Old Friends and What Became of Them. By Rev. J.
B. Owen, M.A. (Nisbet and Co.)—In this small volume the incumbent of St. Jude's, Chelsea, has given to the public a collection of reminiscences of one of his old schoolmasters and several of his fellow-pupils. His sketches are not very amusing; but their moral tone is excellent. They are, moreover, very fairly written ; though a few slight objections might
possibly be urged against Mr. Owen's style by a very sensitive critic. He displays, for instance, an occasional inability to resist the tempta- tion of making very small jokes. This weakness leads him to observe, when speaking of an ill-conditioned friend of his who devoted himself to railways, that " the rails had a fellow-feeling with the corroding railer," and that " the greatest bore on the line was not its longest tunnel." It induces him, further, to invest his dramatis personce with symbolic names—to call a lad who is fond of low company, Charlie Low- tone ; his overbearing railway friend, Bullielaw ; his preceptor (with a subtle allusion to the birch), Broomielaw ; and so on. And what are we to make of a set of boys whose ponderous diversions are described in the following appropriate language?—" They invented literary games with etymologies and genealogies, as if the ancestry of men and of their words was a cognate inquiry. The synchronization of the pursuit of both relieved the monotony of the less interesting of the two."
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