middle of the meeting there was a suspicious group composed of various persons who for various offences had at different times being discharged from the employ of the Dial. These, as might be expected, were most zealous and noisy. The Manchester stock-jobber acted as a fugleman, mounted on a table commanding a view of all. At the motion of his hand or the expression of his hungry-looking face, his lackeys would rise to speak or hoot. There was one man who was specially active and offensive; he does not live a hundred miles from Greenwich. He had once been employed on the Star, and once failed in business. He often now pushes himself into prominent positions in public meetings, and has the audacity to aspire to a seat in the House of Commons. I will not write his name. Physically he is a type of ugliness, and morally a representative of the mean and the base.

We need not say that the representatives of the Dial movement were thwarted in their purpose at this meeting. We expected to meet the Star men who were shareholders in the Dial in good faith to assist us in our undertaking. We found that they had gathered together and organized themselves for an entirely different purpose. Their object was to grasp the entire property, with the exception of £8000.

At that meeting I, as Chairman, fought hard; for had the Company passed into the hands of the Star people, they would have had the power of calling up £200,000. This, according to my pledge to the shareholders, I was determined should not be done, especially to support a paper, a connection with which I, and thousands of those who joined me, felt was a dishonour. At that meeting all my fellow Directors on the Dial Board, with the exception of the man whom I have represented as the Caliban of John Bright, stood firm and faithful. We found at the close of the meeting that a large number had attended who were no shareholders and had no right to be there. The rowdies had seized and destroyed the book in which every shareholder was required to sign his name on entering, so that we had no power of detecting who had the right to be there and who had not. Finding that other documents were in peril, my friends and I had all books and papers placed in safe custody and adjourned to a meeting in another room, leaving the miserable stock-jobbers and their mob to themselves.

Although we were assured by able counsel that we had good ground for legal action to compel the Star party to return the whole of our £17,500, I had become so disgusted with the matter and so overwrought in my endeavours to

create a great national journal, that I came to the conclusion to submit to the injustice, and hence yielded up the whole of our interest for £8000, leaving in the hands of John Bright and company £9,500. We had not long withdrawn, however, before this wonderful Morning and Evening Star, regarded as the grand organ of the Manchester party, collapsed, showing that it was our money and influence which kept that huge imposture in existence for so many years. What became of our £9,500? Into whose pocket did it go ? Generous friends have often tried to comfort us under the severe trial of our disappointment by assuring us that the Reform measure would not have been carried, had it not been for Edmond Beales, M.A., and that the Dial brought him into prominent notice and gave him power with the people; that the stamp duty would not have been taken off newspapers, so soon at any rate,-for it was the Dial men that used their influence for the purpose; and that in consequence of our efforts the prince of journalism is more practically alive to the claims of the various religious institutions of the country than it ever had been before. However I own myself beaten, and feel that I have expended the forces and the enthusiasm of the best part of my life, as well as much time and capital, in a comparatively useless endeavour.

I have felt bound to give a faithful, though a very brief, account of this movement, because of the many letters I have received requiring information concerning the false statements that our enemies have put in circulation. Although I came out beaten, I did not come out dishonoured; nor did I come out at all weakened in my conviction as to the transcendent necessity and thorough feasibility of the movement. Reformation in journalism seems to be more necessary now than it did when the Dial movement was inaugurated; and I am certain that the Dial scheme, taken up now and honestly worked, avoiding the mistake which I made in joining the Star, would be crowned with signal success. I am happy, in concluding my sketch of this undertaking, to reprint the following resolutions passed by the shareholders of the National Newspaper League Company, held at Radley's Hotel, 1869, at the close of the undertaking, Edward Carlile, Esq., of Queensbury, Clapham Park, in the chair.

"I. That in view of the winding up of the National Newspaper Company, Limited, this meeting deems it necessary, in revolving the history of the Company, to record its admiration of the indefatigable energy, great courage, and self-sacrifice which have signalized all the acts and policy of the Chairman, Dr. David Thomas.

"II. That on referring to the Dial Register and other records of the history of the Company, it is shown that several thousands of shareholders were enrolled as the immediate and direct result of Dr. Thomas' extensive influence and incessant and disinterested labours; that, yielding to the solicitations of many shareholders who considered that no efforts but his could complete the great movement, of which he was the unpaid promoter and originator, he relinquished for many months ministerial and literary labours, and, at the greatest personal inconvenience and expense, devoted himself amidst much public misrepresentation to the arduous and to him uncongenial work of addressing meetings in all parts of the kingdom on the importance of infusing a higher moral tone into the newspaper press than it then manifested, and of placing journalism within the reach of the masses; that the effect of his publications, his addresses, and the succeeding operations of the National Newspaper Company had a most beneficial influence on the country, tended to the reduction in price, the elevation of tone, and the extension of the influence of the Daily Press, and resulted in the largest union of political and religious reformers and philanthropists on record, and the establishment of a Company for carrying out their views in the press, whose constituency of nearly 10,000 shareholders with an immense available capital made it the largest Company of the day.

"III. That this meeting expresses its highest appreciation of the uncompromising and steadfast fidelity with which (notwithstanding the available capital of the Company and the service which it would have been to the Directors in carrying out the objects of the Company) Dr. Thomas has resolutely adhered to, and successfully prevented all attempted violations of, the promise to make no call on the shareholders; and although he has not been able to protect the Company from dissolution; congratulates him that the first deposit of 40s. a share is all that has ever had to be paid by the shareholders, and that even of that sum a portion will yet be returned to them, and this too notwithstanding the complications with which he has been surprised and which have been working around and within the Company."

