CURRENT LITERATURE.
The History of Maidstone. By J. M. Russell. (William S. Vivish, Maidstone.)—We should be glad to see the example set by Mr.
Russell in writing this book extensively followed. Most of our towns have an interesting history. Nor could there be a better model than we have here. With general English history Maidstone has been several times connected. Wat Tyler occupied it, and made a jail deliverance not of the legal kind ; Jack Cade drew recruits from it ; and Sir Thomas Wyatt was a neighbouring squire. In the Civil War, it was stormed by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax. Its eccle- siastical annals are not unimportant, and its grammar-school has sent out some alumni of note, among whom may be mentioned Horne, Bishop of Norwich, and Christopher Smart (whose chief work, the translation of Horace, Mr. Russell does not mention). But the most interesting and really most valuable part of its history is to be found in its domestic records. It has been governed in time past by a parti- cularly wrong-headed corporation, whose misdoings, however, have had the effect of keeping from oblivion things which, but for them, would probably have been forgotten. No less conspicuous a person than Lord Mansfield remarked of this body that the mayor and jambes of Maid stone "would overthrow the Constitution itself, if it were in their power." At different times, two industrious clergymen of Maidstone made elaborate censuses of their parish. The value, in a statistical point of view, of the exact amount of population cannot be exag- gerated. It enables us, for instance, to make a calculation which may interest Mr. Peter Taylor and his friends the anti-vaccinationists, that in 1760 twenty per thousand of the population died of small- pox. In 1782 the mortality from all sources was twenty-six per thousand. The plague seems to have been very fatal. None of the chapters are more interesting than that on "Courts and Punish. ments." What an extraordinary account is that of the witches who were tried in 1652 (page 285.) Like other towns, Maidstone has had an ecclesiastical census, the figures of which are unusually favourable to the Establishment, showing 4,376 attendances at. the churches, to 2,472 at the various chapels.
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