The Literary Life of the Early Friends, 1650-1725 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS71 BOOK REVIEWS Wright, Luella M. The Literary Lije of the Early Friends, 1650-1725. New York: Columbia University Press. 1932. Pp. 309. $3.00. This volume, briefly mentioned in the Bulletin of last autumn, is worthy of a fuller notice. The present writer knew of Doctor Wright's long and arduous labors in preparing her manuscript. The finished volume testifies to the effectiveness of her work. In twenty-one chapters the author traces and evaluates the literary efforts of early Friends. The reference notes alone fill thirty-four pages, and a selected bibliography contains about three hundred and fifty titles. " In the period covered by this book, 1650-1725, four hundred and forty Quaker writers produced no less than two thousand, six hundred and seventy-eight separate publications." These figures indicate the dimensions of the field covered and the devoted labors required of the author. Limitations of space preclude a detailed review, but a few selected chapter titles will illustrate the contents of the volume: The Inner Light; The Literary Principle ; The Literature of " Sufferings " ; Ventures in History and Biography ; Quaker Essays ; Sermons, Proverbs, and Advices ; Quaker Journals and Quaker Life; The Language of the Journals; Introspection; Practical Mysticism. No one who wishes to study carefully the literature of early Friends, and few who wish to refer casually to it, will wish to be without the guidance of this book. Others will read it purely as religious history. All will agree with the estimate in the Introduction (by Rufus M. Jones) that the author " has put all of us who are interested in this great mutation period of English life, and in genuine human nature, deeply in her debt." R. W. K. Hine, Reginald L. Hitchin Worthies. Four Centuries of English Life. London : George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1932. Pp. 399. 16 shillings. Friends who read books will remember Reginald Hine's Story of the Hitchin Quakers, published in 1929 and reviewed in the Bulletin, 19 (1930) : 111. The present volume is a supplemental study, of the same high qualities: charmingly written, beautifully printed and bound, profusely illustrated , and embodying the results of the most painstaking and laborious research. The book contains a chronological series of biographies, sketching brilliantly but succinctly the lives of more than a score of greater " Worthies " and many lesser ones. Among these appear several Friends, such as Thomas Shillitoe, Frederic Seebohm, James Hack Tuke, Samuel Lucas and William Ransom. American Friends will perhaps be most interested in Thomas Shillitoe. Of him the author tells how King George IV, on his death-bed in 1830, " brushed the Archbishop aside and said : ' Send for that little Quaker ; he ...