Ignorance is a foe to freedom that must be expelled, and Mormon lust, that changes the home to a harem, crucifies womanhood, and makes children worse than fatherless must be made as perilous to the guilty, as it is infamous in the eyes of all good citizens. The well considered, manly utterances from Ocean Grove have our hearty indorsement. It is a pleasure to say the speeches that so enthused those vast audiences seem worthy of the men and of the occasion. The admirable Home College Series has reached the eighty-third number. A decidedly practical and useful idea it was to throw these terse, interesting scraps of knowledge into everybody’s hands. The tracts are all good. One that will please all reading people, as well as be suggestive to those who do not know how to read, is Rev. H. C. Farrar’s talk on “Reading and Readers.”[O] While it contains nothing new, it tells well many true and essential facts that every reader ought to consider. There are no two characters in the list of English writers who hold so warm a place in our hearts as Charles and Mary Lamb. We mention them together, for who could separate him from her any more than they could separate him from his essays? Mary, Charles, Elia, the tales and sketches are woven together in a way unique in literature. It is strange that with all its interests Mary Lamb’s life should never have been written until now, save in scraps, and as the necessary complement in every sketch of her brother. The cloud that hung over her gentle life, the tender, close friendship of the brother and sister, and the interesting circle of friends that formed their circle, make her an exceptionally entertaining character. Mrs. Gilchrist[P] in her book has given us the best that is known of Mary Lamb. Little of the material is entirely new; with few exceptions it has all appeared before, but never so well arranged. The story is carried from her earliest life, when the unsympathetic mother would say to the child, whose brain was full of morbid phantoms: “Polly, what are those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking alway?” to the time when at eighty death ended the shadowed life. The Hazlitts, Stoddarts, Coleridge and many others receive much attention, but this is necessary, so intimately was Mary Lamb’s life joined to her friends. In a few instances, however, notes on people are introduced into the text, which seem entirely irrelevant, and would have figured better as foot-notes, if introduced at all; as in the case of the story of Mr. Scott, the Secretary of Lord Nelson. Of all our elegant holiday books not one is more chaste and beautiful than the Artist’s Edition of Gray’s Elegy.[Q] It is the first really fine edition of the poem ever published. It could hardly have been better done. The illustrations are the work of such eminent artists as R. Swain Gifford, F. S. Church, etc., and are perfectly suited to the calm, dignified and thoughtful beauty of the poem.