After commenting on Taylor’s mistakes at Palo Alto and criticizing severely his movement upon Monterey, he denounces his generalship in that battle and the armistice which followed. As to Buena Vista, he evidently thinks that it was won in spite of Taylor, and he says that the battle was saved once by the brilliant courage and hard fighting of Davis’s Mississippi regiment, and again by the timely and splendid execution of Bragg’s battery; that Davis suggested his own movement, and that Bragg moved without orders in the direction of the plateau, and both came in at the proper hour, and were both successful――giving fresh proof of the “supremacy of fortune in war.” His criticisms of Scott are intensely bitter, and he says that the first great cause of American success in the operations around the City of Mexico lay in the bravery and courage of the army, and not in the ability and skill of the General-in-Chief, who (in our author’s opinion) gave more attention to politics and his own personal position than to the operations of the war. Santa Anna is skillfully and ably portrayed, and appears as the most remarkable figure on either side. Ripley charges that Scott was successfully duped by the Mexican from the outset of his movement from Puebla till the capture of the city. With all its faults, this book of Ripley’s is the very best history of the war with Mexico that has been written, and it will probably always remain the standard military history of the war, as Kinglake’s is of the Crimean contest, and Napier’s of the Peninsular War――the two military histories of surpassing excellence. Its author, who is still alive and in the perfection of his powers, ought to revise it by the light of subsequent events, and leave it to his country as an imperishable record of the most glorious war which the Union has ever fought. THE MEXICAN WAR: A History of its Origin, with a detailed Account of its Victories, which terminated in the Surrender of the Capital, with Official Despatches of the Generals. By Edward D. Mansfield, a graduate of the United States Military Academy. Illustrated with Maps and Engravings. New York. 1848. 12mo, 343 pages. This author was born in Connecticut in 1801. His father afterwards became the first Professor of Natural Philosophy at West Point, and there the son graduated in 1819. Declining a commission in the Corps of Engineers, he resumed his studies at Princeton and graduated there in 1822. He then practiced law in Connecticut, whence he removed to Cincinnati, and practiced law there till 1836, when he abandoned law for literature.