rk. Altogether
the romance must be classed among the best which have appeared during
the last twenty years.

_Lessons in Life_. A Series of Familiar Essays. By TIMOTHY TITCOMB. New
York: Charles Scribner, 16 mo.

Who is more popular than honest Timothy? Opening this, his latest
volume, we read on, a fly-leaf fronting the title-page that twenty-six
editions of the "Letters to Young People," fifteen editions each of
"Bitter-Sweet" and "Gold Foil," and thirteen editions of "Miss Gilbert's
Career" have gone the way of all good books. The author says, in his
modest preface to the "Lessons," that he can hardly pretend to have done
more than to organize and put into form the average thinking of those
who read his books, and be only claims for his essays that they possess
the quality of common sense. He herein pays a very high compliment to
the crowd which demands over the bookseller's counter so many thousands
of his volumes. Wisdom, admirably put, is not a commodity glutting the
market every day. We find in the pages of this new venture so many
healthy maxims and so much excellent advice, that we hope the volume
will spread itself farther and wider than any of its predecessors. This
wish fulfilled will give it no mean circulation. "The Ways of Charity,"
one of the papers in this volume, ought to be printed in tract form, and
scattered broadcast everywhere. And there are other articles in the book
quite as good as this.

_English Sacred Poetry of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and
Nineteenth Centuries._ Selected and edited by ROBERT ARIS WILLMOTT, M.A.
Illustrated by Holman Hunt, John Gilbert, and others. London: Routledge
& Co. 4to.

Mr. Willmott has considerable reputation for judgment and taste as a
compiler. He knows a good poem afar off, and his chief pleasure seems
to lie in reproducing from old books the excellent things that time has
spared to us. His last contribution to the stock of elegant volumes is
this very handsome book of English Sacred Poetry. The illustrations are
by no means equally good, but the majority of them are satisfactory.
Delicious bits of English landscape scenery peep out along the pages, as
one turns the leaves of this beautiful collection. An old village church
rising among the graves of centuries, a bird's-nest snug and warm in the
boughs of a mossy tree, a group of old-time worshippers gathered on the
grass, a brook making its way through flower-enamelled banks, a shepherd
wi