At seventy-eight Father Fletcher, constrained by the infirmities of age to the retirement of Twyford Abbey, was persuaded to set down his recollections. It was forty years since he and Lister Drummond had started the Guild of Ransom—taking for their models ‘two old orders for the redemption of. captives from the Moors, viz., that of Our Lady of Ransom (de Mercede) and that of the Trinitarians, both founded in the thirteenth century. . . .’ For forty years Father Fletcher had been identified with the work of the redemption of England from heresy. It is appropriate that his autobiography should be called the Recollections of a Ransomer ; appropriate, too, that the responsibility for the book, since its author did not live to see it through the press, should be upon two of Father Fletcher’s old friends—Mr. G. Elliot Anstruther (‘one of the best speakers, indoors and out, that the Catholics of this country possess’), and the Rev. William A. Spence. Simplicity, our editors note, and rightly, as the distinctive quality of Father Fletcher’s style; Le style, c'est Vhomme mime. It is the simplicity of a large-hearted man, a great lover of England and its people, of Ireland, of little children and the poor, that is revealed in these recollections, as it was revealed to all who knew him. Preeminently a man of prayer from boyhood : at sixteen, at his confirmation in the Church of England, ‘prayer and praise became a delight to me, and religion took possession of me and became first, instead of a long way behind.’