"To have confined the lives of these men and women within one volume is no mean achievement and to Father Williamson, the Editor, go congratulations not only for the choice of subjects but also for having obtained such an impressive array of biographers, learned and distinguished themselves, for the task in hand. The list of writers contains names well-known in literature and affairs: Shane Leslie, Mgr. Ronald Knox, Mgr. Peter Guilday, Laurence Meynell, Father Martindale, of the Society of Jesus, Archbishop Goodier, Dr. W. J. O'Donovan, Dom Bede Comm, O.S.B., Miss Isabel C. Clarke and Christopher Hollis, not to mention Father Williamson himself, who writes about Francis Thompson, and is the author of the absorbing "Introductory Essay on Biography" which precedes the lives. One of the sketches, that of no less a personage than John Dryden, is anonymous. The choice of subjects is explained by the compiler when he says that the.writers were invited to "select one character of whom they considered a new presentation was necessary or whose reputation had been overlooked on account of bias because he was a great Catholic' in the universal sense." This utterance may supply the answer to those critics who would find that the subjects fail to include some of. the "greatest Catholics" such as Dante and St. Francis of Assisi, or Joan of Are, or Louis Pasteur, Irish Catholics would be sure to regret the absence of St. Patrick from the illustrious gallery, "Italians that of the new-sainted Don Bosco, and Danes that of Nicolaus Steno, the seventeenth-century na-furalist, and (since persons now living are included) also the absence of the author and poet Johannes Joergenson. The Far East might feel that it had been slighted by the failure to include St. Francis Xavier, and so forth. Personally, this reviewer would have welcomed the life, story of Father Damien, the apostle of the lepers, as one of the chapters of the book. As Cardinal Hinsley says in his brief foreword are the sketches of saints, of St. Augustine, of St. Vincent de Paul, of St. Charles Borromeo, St, Antony, St. Ignatius—and those of scientists like Linacre and Mendel as well thers distinguished by special Contributions to culture, each reader of this volume of Great Catholics will regret that he had not a word in the selection, that his favourites among the famed have been omitted. But everyone. will find a fascination in the great ones admitted. to your temple of Catholic worthies.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.