By far the most important work, however, with which Joseph Parker’s name is concerned, is Keble’s “Christian Year.” We believe that the first risk of publishing was insured by Sir John Coleridge. Nothing could be more unassuming than its first appearance in 1827, in two little volumes, without even the authority of an author’s name. None of the regular literary journals noticed its publication, excepting a friendly greeting in a footnote to an article on another subject in the _Quarterly Review_. Appealing to no enthusiastic feelings, deprecating excitement, and courting no parties, silently and imperceptibly at first, but with increasing rapidity, it found its way among all sections of churchmen, and was the real commencement of that movement in the Church with which afterwards the “Tracts for the Times” were associated. At Oxford, when once its popularity was attained, its effects were marvellous; young men dropped the slang talk of horses and women and wine, and went about with hymns upon their lips; instead of the riotous joviality of “wines,” the evening meetings became austere; and even the most careless made some little temporary effort to be better and purer. Partaking of the nature of a revival--among a better-educated and less-impressionable class than that usually affected by such movements--its strongest outward symptoms were of longer than ordinary duration, and its inner effects much deeper. The most popular volume of poems of recent times, it is said in the number of its editions to have out-rivalled Mr. Tupper’s works (we state a fact merely, with an apology for mentioning the two names together); in less than twenty years, twenty-seven editions had been exhausted.[24] The author’s profits, as well as the publisher’s, were large, and the Rev. J. Keble devoted his portion of them to the entire reconstruction of his own church, that of Hursley, in Hampshire. In 1832 Joseph Parker retired from business, retaining, however, his share in the Bible Press until his death in 1850. Mr. John Henry Parker, his nephew, was the son of John Parker, merchant, of the City of London, and was born in the year 1806. After receiving a good education at Dr. Harris’s school at Chiswick, he entered the bookselling trade in 1821, and was consequently fully prepared, eleven years later, to occupy the position just vacated by his uncle.