(To be continued.)

THE GENUINE SIMPLICITY OF CHRIST AS A TEACHER.-How free from everything like art were the reasonings and the language of Christ! There was nothing of the technical scholar in the structure of His sentences, nor of the sanctimonious priest in His intercourse with his hearers. He did not formulate His thoughts by any logical rules, nor adorn them with any rhetorical ornaments. His thoughts were the rising intuitions of His own great nature, and He made the current and everyday language of His contemporaries the mirror to reflect them on the eye of others. His outward life was the faithful expression of His inward, and His inward life was ever in perfect agreement with truth and sympathy with God. Every changing note of His voice was the ring of something new within, and every expression of His countenance was the gleam of some passing thought or feeling of His soul.

Literary Notices.

[We hold it to be the duty of an Editor either to give an early notice of the books sent to him for remark, or to return them at once to the Publisher. It is unjust to praise worthless books; it is robbery to retain unnoticed ones.]

THE REVIEWER'S CANON.

In every work regard the author's end,

Since none can compass more than they intend.

THE LIFE AND EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. BY THOMAS LEWIN, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., of Trinity College, Oxford, and of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister Law. Third Edition. Volumes I. and II. London: George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden.

Here are two, in every sense, magnificent volumes. The paper, the type, the engravings,—which are very numerous,—the maps, the subject, the arrangement, and the literature, all command our highest admiration. The talented, industrious, learned, and devout author informs us that the work engaged his attention, more or less, for forty years. Gresswell's "Harmony of the Gospels" having fallen into his hands while at College, he studied it and its accompanying dissertations, and discovered in them a store-house of learning as regards the life of St. Paul, but in such a loose, -as he thought,—and disjointed shape that it impressed him with the importance of moulding the scattered fragments into a consecutive narrative. Without knowing at the time to what an enormous amount of labour he committed himself, he began collecting materials and arranging them, and year after year continued so to do, as far as his professional and other duties would allow. After pursuing this course for some twenty-three years, his MS. was ready for the press, and he offered it to an eminent publisher, who, to his surprise, informed him that he was pledged to bring out a work of precisely the same character and the same title, viz., "The Life and Epistles of St. Paul." This was, of course, the work of Messrs. Conybeare & Howson. This, however, did not deter him from committing his work to the press, and the first edition appeared in 1851. And now, after the lapse of more than a quarter of a century, comes this, the third edition. The Author tells us that during this period he has devoted his leisure hours to the improvement of his earlier efforts, he has made numerous corrections, introduced much new matter, expunged many errors, bestowing especial attention to the attaining a correct chronology. The first edition was almost destitute of illustrations; but here we have engravings great and small, most of which are exquisite, exceeding 370 in number. Epistles have been inserted at length, under the impression that, read in their proper places chronologically, and in connection with the circum

"The

stances under which they are penned, they would be better understood, and thus convey to the reader a force which, without reference to the occasion of inditing them, might have escaped notice. They have been translated as literally as possible; and the deviations from the Authorized Version, which are not numerous, have arisen partly from an improvement of the original text by the labours of modern critics, and partly from the fact that many of the words employed by the translators have since fallen into disuse or lost their meaning, and, it may be added with deference, that in some few cases the sense of the original had not, according to the best scholars, been correctly apprehended. The notes to the Epistles are brief, and seldom either critical or doctrinal, but calculated rather to assist the narrative historically." We consider this work in many respects vastly superior to that of Conybeare & Howson, admirable as that work confessedly is. The subject of all that is authentic in the history of that work is here, with a vast amount of criticism and rare information which that does not contain. The Author, being one of the first lawyers of the age, has sifted the evidence with the highest thoroughness and skill of his profession. Here we have countries, cities, temples, ships, historic characters, etc., described with great vividness and vigour with the pen, and portrayed in pictures with great artistic skill. The portrait of St. Paul in the frontispiece is a magnificent engraving, and presents a man that answers to our conception of the physique of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. This is a work which must pass through numerous editions, circulate for ages, and be the text-book of generations of coming expositors. The rich laymen of every congregation would honour themselves and bless their ministers by presenting them with a copy of this incomparable production.

Since writing the above, we have learnt that the distinguished Author has joined the illustrious dead. What is life?

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PAINTERS OF ALL SCHOOLS. By LOUIS VIARDOT and other Writers. Illustrated. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 188, Fleet Street.

The preface of this beautiful book informs us that "the more important parts of the work, such as the Introductions to the Foreign Schools, and the Criticisms upon the Pictures of the Great Masters, are from the pen of M. Louis Viardot, by whom they were originally written for Les Merveilles de la Peinture, published by Hachette and Co., in their Bibliothèque des Merveilles. But this Author included in his volume only those painters whom he styles the "divinities of Art," and of their personal history he gives but brief details. In order, therefore, to make a comprehensive book,—which may lay claim to be of value to students of Art, not only as a brief history of the painters of all schools, but also as a work of reference,-it has been considered desirable to supplement M. Viardot's writings by short memoirs of many additional artists whom he has not mentioned. Even then, a list of those whose names appear in