This tardy measure of historical justice is partly due to the appearance in different parts of Europe of important public and private documents and correspondence, which have shamed British Protestant authors into something like truthfulness, but principally to the revival of Catholicity in England, which has been the means of drawing out a mass of original and reliable information, that had long been allowed to slumber in the dark closets of a few noble families or in inaccessible libraries during the gloomy era of persecution and proscription. Our readers are already familiar with the articles which formerly appeared in these columns on the long‐unsettled and vexed question of the character of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the justice or injustice of her treatment by Elizabeth—contributions to current literature which in their collective form have found their way among the _literati_ of all nations, and, from their admirable cogency of argument and conscientious appeals to contemporary authorities, have at length cleared away from the character of that ill‐starred lady the foul aspersions and unexampled obloquy heaped on it by the minions of the English sovereign. Some more recent publications have thrown additional light on the tragic incidents of her reign and of that of her successor James, which, as far as they relate to the Catholics of Great Britain, are full of freshness and interest. Chief among them is the _Life of Father John Gerard_, for many years a Jesuit missionary in England under both rulers, with his account of the celebrated Gunpowder Plot, written soon after the failure of that conspiracy. Many of the participants in the plot were personally known to him, and he himself was accused of having taken an active part in its formation; but, though his name has been frequently mentioned in connection with it and his manuscript narrative more or less correctly quoted, it remained for a member of his Order, the Rev. John Morris, the able editor of the book before us, to present to the world for the first time the only complete and accurate history of an event which has been the fruitful subject of misrepresentation and comment by every writer on English history for the last two hundred years.