the smell of herbs alarms the Devil; that medicine drives out Satan!” We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but we do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged.  Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather’s text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that medicine drives him out.

Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic,—­not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian’s head among the rest; but, en revanche, Mr. Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the Civilta Cattolica.  He allows himself to say, that, “after Southwell’s death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blameably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the skill of all physicians.”  Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell.  That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief.  But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and however it may gratify Mr. Turnbull’s catechumenical enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the expense of Jesuits’ bark, we cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero’s life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses.  It is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a neck-tie only to heretical readers.

Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offor’s preliminary dissertation on Witchcraft we never read; but we could hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had either not read or not understood it.

We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion because they are on the whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular gives us almost no information whatever.  Some of the others are not without grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and awaken his distrust.  In his Introduction to Wither’s “Hallelujah,” for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that “nearly all the best