CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Thorough Business Man : Memoirs of Walter Powell. By Ben- jamin Gregory. (Strahan.)—Mr. Powell was born in England, and taken in early infancy to Van Diemen's Land. In this colony he began com- mercial life, but removed in early manhood to Melbourne, and finally from that place returned to England, though keeping up his business connection with Australia for some years. In London, he died before he had completed his forty-sixth year. Into this short life he seems to have crowded as much activity, bodily, mental, and spiritual, as would suffice for many ordinary existences. He conducted a large business with energy and success; ho took an active part in the affairs of his own religious community, the Wealeyans ; and he busied himself with good works. The line cf these good works was benevolence rather than philanthropy. And he did not do them in any sort of way by deputy ; he took the trouble to do them well, in the right way, and to the right persons. His biographer properly thinks that the life of s man of this kind, a man who was also possessed with the strongest religious feeling—he was one of the class who can fix the hour of their conversion—and who at the same time showed the shrewdest perception and the most prompt activity in all matters of business, was a valuable study of character. If we differ in some degree from the view which he takes of it, it is not from want of a sincere ad- miration for the subject of his work. But we cannot think that the "journal in eleven folio volumes which makes us familiar with his spiritual history" is a symptom of a perfectly healthy life, and we must confess ourselves to be among those to whom " this intense and per- sistent self-scrutiny seems prodigious." At the same time, we must acknowledge the force with which the biographer remarks, "Let them call it morbid who can match its healthy and robust results." One re- sult, however, as he seems to acknowledge, was a shortened life. But years so spent must not be measured by their length. The question is
too large for us to deal with here ; let our readers study it with this book before them.
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