of original sketches; he has not built a temple, but only piled together the unfinished blocks of which it was to be composed. This is the great fault into which Barante, Sismondi, and Michelet have fallen. In their anxiety to be faithful, they have sometimes become tedious; in their desire to recount nothing that was not true, they have narrated much that was neither material nor interesting. Barante, in particular, has utterly ruined his otherwise highly interesting history of the Dukes of Burgundy by this error. We have bulls of the Popes, marriage-contracts, feudal charters, treaties of alliance, and other similar instruments, quoted _ad longum_ in the text of the history, till no one but an enthusiastic antiquary or half-cracked genealogist can go on with the work. The same mistake is painfully conspicuous in Sismondi's _Histoire des Francais_. Fifteen out of his valuable thirty volumes are taken up with quotations from public records or instruments. It is impossible to conceive a greater mistake, in a composition which is intended not merely for learned men or antiquaries, but for the great body of ordinary readers. The authors of these works are so immersed in their own ideas and researches, they are so enamoured of their favourite antiquities, that they forget that the world in general is far from sharing their enthusiasm, and that many things, which to them are of the highest possible interest and importance, seem to the great bulk of readers immaterial or tedious. The two Thierrys have, in a great measure, avoided this fatal error; for, though their narratives are as much based on original and contemporary authorities as any histories can be, the quotations are usually given in an abbreviated form in the notes, and the text is, in general, an unbroken narrative, in their own perspicuous and graphic language. Thence, in a great measure, the popularity and interest of their works. Michaud indulges more in lengthened quotations in his text from the old chronicles, or their mere paraphrases into his own language; their frequency is the great defect of his valuable history. But the variety and interest of the subjects render this mosaic species of composition more excusable, and less repugnant to good taste, in the account of the Crusades, than it would be, perhaps, in the annals of any other human transactions. As a specimen of our author's powers and style of description, we subjoin a translation of the animated narrative he gives from the old historians of the famous battle of Dorislaus, which first subjected the coasts of Asia Minor to the arms of the Crusaders.