The Sunday at Home. (R.T.S. 7s. 6d.)—This periodical con- trives,
as we have said on another occasion, to discharge its proposed function with success. "Sunday reading" is a practical difficulty which is here solved as well as can be expected. Fifty years ago the table of contents would have been considered some- what lax ; to-day it may seem to some over-narrow. Probably it is not far off the just mean. Among the miscellaneous contents we may mention the "Biographies," mostly, of course, of modern personages, but with a curious mediaeval story, St. William of Norwich, the boy who was said to have been sacrificially murdered by the Jews. The Rev. C. S. Isaacson has written the paper in a very reasonable way. He might have used much stronger language about the men who were responsible for the affair, and not been far wrong. Mr. Isaacson "is glad to believe that neither William of Norwich nor any other Christian boy was ever crucified or killed by Jews for ritual purposes." One of his clerical brethren in the Norwich diocese has, we regret to hear, included him in the list of Christian martyrs. Fiction is represented, but not to excess, the longest story being "The Shadow," by Mx. Harold Begbie, which has been since published separately, and has been noticed in the Spectator. Here we may say that the drawing of the minor characters seems to us much inferior to that of the principal, Christopher, and his mother. The latter is a very pathetic figure indeed. Mr. Harold Copping contributes some coloured illustrations, of which we have spoken elsewhere.
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