The Rev. Moses Margoliouth, who was once a Jew, and who last year published a narrative of a journey to Palestine, under the title of "A Visit to the Land of My Fathers," has just given to the world, in three octavos, a _History of the Jews in Great Britain_. The book is insufferably tame and feeble; the author is of the class called in England "religious flunkies:" a mastiff to the poor and a spaniel to the proud. His first book was disgusting for its feebleness and servility, and this is scarcely better, notwithstanding the richness of its materials and the curious interest of its subject. A good History of the Jews in England will be a work worth reading.
The _Ecclesiastical History Society_ have published in London _Strype's Memorials of Cranmer_, _Heylyn's History of the Reformation_, and _Field's Treatise of the Church_. Strype and Heylyn are more familiar than Field, whose work is a sort of supplement to Hooker's _Polity_. Field resembled his illustrious master and friend in judgment, temper, and learning. In his own day his reputation was great. James I. regretted, when he heard of his death, that he had not done more for him; Hall, in reference to his own deanery of Worcester, which had been sought for Field, speaks of that "better-deserving divine," who "was well satisfied with greater hopes;" and Fuller, with his accustomed humor of thoughtfulness, bestows his salutation on "that learned divine whose memory smelleth like a _field_ that the Lord hath blessed."
THE LIFE OF WORDSWORTH, by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, has appeared in London, and with some additions by Professor Henry Reed, of Philadelphia, will soon be issued by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston. From what the critics write of it we suspect it is a poor affair. The _Leader_ says that, "all things considered, it is perhaps the worst biographical attempt" it "ever waded through." The _Examiner_ and other leading papers admit its dulness as a biography, and its worthlessness in criticism, but claim for it a certain value as a collection of facts respecting the histories of Wordsworth's different poems. The work indeed professes to be no more than a biographical commentary on the poet's writings. It does not even affect to be critical, or to offer any labored exposition of the principles on which Wordsworth's poems were composed. The author describes his illustrious relative as having had no desire that any such disquisition should be written. "He wished that his poems should stand by themselves, and plead their own cause before the tribunal of posterity." Strictly, then, the volumes are so exclusively subordinate and ministerial to the poetry they illustrate, that apart from the latter they possess hardly any interest. By enthusiasts for the poems they will be eagerly read, but to any other class of readers we cannot see that they present attraction. Dr. Wordsworth's part in them, though small, is not particularly well done; and the poet's part almost exclusively consists of personal memoranda connected with his poems dictated in later life, and seldom by any chance refers to any thing but himself.