we trust to
have a continuation of it which may show a restraining influence
exercised with kindness and tact, such as were so often exerted by the
author for the benefit of his friends.

The Life and Work of William Augustus Muhlenberg. By Anne
Ayres. New York: Harper & Brothers.

There could not well be a stronger contrast than between the subject of
this book and that of the one just noticed. We have called Mr. Wikoff a
model idler, and with at least equal truth we may call Dr. Muhlenberg a
model worker, not because he was unremitting and methodical in labor or
because his work was his delight, but because it was consecrated by a
devoted singleness of purpose and crowned by the noblest achievements.
The life of the founder of St. Luke's Hospital and St. Johnland, as
exhibited in this faithful record, has the simplicity and grandeur of an
antique statue, and in the contemplation of it the marvel of its rare
perfection grows, till we are half inclined to ask whether it, too, be
not some relic of the remote past rather than a product of our own age.
Saintly purity, unbounded beneficence, intense earnestness and
great-hearted liberality of sentiment were never more symmetrically
blended than in the character of "the great presbyter," whose
ministrations were neither inspired nor confined by any narrower dogma
than "that love to man, flowing from love to God," which, as he himself,
with no lack of humility, said, "had been their impulse." It has been
justly observed that "he was eminently the common property of a common
Christianity," and not less truly that "there is, and ever will be, more
of Christian charity in the world because Dr. Muhlenberg has lived in it
as he did." He was perhaps not a man of extraordinary intellect, but his
singularly healthy mind, with its union of resoluteness and candor,
sound sense and lively fancy, gave the needed counterpoise to his moral
qualities, keeping his enterprises within the domain of the useful and
the practical, and thus saving him from the disappointments that too
often checker the career of the philanthropist. This biography, written
from long and intimate knowledge and admirable alike in spirit and
execution, will find, we may trust, a multitude of readers among members
of all sects and those who belong to none. Its interest is of a far more
absorbing kind than any that can be excited by gossip or anecdote. It is
that of a vivid portraiture, in which nothing cha