The Witch of Atlas. By H. Park Bowden. (Sampson Low
and Co.)—" A ballooning story" is certainly a novelty. Never before, we fancy, in fiction—not to speak of real life—has the heroine made the acquaintance of the hero by descending in a balloon upon the fishing-smack where he was recreating himself by a night with the herrings ; never before has a hero showed his devotion by treating himself as ballast and throwing himself out of a balloon-car to check its too precipitate descent. The author deserves so much credit, and something also for the ingenious thought of utilising the balloon experiences of the siege of Paris. When we have said this, and added that the story is fairly well written, and that it is wholly void of offence, we have gone as far as possible.
Two books of devotion may be mentioned together. Come ye Apart, by the Rev. J. R. Miller, D.D. (Nelson and Sons) is a volume of "Daily Readings in the Life of Christ,"—a series, that is, of meditations on texts taken in sequence from the Gospels, which are arranged for the purpose in what may be described as an informal harmony. From the same publishers we also receive a fitting companion for the above, Gloria Petri: a Book of Private Prayer for Morning and Evening, by J. R. Macduff, D.D.
Dr. Edersheim's Jesus the Messiah (Longmans) has been pub- lished in an abridged form, under the joint care of one of his children, whose name is not given, and Professor Sanday, who writes the preface. "No one else," he very truly says, "has pos- sessed such a profound and masterly knowledge of the whole Jewish background to the picture presented in the Gospels,—not only of the archteology, which is something, but of the essential characteristics of Jewish thought and feeling, which is far more." The work of abridgment has been done, in the first instance, by a son or daughter of Dr. Edersheim, and revised by Professor Sanday. It was inevitable, of course, that something should be lost in the process; but we have an accessible volume of sterling value.
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