17 FEBRUARY 1872, Page 22

Erummacher : an Autobiography. Translated by Rev. M. G. Easton,

A.M. (T. and T. Clarke. Edinburgh. 1871.)—We do not know that this really valuable "life" has gained much by the very considerable additions supplied by the editor in this second edition. It did perhaps seem unsatisfactory that the narrative of a life so rich in interest should break off abruptly twenty years before that life drew to its actual close, and yet it is with Krammacher before 1848 that we mainly have to do. From that data his life took another form, and while his daughter naturally wonders that he should have laid aside his pen just when to her eyes his years seemed most filled with incidents worthy of record, we may well believe that to Krammacher himself, the external, busy, hurried life of Berlin and Potsdam had in it nothing to compare with the days when a new intellectual and spiritual life was, as it were, jest awakening in Germany. The claims of society more or less Christian, but lacking the characteristic of any strongly marked in- dividuality, the favour of crowned heads, or the demands on time and thought made by "Evangelical alliances," were probably dust in the balance to a mind weighted with memories of far sterner intellectual conflict, which had sifted the teaching or enjoyed the friendship of Wegschneider and Gesenius, Knapp and Neander. Krummacher's own narrative is delightful, and is a really valuable commentary on one of the most interesting periods in the history of the inner life of Germany.