The name of the author of this volume has long been known as that of an accomplished man of letters. Successive volumes of poetic versions, chiefly from the German, had, by their various merit, gained for him a high rank among our translators, when four years ago, in 1856, by a translation of "Faust," he set himself at the head of living authors in this department of literature. It is little to say of his work, that it is the best of the numerous English renderings of Goethe's tragedy. It is not extravagant to assert that a better translation is scarcely possible. It is a work which combines extraordinary fidelity to the form of the original with true appreciation of its spirit. It is at once literal and free, and displays in its execution the qualities both of exact scholarship and of poetic feeling and capacity. This work, and the others of a similar kind which preceded it, were the result of the intervals of leisure occurring in the course of their author's professional life as a clergyman. While the wider world has known him only through these volumes, a smaller circle has long known and loved him as the faithful and able preacher and pastor,--as one to whom the most beautiful description ever written of the character of a good parson might be truly applied; for "A good man he was of religioun, That was a poure Persone of a toun: But riche he was of holy thought and werk; He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche, His parishens devoutly wolde he teche. * * * * * And Cristes lore and his apostles' twelve He taught, but first he folwed it himselve." And it is in this character that he now comes before us in the volume which is well entitled "The Simplicity of Christ's Teachings."