From Sinner to Saint. By John Burn Bailey. (Chapman and
Hall.)—Mr. Bailey, in the introduction to his volume of short biographical sketches, or " gallery" of converted sinners, has done well to explain that the terms " Sinner " and " Saint " are capable of a very wide interpretation. A calendar of the latter, which contains Nell Gwynne, Sir John Popham, and the Rev. William
Dodd, may cc-me with somewhat of a shock to his readers, while, considering the stamp of some of the sinners, many will regret to
see John Bunyan catalogued among them merely as "Blaspheming Tinker," in respect to his early career. The sketches, eleven in number, are clearly and briefly given, and the author has avoided the irritating tendency, so common among those who write to inculcate a moral lesson, of trying to give their story a fictitious interest by dwelling on irrelevant details ; but his book would have gained in dignity and refinement had he resisted the tempta- tion to give it a fictitious attraction by the sensational headings to the chapters. Readers to whom such inducements as the fol- lowing,—" From Highwayman to Lord Chief Justice," "From a Coal-Heaver's Yard to a West-End Pulpit," &c.,—are held out, may be disappointed in the soberly and earnestly-written little biographies. They will be appreciated by those who take a genuine interest in what Mr. Bailey calls "character-transformations," or rather, in the facts of those lives in which such transformations have manifested themselves, for the writer has not ventured beyond the facts.
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