We think we discern a sneer upon the bilious and discontented cheeks of a certain class of writers as they read the last two words. We know the gentlemen well. They have been scribbling for the last few years with a “oneness of purpose,” as creditable to their understandings as it is significant of their ulterior designs. “Now and Then” is by no means written for their especial delectation, although, if properly and humbly read by the “earnest” worthies, it would go far to secure their moral improvement. The volume neither laughs at ecclesiastical institutions, nor ridicules the professors of religion. It does not make fun of every thing serious, until the unsophisticated reader is reduced to wondering whether he is not in duty bound to smile when and wherever his previous education had instructed him to weep: it does not consider that a man born on a dunghill has all the virtues of Adam before he transgressed, and that another, brought into life on a bed of down in Grosvenor Square, has, poor devil, in virtue of his good luck, inherited the vices of Satan and of the whole company of fallen divinities. There are a heap of Cockneys now gaining their miserable bread by the promulgation of such doctrines, who will look down with supreme contempt and biting sarcasm upon the book of which we treat; not, mark you, the _believers_ of such doctrines, but simply the mischievous and impious promulgators. Trust them, they prefer the company of the wealthy and the well-to-do, as they love cheese and beer more profoundly than all the moral beauty that the earth contains. Catch them giving sixpence to a beggar on a snowy day, or uttering a syllable of human kindness, which costs them nothing, to a houseless wanderer, no one being by. We hold it to be a great jewel in the coronet of Mr Warren, that he sets his face manfully, in the present instance, against the fashion which all honest men and true must deprecate. The freedom from the prevailing cant which his book exhibits, is most refreshing; the certain upturning of misshapen noses which its very tendency must effect, the greatest compliment yet paid to his honest exertions in the cause of morality, and of the holy faith which he professes.