sire the whole of these two canticles throughout
the year, there is nothing in the rubrics of _The Book Annexed_ to
forbid such an enjoyment of them. They may be sung in full always;
but only in Lent in the one case, and in Advent in the other, mast
they be so sung. The revision Committee was informed, on what was
considered the highest authority, that in the Church of England
the _Benedictus_, on account of its length, had been very generally
disused. But, however this may be, there can be little doubt that
the effort after restoration would have failed completely in the
late Convention had the use of these two canticles in full been
insisted upon by the promoters of revision.

There is less of verbal criticism in _The Guardian's_ review than
could have been wished, for any suggestions with respect to
inaccuracies of style or rhythmical shortcomings would have
been most welcome from the pen of so competent a censor. Attention
is called to the unmusical flow of language in the alternate
Confession provided for the Evening Office; the figurative features
of the proposed Collect for Maundy-Thursday are characterized as
infelicitous; and the Collect provided for the Feast of the
Transfiguration is declared to be inferior to the corresponding
one in the Sarum Breviary.

Of this sort of criticism, at the hands of men who know their
craft, _The Book Annexed_ cannot have too much. In fact, of such
immeasurable importance is good English in this connection, that
it would be no hardship were every separate clause of whatever
formulary it may be proposed to engraft upon the Prayer Book to
be subjected to the most searching tests.

Let an epoch be agreed upon, if necessary, that shall serve as
the criterion of admissibility for words and phrases. Let it
be decided, for instance, that no word that cannot prove an
Elizabethan parentage, or, if this be too severe a standard,
then no word of post-Caroline origin, shall be admitted within
the sacred precincts. Probably there are words in _The Book
Annexed_ which such a canon would eject; but let us have them
pointed out, and their merits and demerits discussed. Such
criticism would be of infinitely more value to the real interests
of revision than those vague and general charges of "crudeness"
and "want of finish" which it is always so easy to make and
sometimes so difficult to illustrate.

The writer in _The Guardian_ closes an only too brief commentary
upon what the Convention