The Annotated Book of Common Prayer, forming a Concise Commentary on the Devotional System of the Church of England. By the Rev. JOHN HENRY BLUNT, M.A. Compendious Edition.

Rivingtons.

Mr. Blunt's great work, of which this is a cheap edition, is full of the results of great liturgical scholarship, and historical and antiquarian research. Mr. Blunt is a High Anglican, and the historical conscience in him is not so judicial as to be imperial in its sway. He sees very largely what he wishes to see, and the historian of the Book of Common Prayer can easily see anything he likes in its fluctuating history and irreconcilable compromises. Sacramentarian principles, both of dogma and worship, are sacred in Mr. Blunt's estimation. When, therefore, in the Prayer Book these find expression they are, of course, magnified and exalted to supremacy, and when Low Church principles, these are extenuated and subordinated. That the Apostolic Church used a liturgy is, of course, assumed as almost unquestionable. The two expressions, Acts ii. 42,"In the breaking of the bread," and, "in prayers," clearly indicate 'settled and definite ceremonial usages.' This is only a specimen of the kind of assumption which characterises the work from beginning to end. Mr. Blunt discreetly omits all reference to the Thirty-nine Articles. The value of the book is its great accumulation of liturgical information and reference.

History and Significance of the Sacred Tabernacle of the Hebrews. By EDWARD E. ATWATER. Dickinson and Higham.

The Tabernacle, Priesthood, and Offerings of Israel. By the Rev. FREDERICK WHITFIELD, M.A. Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.

The Gospel of the Tabernacle. By ROBERT EDWARD SEARS. Elliot Stock and Co.

The interest excited in religious people by the typical provisions of the Jewish Tabernacle is unfailing. There is indeed a richness of suggestion in its multifarious appointments that gratifies a certain order of minds as parables do, far more than the affirmative dogmatic teachings of Christ and His apostles; and the reflex testimony to Christianity which Levitical institutions bear is simply irrefragable. These three volumes, all expounding the uses and teachings of the Tabernacle, are of different value. The first of them is by far the most complete and important. The writer tells us that it had been his specialty during thirty years of ministerial life, and that he retired from the ministry some years ago to give himself 'wholly to a subject which a pastor can study only at intervals.' It is an elaborate exposition of the structure and the history of the Tabernacle and of its symbolical significance, filling a volume of five hundred pages, and illustrated by some fifty carefully-executed engravings. Mr. Atwater has diligently studied authorities ancient and modern, Lund, Bähr, New

man, and others. He is confident that his 'studies have added to the 'knowledge of Hebrew symbolism;' and it is only just to say that his views are formed with great care and moderation, guarding himself against the wild lawless typologists of the coercion school.' He yet insists upon the legitimate typology of the remarkable symbolism of the Tabernacle. His book will probably be accepted as the best authority on the subject.

Mr. Whitfield's book follows in the same track, but with much less of scholastic research and firmness. Its chapters partake more of the character of sermons, and run largely into religious uses, and that with but little of critical discrimination. Men are slow to learn that an interpretation cannot be justified by its religious usefulness.

Mr. Sears follows Mr. Whitfield's example, and falls more helplessly into his mistakes. His chapters are preachings of a purely practical kind -useful religiously, but worthless critically and historically.

The Atonement. The Congregational Lecture for 1875. By R. W. DALE, M.A. Third Edition. Hodder and Stoughton.

The sale within some six or seven months of two large editions of Mr. Dale's able and eloquent lecture is equally gratifying as a testimony to the lecturer's ability and to popular interest in his high theme. In compliance with a generally expressed desire this cheap edition is published. In our next number we purpose, somewhat at length, to examine Mr. Dale's treatment of his theme.

The Expositor. Edited by the Rev. SAMUEL Cox. Vol. II. Hodder and Stoughton.

The second volume of the 'Expositor' contains a valuable exegesis of the First Epistle to Timothy, read in the light of modern speculation, by Dr. Reynolds; discussions on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by F. Godet; a new translation, with comments, of the Book of Ruth, by the Editor; dissertations on the Epistles to the Seven Churches, by Professor Plumptre; together with miscellaneous papers, all thoroughly scholarly and valuable. The 'Expositor' is defining for itself an important niche, and is filling it admirably.

THE BRITISH

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

APRIL 1, 1876.

ART. I.-Jonathan Swift.

The Life of Jonathan Swift. By JOHN FORSTER. Vol. I.
London: John Murray.

