book is gone, and know not
where to turn for its successor. Till I have found a substitute I can
write no more, and I do not know how to find even a tolerable one. I
should try a volume of Migne's "Complete Course of Patrology," but I do
not like books in more than one volume, for the volumes vary in
thickness, and one never can remember which one took; the four volumes,
however, of Bede in Giles's "Anglican Fathers" are not open to this
objection, and I have reserved them for favourable consideration.
Mather's "Magnalia" might do, but the binding does not please me;
Cureton's "Corpus Ignatianum" might also do if it were not too thin. I
do not like taking Norton's "Genuineness of the Gospels," as it is just
possible some one may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine
or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton's book.
Baxter's "Church History of England," Lingard's "Anglo-Saxon Church," and
Cardwell's "Documentary Annals," though none of them as good as Frost,
are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine's
"Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in
the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost. I should
probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too
seductive title. "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of
her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the
book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a
thing a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there
are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling
them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem as if
they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine's work. There are some
things, however, which it is better not to know, and take it all round I
do not think I should be wise in putting myself in the way of temptation,
and adopting Arvine as the successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.

Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether, and
this I should be sorry to do. I have only as yet written about a third,
or from that--counting works written but not published--to a half, of the
books which I have set myself to write. It would not so much matter if
old age was not staring me in the face. Dr. Parr said it was "a beastly
shame for an old man not to have laid down a good cellar of port in his
youth"; I, like the gr