It is but too seldom that the reviewer has to welcome a work like that which we have already had the pleasure of introducing to our readers, and to which we now desire to render more fitting honors. An original life of a saint, and of an epoch‐making saint like Thomas of Aquin, treated on a scale adequate to its importance, in the English tongue, by an English Benedictine monk, is a refreshing novelty to those who, like ourselves, have so much to say to what is slight, or frivolous, or common, or hostile. The contemplative reviewer, looking at the two thick volumes of the English edition, feels inclined, like a man who guesses before he opens a letter, to conjure up fancies as to what he will find in this new life of S. Thomas of Aquin. Two volumes, each consisting of more than 800 pages, are a great deal, in these days, for one saint. They are a great deal to write, and what is perhaps of more importance, they are a great deal to read. But no one can suppose that they are too much for such a saint as Thomas of Aquin. Considering that his own works, as printed in the splendid Parma edition lately completed, would make up some forty volumes of the size of these two goodly ones, it is not much. Considering that Thomas of Aquin has been more written about by commentators for four or five centuries than any other man, except perhaps Aristotle, who ever lived—considering that every student of theology is always coming across his authority, and that he has been the great builder‐up of the vast building of Catholic philosophical and theological terminology, it is not much that he should have two volumes. Indeed, when we look into the book, we expect to find Prior Vaughan not seldom complaining of being obliged, through want of space, to leave out a great deal that he would have wished to say. And this leads us to notice the author’s name. Father Bede Vaughan, though fairly known by reputation in England, is perhaps a stranger to the greater number of American Catholics. It is sufficient to say at present that he is a brother of the Very Rev. Dr. Herbert Vaughan, whose presence in this country lately, in connection with the mission to the negroes, will have made his name familiar to many even of those who had not the pleasure of personally meeting him. Father Bede Vaughan is Prior of the Benedictine Cathedral Chapter of Newport and Menevia. A cathedral‐prior is a novelty, not only in literature, but absolutely. There were a great many cathedral‐priors in England once upon a time—men of power and substance—wearing their mitres (some of them) and sitting in the House of Lords. Whatever be the lands and the revenues of the only cathedral‐priory in English‐speaking hierarchies of the present day, it is pleasant to meet with the old name, and to meet it on the cover of a book. That a Benedictine should have written a sterling book will not surprise the world of letters. It is perhaps a little new to find the great