English Sacred Poetry of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries
Selected and edited by Illustrated by Holman Hunt, John Gilbert, and others. London: Routledge & Co. 4to.
MR. WILLMOTT has considerable reputation for judgment and taste as a compiler. He knows a good poem afar off, and his chief pleasure seems to lie in reproducing from old books the excellent things that time has spared to us. His last contribution to the stock of elegant volumes is this very handsome book of English Sacred Poetry. The illustrations are by no means equally good, but the majority of them are satisfactory. Delicious bits of English landscape-scenery peep out along the pages, as one turns the leaves of this beautiful collection. An old village church rising among the graves of centuries, a bird’s-nest snug and warm in the boughs of a mossy tree, a group of old-time worshippers gathered on the grass, a brook making its way through flower-enamelled banks, a shepherd with his flock couched on the hill-side, and other similar scenes of quiet and rest, abound in this volume. The printer and the binder have produced as luxurious a specimen of their respective arts as we have seen from the British holiday press.