But that is a minor matter. Illustration is a mania of the day--a crotchet of a public whose reading appetite, it is to be feared, is in no very healthy state. From penny tracts to quarto volumes, every thing must have pictures--the more the better--bad ones rather than none. Turning from the graphic embellishments of the books before us, we revert to the letterpress, and to the endeavour to sift something of interest or value out of the nine hundred pages through which, in conscientious fulfilment of our critical duties, we have wearisomely toiled. The work in question purports to be a life of Dost Mohammed Khan, the well-known Amir of Kabul. It is what it professes to be, but it is also a great deal more; the whole has been named from a part. A history of the affairs of Sindh occupies nearly half a volume, and consists chiefly of copious extracts from works already published--such as _Pottinger's Bilochistan_, _Dr Burnes' Visit to the Court of Sindh_, _Sir A. Burnes' Travels in Bokhara_, _Thornton's British India_--from which sources the unscrupulous Lal helps himself unsparingly, and with scarce a word of apology either to reader or writer. We have long accounts of Russian intrigues, and of those alarming plots and combinations which frightened Lords Auckland and Palmerston from their propriety, and led to our interference and reverses in Afghanistan--interference so impotently followed up, reverses which neither have been nor ever can be fully redeemed. The mismanagement or incapacity of our political agents during the short time that we maintained the unfortunate Shah Shuja on the throne of Kabul, is another fertile topic for the verbose Kashmirian; but this, it must be observed, is one of the best portions of his book, although it has no very direct reference to Dost Mohammed, "the lion of my subject and hero of my tale," as his historian styles him. Numerous copies of despatches, treaties and diplomatic correspondence, sundry testimonies of Mr. Lal's abilities and services, and various extraneous matters, complete the volumes. To give the barest outline of so voluminous a work would lead us far beyond our allotted limits. We should even be puzzled to effect the analysis of the first half volume, which sketches the history of Afghanistan from the period when Payandah Khan, chief of the powerful Barakzai tribe and father of Dost Mohammed, was the prime favourite and triumphant general of Taimur Shah, up to the date when the Dost himself, after a long series of bloody wars, sat upon the throne, was in the zenith of his prosperity, and when British diplomatists first began to make and meddle in the affairs of his kingdom. The perpetually recurring changes, the revolts, revolutions, and usurpations of which Afghanistan was the scene with little intermission during the whole of that period, the absence of dates, which Mohan Lal accounts for by the loss of his manuscripts during the