Life of George Maxwell Gordon. By Arthur Lewis. (Seeley and
Co.)—This is a plain history of a manly, simple-minded missionary, who laboured at his own charges for the Church Missionary Society a short time in South India, and for about six years in the Punjab. The chief interest of the book lies in the fact that most of that period he lived almost "as an Anglo-Indian fakir," dispensing with horses and servants, and all such comforts and luxuries as are apt to cause " a separation between the missionary and the natives of India." We are, however, told very little of the results of this self-denial, and can hardly gather whether he thus won his way into the hearts of the natives more than other missionaries. Some in- teresting chapters are devoted to Persia, which Gordon visited during the famine in 1871, and of which his journal gives an extremely miserable account. The only redeeming feature, and that a poor one, seems to have been a sort of beauty in the distant aspect of some of the towns. For instance, he says that "the first view of Shiraz through a gap in the mountains is very striking. It looks like a beautiful mosaic framed in the rocks. There is a line of tall dark cypresses in the foreground, over which rise the walls of the fortress, surmounted by two pear-shaped cupolas encased in a bright green and blue enamel, which shines in the sun like turquoise. The Persians are very fond of colour, and they paint all over the gateways of their cities, the front of their houses, and the walls of their rooms with designs of more or less taste." At the end of 1878, and again in 1880, Gordon marched with the British troops to Candahar, acting both as Army Chaplain and as pioneer missionary to the Afghans; and during the siege of Candahar he lost his life, being shot as he bravely ventured outside the city under a heavy fire to bring in some wounded men.
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