ANCIENT WAYS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18629, 26 July 1930, Page 14

ANCIENT WAYS

A FAMILY RECORD. “Beauty vanishes, beauty passes”— and there was much that was beautiful in the olden ways of life. Readers then should be grateful that there are patient historians like Mrs A. M. W. Stirling to record for us the histories of some fine old English families. Her present volume, “The Ways of Yesterday,” with its punning title is a chronicle of the Way family from 1307 to 1885. There, history is a real history of England in those centuries, much more truly so than the books which record mainly the shedding of blood and the passing of kings.

But the most noteworthy member of this ancient house was undoubtedly the Rev. Lewis Way, friend of the famous Henry Drummond. Lewis Way became the possesor of an immense fortune by the whim of a certain John Way, who, though no relation, liked to imagine himself a kinsman of the more illustrious family. The name seems to lend itself to punning and the comic papers of the day did not fail to notice that “Where there’s a Will there’s a Way.”

The lucky legatee, however, though the father of a large and constantly increasing family, became, by another curious chance, passionately interested in the conversion of the Jews and sought to turn his beautiful country seat Stansted into a college for training foreigners and others of pious disposition for the purpose of being sent

forth to Jew and Gentile to declare the truths of the Gospel. The book tells of all the travels of this fiery apostle in furtherance of the cause, his visits to the Emperor Alexander of Russia, and his entertainment in Palestine by the formidable Lady Hester Stanhope. So full and so varied, indeed, is the life described in “The Ways of Yesterday/’ that readers of however varied tastes will be able to find something to suit their particular humour. “The Ways of Yesterday,” by A. M. W. Stirling'. (Thornton Butter worth).