One turns with eagerness to the _Life of Frances Power Cobbe_, more especially when it bears the honoured _imprimatur_ of BENTLEY. Miss COBBE has lived long, enjoying full opportunity of seeing things and people. She ought to have written a good book. "Instead of which," as the judge once said, she presents a slovenly-written, ill-digested mass of miscellaneous matter, including whole chapters devoted to digests of her published works. Pleased with herself from most aspects, she particularly admires her literary style. There is a passage in the book where she plaintively apprehends that, lost in admiration of her style, readers may miss the true purpose and importance of her writing;--this in volumes that bristle with such monstrosities as "compared to," "disapproved of," and "from thence," the latter a favourite foible of Miss COBBE'S style. In the second volume there are some attempts at what was naturally looked for, to wit, reminiscences of people the present generation would like to meet. But the burly, complacent figure of the diarist intervenes just as they come into view. She tells us what she said to them, not, what we are burning to hear, what they said to her. On the whole, looked at through Miss COBBE'S spectacles, they were a poor lot. Of RENAN she writes, "The impression he has left on me is one of disappointment and short-falling." Short-falling is "style" of the athletic order, and, my Baronite vaguely surmises, is the opposite of high jumping. As to poor CARLYLE, Miss COBBE "never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men." GEORGE BORROW, who wrote _The Bible in Spain_, she "never liked, thinking him more or less a hypocrite." Professor TYNDAL is more in favour, since, in reply to the gift of one of Miss COBBE'S instructive books, the Professor wrote an acknowledgment, the exquisite irony of which his correspondent evidently does not see. One other partial concession is made in a passage sublime in its fatuousness. Speaking of one of her books, of which the fortunate reader will find a full summary in the first volume, Miss COBBE says, "It was very favourably reviewed, but some of my fellow Theists _rather disapproved of the tribute I had paid to Christ_." The volumes bear on the front the COBBE coat of arms and motto. The family may, we are assured, be traced back through four centuries, and, even in the present degenerate days, is highly connected.