MR. FORSTER'S long looked for life of Swift has at last appeared, and the completeness of this, its first volume, is enough to console us for the delay. The life of Swift was at first written incompetently by Delany and Dean Swift, afterwards hurriedly by Johnson; and a whole mass of misconceptions, repeated from hand to hand, had to be cleared away before his character could be reconstructed as it required to be. Popular opinion readily accepted the rough and ready estimate of Swift as one utterly dark and repulsive in life and genius; and where it took the trouble to verify this second-hand estimate, it found the estimate confirmed by the untested and rash assertions of one after another of his biographers. Mr. Forster has not brought help before it was greatly needed, and the niche of English literary biography which his book will fill is not less palpably vacant than those which he has already so ably occupied. The volume before us is perhaps chiefly valuable for the mass of new information which has been brought together either for the testing or the illustration of the facts asserted of Swift. We perhaps miss in the narrative something of succinctness and of thorough digesting of the matter; and it would be no very high compliment to the author of the Life of Gold

smith and of the monograph on Defoe to say that he has here surpassed or even equalled himself. But our knowledge of that part of Swift's life which is here chiefly dealt with is at the best fragmentary, and in itself perhaps incapable of any very clear or succinct narration. It is enough that this book gives us for the first time much that is of incalculable value for a knowledge of the life of Swift, and that to the judgment of this new material Mr. Forster brings his own sound experience and fine literary tact.

Whatever the objections that an editor or a biographer of Swift may have to meet in our day, there is one from which he is probably exempt. He is not likely to be told that the works of Swift want interest, that his genius has been eclipsed, and that the study of his writings may well be laid aside, as not 'entering necessarily into the institution of a liberal educa'tion.' And yet something like this is the verdict pronounced by Jeffrey in his critique on Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift's works in 1816. He tells us how he remembers the time when every boy was set to read Pope, Swift, and Addison, as regularly as Virgil, Cicero, and Horace; when all who had any tincture of letters were familiar with their writings and their history; and when they and their contemporaries were placed without challenge at the head of our literature. He congratulates himself that this is no longer the case, and that these writers have been deposed from their pedestal; that their genius has been surpassed, and that they have no chance of recovering the supremacy from which they have been deposed. The language in which he goes on to speak of them is somewhat astonishing. They were remarkable, he says, for the fewness of their faults rather than for the greatness of their beauties. Their laurels were won by good conduct and discipline, not by enterprising boldness and native force. They had no pathos, no enthusiasm, no comprehensiveness, depth, or originality; but were for the most part cold, timid, and superficial. Their inspiration is little more than a sprightly sort of good sense. They may pass well enough for sensible and polite writers, but scarcely for men of genius.

As we read the estimate of the Edinburgh reviewer, we feel that not only does that estimate differ from our own, but that

the standpoint from which it is made is one with which we are essentially out of sympathy. The generation for which Jeffrey wrote had no small share of self-complacency, and it was a self-complacency fortified by circumstances. It was a generation of very considerable force and earnestness, and that force and earnestness had a very strong bias in one particular direction. Such biassed force has its advantages, but a wide-stretching sympathy, or a quick sensibility to the genius of another age, is not one of these. What is good in itself it prizes, but it does so to the exclusion of that which an age possessing perhaps less stringent characteristics of its own may be ready to appreciate. For us, rivalry has not made appreciation impossible. Our own generation has sought other objects, and achieved a bias in a different direction; but while the force of literary genius may be thereby dulled, the absence and hopelessness of literary emulation may make our criticism none the less disinterested. Our laurels are not chiefly won in the fields where we may find Swift and Addison and their contemporaries for rivals, and we may content ourselves with our power of judging the more calmly of the merits of different competitors. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the complacent optimism upon which the Edinburgh reviewer bases his judgment of literary progress; we can no longer assent with him to the proposition that in literary taste every generation is better than its predecessors. Instead of believing with him that such taste 'is of all faculties the one most sure 'to advance with time and experience,' we are more likely to be impressed with the extreme delicacy of its growth; with the dangers to which it is exposed of being blinded or formalized by every twist and turn of popular fanaticism or prevailing pedantry; with the likelihood that development in other directions may only disarrange the equable balance, the sweet reasonableness,' as the chief critic of our generation has it, of literary judgment. What the Edinburgh reviewer feels to be little capricious fluctuations,' we may often be disposed to think serious aberrations, and we may see in them the loss of that quick appreciativeness which only the stirring of a new birth in literature could restore. But if we lose the gratification of believing in this comfortable natural law of progression in literary taste, we escape the risk of being