Mr. Blackburn is well-known as a traveller with a special faculty; he has an artist's eye, and his record of wanderings in Algeria, Spain, Normandy, are pages of picture. Hence was he the very man to make a pilgrimage into the Bavarian highlands, and bring back an intelligible account of that strange Passion-Play performed by the peasants of Ober-Ammergau; and excellently well he has done it. There is something strange, something almost weird in the enactment of a mediæval miracle-play in this nineteenth century--by peasants, too, who are some of them before Paris by this time, obeying Bismarck's iron will. Extremes meet in the oddest manner. As to this old-fangled representation, which has come off once a decade for the last two centuries, there seems to be nothing irreverent about it. They are a child-like folk, these Bavarian peasants; they have no Prussian _geist_; they possess a strong imitative faculty, such as belonged to the first villagers who, in ancient Greece, originated what we now call comedy. Mr. Blackburn's illustrations amply show what sort of people they are. Look at the maiden at page 59, with the mild bovine eye that Homer loves to attribute to Hebe, and the well-shapen yet utterly unlightened face, and the comfortable, unfascinating curves of shoulder and arm, a woman--a dull, good, unimaginative 'young person'--with no tendency towards witchery or ladyhood. Having examined that portrait, you have no difficulty in understanding how it is that a Passion-Play lives alongside the railway and the telegraph. The slow-moving, cow-eyed maiden is typical; that she would heartily and reverently enjoy the show of our Lord's Passion is clear enough. But how long she, and such as she, will crawl on in their snail-like groove, now that our 'own correspondent' has appeared in Ammergau, now that the representatives of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate have gone together to besiege Paris, is a question not easy to settle. Mr. Blackburn states that there will probably be ten performances of the Passion Play in 1871, and that then it will not be repeated till 1880. We commend anybody who really desires to see it to go to Ammergau next year. We move fast nowadays--that Bavarian village will be quite another sort of place in 1880. _Church Design for Congregations: its Developments and Possibilities._ By JAMES CUBITT, Architect. With nineteen plates. Smith and Elder.