voluntary" to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable function--such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not been repeated since. _Essays in Criticism_, let us repeat, is a book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither. Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same _lustrum_, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that "it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving; perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.