The style of Bolingbroke is unrivalled. No library is perfect without his works, and they should be studied by the public speaker, or the author, night and day. We boldly aver that there does not exist a writer in the language, the reading of whose works, so far as diction is concerned, would be more beneficial to young men. Bolingbroke’s choice of words is singularly fine. Nothing can be clearer, stronger, or more copious than his language. Terse, nervous, epigrammatic; diffuse in general, but condensed when necessary; at times racy, at times vehement, at times compact as iron; rhetorical, yet easy; elegant, yet convincing; bold, rapid and declamatory, his writings carry one away like a spoken harangue, without betraying the carelessness of the extemporaneous style. The very absence of method, which, in others, would be faulty, is, in Bolingbroke, from the air of frankness it gives to his cause, and its consistency with his essentially oratorical style, a merit: at least not a defect. In grace he has no equal. The euphony of his sentences is like the liquid flow of a river. No writer in the English tongue so much resembles Cicero—to our mind—as Bolingbroke. Burke has been called his rival here; but Burke wanted the ease, the elegance, the chastened imagery of Tully, and in all of these St. John rivalled the friend of Atticus. Deeply imbued with the Latin literature, Bolingbroke has caught, as it were, the spirit of the Augustan age; and we feel, in perusing his pages, the same chastened delight which we enjoy over no modern, and only over Tully among the ancients. We repeat it: no library is complete without these volumes. Hitherto, the difficulty of obtaining a set of Bolingbroke’s Works, and the high price at which the English editions were sold, have confined the study of his writings comparatively to a few. The life of Bolingbroke, affixed to these volumes, is altogether a mongrel affair, being made up of shreds and patches, like an old grandam’s best bed-quilt. The text is Goldsmith, interpolated with Brougham, Cooke, and the Encyclopædia. It is true, the preface states this at large, but it also conveys the impression that the memoir has been re-written, and that only the _materials_ have been used. Now, if so, a more unequal, ragged, piebald piece of composition was never perpetrated than this same memoir, and the author—if any one but a pair of scissors there be—ought to be condemned to the now obsolete, but not less effective punishment, of the cutty-stool. If ever a man deserved a horse-pond, it is the inditer of this biography. * * * * * _A Memoir of the Very Reverend Theobald Mathew. With an Account of the Rise and Progress of Temperance in Ireland. By the Reverend James Bermingham, of Borisokane. Edited by_ P. H. Morris, M. D., _and by whom is added the Evil Effects of Drunkenness Physiologically Explained. Alexander V. Blake: New York._