On May 18th, 1870, Mr. John William Parker died at his country house near Farnham. By his first wife he left two daughters living, and by his second (the daughter of Dr. Mantell, the well-known geologist) one son and two daughters. He was seventy-eight years of age at the time of his death; and, though his life presents us with little that is striking or historically strange, he had played an honest part manfully, and may be remembered as one of the few instances in which a publisher, successful as an architect of his own fortune, has been wise enough to transfer his business at the very zenith of its success to the keeping of other hands, when he had ascertained that his own were too aged for its proper maintenance and management. The Broad Church, so called, and the liberal thought of the country, owe much to the now defunct firm of John William Parker and Son. * * * * * JAMES NISBET, the son of a poor Scotch farmer, who afterwards became a cavalry serjeant, was born on Feb. 3rd, 1785. After receiving the ordinary rudiments of education he was apprenticed to Mr. Wilson of Kelso for three years, but having obtained the offer of a situation in London he was permitted to leave before his indentures had expired. He left Scotland with only four guineas in his purse, and being delayed on the road, was obliged to sell his violin. On reaching town he became clerk to a Mr. Hugh Usher, a West India merchant in Moorfields, and his salary commencing at £54 12_s._ per annum took some years before it increased to £120. James Nisbet’s career has been to a certain extent chronicled by his son-in-law, the Rev. J. A. Wallace, in a volume entitled, “Lessons from the Life of James Nisbet, the Publisher”--not, says the author, “a mere biography”--would that it were!--but a series of forty chapters or lessons, each commencing with a text and ending with a hymn. To its rambling and incoherent pages we are indebted, however, to many of the facts in the following notice. On the evening of Nisbet’s arrival in London a young Scottish friend took him about sight-seeing. The walk terminated in a blind alley and a strange looking house--which instinct at once told him was “the house of the destroyer.” He gave up intercourse with his companion, and fled away hastily, and not till some few days afterwards, when he found a refuge in the Swallow Street Chapel, did he recover his equanimity. From his earliest boyhood he had a great liking for “the courts of the Lord;” a pocket-book dated 1805, contains a list of places at which the gospel was reported to be purely preached. It seems, too, that his favourite books at this time were Henry’s “Commentary,” Cruden’s “Concordance,” Hall’s “Contemplations,” and Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.” At the Swallow Street Chapel he met his future wife.