It is not of hangings only and such direful solemnities that we read in Sewall’s diary. Every ordinary duty--I cannot say pastime--of life is faithfully portrayed. We know the faults--sins they were considered--of his fourteen children; how they played at prayer-time or began their meals before grace was said, and were duly whipped for such transgressions. We know how the judge went courting when past middle age; how he gave the elderly Mrs. Winthrop China oranges, sugared almonds, and “gingerbread wrapped in a clean sheet of paper,” and how he ingratiated himself into her esteem by hearing her grand-children recite their catechism. He has a businesslike method of putting down the precise cost of the gifts he offered during the progress of his various wooings; for, in his own serious fashion, this gray-headed Puritan was one of the most amorous of men. A pair of shoe-buckles presented to one fair widow came to no less than five shillings threepence; and “Dr. Mather’s sermons, neatly bound,” was a still more extravagant _cadeau_. He was also a mighty expounder of the Scriptures, and prayed and wrestled with the sick until they were fain to implore him to desist. There is one pathetic story of a dying neighbor to whose bedside he hastened with two other austere friends, and who was so sorely harried by their prolonged exhortations that, with his last breath, he sobbed out, “Let me alone! my spirits are gone!”--to the terrible distress and scandal of his wife. On the whole, Judge Sewall’s diary is not cheerful reading, but the grayness of its atmosphere is mainly due to the unlovely aspect of colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement climate not yet subdued by the forces of a luxurious civilization, and by a too constant consideration of the probabilities of being eternally damned. There is nowhere in its sedate and troubled pages that piercing sadness, that cry of enigmatic, inexplicable pain, which shakes the very centre of our souls when we read the beautiful short journal of Maurice de Guérin. These few pages, written with no definite purpose by a young man whose life was uneventful and whose genius never flowered into maturity, have a positive as well as a relative value. They are not merely interesting for what they have to tell; they are admirable for the manner of the telling, and the world of letters would be distinctly poorer for their loss. Eugénie de Guérin’s journal is charming, but its merits are of a different order. No finer, truer picture than hers has ever been given us of that strange, simple, patriarchal life which we can so little understand, a life full of delicate thinking and homely household duties. At Le Cayla, the lonely Languedoc château, where “one could pass days without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without hearing any living thing but the birds,” the young Frenchwoman found in her diary companionship and mental stimulus, a link to bind her day by