Written at a time when but a tithe of the material which now awaits the historian’s plastic hand was before him; when the great mass of state papers, memoirs and reminiscences which disclose the truth as to the negotiations which preceded the annexation of Texas and the initiation of the war, as well as the events of the conflict itself, were still unpublished and inaccessible; when absolutely nothing was known to us of the negotiations of the Mexican Government except through its correspondence with ours, and when nothing had been ascertained of its military operations except as disclosed upon the battlefield――it is not to be wondered that Mr. Brooks’s history is characterized as being more interesting and attractive than accurate and instructive, since he neither fully understood the great events which he was narrating nor foresaw the great consequences which were to flow from them; nor, moreover, had he learned the lessons which they taught, by which this generation will profit. The fault which we find with his book is one common to all histories, not strictly military, which treat of wars that have just happened; we refer to its extremely prolix descriptions of battles. The reader, however, can pass over such parts of these as do not interest him, and will lose little save the noise and fury of the fights and the lurid phrases which describe them. The most felicitous chapters of the book are those which tell the story of the conquest of New Mexico and California, and of Doniphan’s romantic expedition. To tell these stories well and truly the historian needed all his poetic fancy, and all that rich and exuberant diction with which nature and study had so bountifully endowed him. These chapters recall the pictured pages of Prescott, and are not unworthy of the historian of the Conquest. PICTORIAL HISTORY OF MEXICO AND THE MEXICAN WAR: Comprising an Account of the Ancient Aztec Empire, the Conquest by Cortez, Mexico under the Spaniards, the Mexican Revolution, the Republic, the Texan War, and the recent War with the United States. By John Frost, L.L.D., author of the Pictorial History of the World, etc. Embellished with 500 Engravings of W. Croome and other distinguished Artists. 8vo. Philadelphia. 1856. Nearly five hundred pages of this volume are devoted to the Mexican War. The author, who was born in Maine in 1800, studied at Bowdoin, and then at Harvard, where he graduated in 1822. He then taught school, first at Boston and afterwards at Philadelphia, till 1845. After that time he gave himself up exclusively to the compilation of his many pictorial histories, all of which achieved great popularity, and deserved it.