witness and the juryman,
bringing with him the oath on the Bible and trial for perjury, and the
feed champion of the Church into the patron. The ordeal of battle is
fought out bloodlessly by lawyers, with often quite as little regard to
the merits of the case as could have been shown in the olden lists. Only
the baser physical ordeals, of fire, hot and cold water, etc., with
torture as a part of the regular machinery of justice, have died out,
evidencing the great rise in intelligence and independence of the bulk of
the people--the "lower orders" to whom these gross expedients were chiefly
applied. Other forms of legal outrage, however, less apparent and palpable
to the senses, have run deep into the nineteenth century, and are not yet
wholly abolished. Mr. Lea, by the way, does not, we observe, refer to the
trial of Bambridge in 1729 for torturing prisoners for debt "in violation
of the laws of England." Perhaps he threw it aside in the redundance of
other illustrative material. We must add, as proof of his impartiality,
the comparatively slight mention made of torture under the Inquisition--a
thing of which we have been told so much as to have fallen into a sort of
popular belief that the Holy Office had a monopoly of this particular
atrocity.

Man will always, in some guise or other, manifest his faith in and
dependence on miracles, and will never cease to implore the special
interposition of the Deity. It is so much simpler thus to make a daily
convenience of his Creator than to consult those dry abstractions, the
laws of Nature. Of this deep and tiresome _x_ and _y_ he has not time to
solve the equation, granting it to be, in its ultimate terms, soluble. Who
shall say in each instance whether the impulse to decline that method and
adopt the shorter be superstition or religion?

Whether looked on as a picture or a mirror, a work such as this has
lasting value. It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of
enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is
delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we
must not expect the record of human fatuity to be closed in our day.

The Witchery of Archery. By Maurice Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons.

The author of this little volume certainly succeeds in proving the truth
of his title to the extent of convincing his readers that archery has its
witchery; and we gather from his words that he has made practical conver