CURRENT LITERATURE.
The current issue of the Quarterly Review (John Murray) con- tains no article of special merit, though several deal with interesting subjects. The best, in our opinion, is that on Lincoln- shire. It contains a great deal of curious learning conveyed with not a little humour. In the account of the Fens, there is a. delightful passage about Crowland Abbey, of which we are told that "no countryman, before that devout servant of Christ, St. Guthlac, could endure to dwell in it by reason that such appari- tions of devils were seen there." These apparitions, we are told, were subsequently thought to be the primeval inhabitants still lingering on in the Fen recesses long after the conquest of the Angles. I legend of St. Guthlse tells how the saint, "being dis- turbed one night by a horrid howling, was seriously alarmed, thinking that the howlers might be Britons ; upon looking out, however, he discovered that they were only devils, whereat he was much comforted!" Another article of interest is that on " Mediteval Athens." It is strange to find a Bishop in the twelfth. century speaking of the Parthenon as "a beautiful, resplendent temple, a graceful royal palace, the sacred abode of the true light which lightens from the mother of God ;" and still more strange to find hint deploring the barbarism of Athens. "From living long in Athens, I have become a Barbarian," says the Bishop, in the language of Plato !
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