Having done all this, our editor sat down to his task of arrangement and revision. But the Coxe-Petrarchan MSS. appear to have defied his powers. “If any one” says he, “suspects me of dealing unfairly with the Archdeacon, let him go to the Library of the British Museum and peruse the work in question—his skepticism will find its reward. He will agree with me that the Coxeian MS. is placed in a wrong part of the Museum. It should not be in the library, but among the bottled abortions of anatomy, or the wooden visages of the South Sea idols.” Mr. Campbell’s kind offer of permitting any skeptic to satisfy himself by going to the Museum and “_perusing_” a huge book which he has just declared to be unfit for perusal, puts us much in mind of the candor of the Munchausens and Ferdinand Mendez Pintos, who, telling incredible tales of lands at the South Pole or mountains in the moon, confound all doubters with a request to proceed and satisfy themselves by personal inspection. One thing is certainly _very_ strange:—that Mr. Campbell did not think of looking at “the Coxe-Petrarchan MS.” in the first place—in the beginning of things—before “surrounding himself with as many books as he could obtain,” and especially before “applying himself assiduously to the study of Italian literature, which he had neglected for many years.” He would have saved himself much trouble, and the Archdeacon might have been spared some abuse. What particularly surprises us in this volume—a large and handsomely printed octavo—is _its slovenliness of style_. Such a charge as this has never before been urged against the author of “Hohenlinden.” In general he is scrupulously correct. The Archdeacon seems to have bewildered his brains in unsettling his temper. What are we to make of such phraseology as this, occurring in the very second sentence of the work?—“It was known that the Rev. Archdeacon Coxe had bequeathed to the Library of the British Museum a MS. Life of the Poet which _he_ had written.” Here “_he_” implies the Poet, but is intended to imply the Archdeacon. Such misconstructions are abundant. We observe, also, far more serious defects—defects of _tone_. These sentences, for instance, are in shockingly bad taste—“The most skilful physicians stood aghast at this disease, (the plague.) The charlatan rejoiced at it, _unless it attacked himself_, because it put quackery on a par with skill; and compassionate women _assisted both physicians and quacks in doing no good to their patients ... This was a dance of the king of terrors over the earth, and a very rapid one._” Attempts at humor on such subjects are always exceedingly _low_.