and left a golden harvest to their successors; yet the race is often enough to the swift, and the battle to the strong, to justify men in striving after strength and swiftness, as well for the guerdon which they bring as for the jubilant consciousness which they impart.  And this, at least, is sure:  though merit may, by some rare mischance, be overlooked, demerit has no opportunity whatever to gain distinction.  Sleight of hand cannot long pass muster for skill of hand.  Unswerving integrity, unimpeachable sincerity, is the lesson constantly taught by the lives of these renowned mechanics.  “The great secret,” says one, “is to have the courage to be honest,—­a spirit to purchase the best material, and the means and disposition to do justice to it in the manufacture.”  Another, remonstrated with for his high charges, which were declared to be six times more than the price his employers had before been paying for the same articles, could safely say, “That may be, but mine are more than six times better.”  A master of his profession is master of his employers.  Maudslay’s works, we are told, came to be regarded as a first-class school for mechanical engineers, the Oxford and Cambridge of mechanics; nor can Oxford and Cambridge men be any prouder of their connection with their colleges than distinguished engineers of their connection with this famous school of Maudslay.  With such an esprit de corps what excellence have we not a right to expect?

We cannot forbear pointing out the Aids to Humility collected in this book from various quarters, and presented to the consideration of the nineteenth century.  Our boasted age of invention turns out, after all, to have been only gathering up what antiquity has let fall,—­rediscovering and putting to practical account what the past discovered, but could not, or, with miscalled dignity, would not, turn to the uses of common life.  Steam-carriages, hydraulic engines, diving-bells, which we have regarded with so much complacency as our peculiar property, worked their wonders in the teeming brain of an old monk who lived six hundred years ago.  Printing, stereotypes, lithography, gunpowder, Colt’s revolvers and Armstrong guns, Congreve rockets, coal-gas and chloroform, daguerreotypes, reaping-machines, and the electric telegraph are nothing new under the sun.  Hundreds of years ago the idea was born, but the world was too young to know its character or prize its service, and so the poor little bantling was left to shiver itself to death while the world stumbled on as aforetime.  How many eras of birth there may have been we do not know, but it was reserved for our later age to receive the young stranger with open arms, and nourish his infant limbs to manly strength.  Richly are we rewarded in the precision and power with which he performs our tasks, in the comfort with which he enriches, the beauty with which he adorns, and the knowledge with which he ennobles our daily life.

The Life and Times of John Huss; or, The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century.  By E.H.  GILLETT. 2 vols.  Second Edition.  Boston:  Gould & Lincoln.