This year sees the fiftieth anniversary of the death at Tegernsee of Lord Acton, and the anniversary has been commemorated by the publication of two books, one adding to the small collection of Acton’s works in book form—now all out of print—and the other an analysis of his political philosophy. The only work of Acton published in his lifetime, apart from occasional essays in innumerable reviews both British and foreign, was his inaugural lecture, on The Study of History, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. After his death, friends and disciples collected various lectures and essays into four volumes, and these, together with some incomplete collections of letters, are all that has been left to us of the man who was acclaimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as being the most erudite in Europe. The more welcome then is the book of Essays on Church and State which is the first volume of what is to be a complete edition of Acton’s works. These essays have been chosen by Mr Douglas Woodruff, assisted by Mr Roland Hill, from Acton’s contributions to those short-lived but impressive reviews of the 1860’s, The Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review, and were all written when Acton was in his thirties. To this volume Mr Woodruff contributes an introduction whose chief merit is to tell the story of these reviews, of how the effort of the laity came to grief in its first attempt at a lay apostolate of the Press.