but lends itself only too easily to ridicule. What could
be more judicious than the remark that " Every home should have some musical instrument ? " Why not have followed it up by the sugges- tion that if you can have but one, you should have a piano, instead
of the somewhat silly remark that there " are instruments to suit all tastes and occasions,—the trumpet for the soldier, &c ? " Would one offer a military friend who happened to call, a trumpet, as an appro- priate instrument ? It is well to recommend a certain attention to dress, but is it well to enforce it by these curiously infelicitous sentences P—" Young men often lose situations for which they apply, through inattention to dress. This is more particularly so in the case of young women." An indiscretion of another kind is the ranking of a glass of beer and a pipe of tobacco with manifest vices, such as gambling and the like. About books there are some sensible remarks, but here also there are things which make one doubt whether all Mr. Pearson's information is first-hand, and whether he always knows precisely what be means. " Scholarly " is not exactly the epithet which we should apply to Burnet's "History of the Reformation," a book which is now superseded. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity " is certainly "philosophical," but we should hardly class it with " histories." Possibly, it is only our ignorance that puzzles us, when we are told that an Independent may know everything about his spiritual ancestors by consulting the laborious " volumes of Dr. Waddington." We know Waddington's " History of the Greek Church," but there was no one less likely than the late Dean of Durham to write about the spiritual ancestors of Independents.
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