that is, a Life of his father, and to tell the story of his own life. Tho two together cover nearly a century. William Cowper the elder landed at Sydney on August 18th, 1809; William Cowper the younger was born in the following year. Governor Macquarie was then in office. Some time after he inaugurated the system of "tickets-of-leave" and "conditional pardons," and Mr. Cowper had the responsibility of distributing them. "As I write this," says the Dean, "there rises up before me a scene which I often witnessed in front of the parsonage in Gresham Street. I see before me a number of persons of both sexes standing before the gate, with their written applications in their hands, ready to be handed in to my father for his examination and testimonial." It is a long step from that to the Sydney of to-day. And a long step also from the scanty establishment of the three or four Government chaplains of that time to the Church organi- sation of the present, ruled by a Metropolitan, with no less than nine suffragans. (The Dean expresses a very natural disapproval of the arrangement by which a roving Primacy, so to speak, is established ; it may belong for the time to any one of the three Sees of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.) It is to Church affairs that Dean Cowper gave the prominent place in his recollections, and his account of them will be of no little use to the historian of the future. It cannot be called a striking narrative, and it is remarkably devoid of illustration and anecdote. But it has the merit of kindliness and candour. The Dean was an observant witness of what went on, taking himself an important part in affairs, as long as his strength held out, and he records what he saw and thought in a way that invites confidence.
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