“Amir Khan,” the longest and chief composition of Lucretia, has been long known to the reading public. It was originally published, with others, in a small volume to which Professor Morse, of the American Society of Arts, contributed a Preface. Partly through the Professor, yet no doubt partly through their own merits, the poems found their way to the laureate, Southey, who, after his peculiar fashion, and not unmindful of his previous _furores_ in the case of Kirke White, Chatterton, and others of precocious ability, or at least celebrity, thought proper to _review_ them in the Quarterly. This was at a period when we humbled ourselves, with a subserviency which would have been disgusting had it not been ludicrous, before the crudest critical _dicta_ of Great Britain. It pleased the laureate, after some squibbing in the way of demurrer, to speak of the book in question as follows:—“In these poems there is enough of originality, enough of aspiration, enough of conscious energy, enough of growing power to warrant any expectations, however sanguine, which the patrons and the friends and parents of the deceased could have formed.” Meaning nothing, or rather meaning anything, as we choose to interpret it, this sentence was still sufficient (and in fact the half of it would have been more than sufficient) to establish upon an immovable basis the reputation of Miss Davidson in America. Thenceforward any examination of her true claims to distinction was considered little less than a declaration of heresy. Nor does the awe of the laureate’s _ipse dixit_ seem even yet to have entirely subsided. “The genius of Lucretia Davidson,” says Miss Sedgwick in the very volume now before us, “has had the meed of far more authoritative praise than ours; the following tribute is from the London Quarterly Review.” What this lady—for whom and for whose opinion we still have the highest respect—can mean by calling the praise of Southey “more authoritative” than her own, is a point we shall not pause to determine. _Her_ praise is at least honest, or we hope so. Its “authority” is in exact proportion with each one’s estimate of her judgment. But it would not do to say all this of the author of “Thalaba.” It would not do to say it in the hearing of men who are sane, and who, being sane, have perused the leading articles in the “London Quarterly Review” during the ten or fifteen years prior to that period when Robert Southey, having concocted “The Doctor,” took definitive leave of his wits. In fact, for any thing that we have yet seen or heard to the contrary, the opinion of the laureate, in respect to the poem of “Amir Khan,” is a matter still only known to Robert Southey. But were it known to all the world, as Miss Sedgwick supposes with so charmingly innocent an air;—we mean to say were it really an honest opinion,—this “authoritative praise,”—still it would be worth, in the eyes of every sensible person, only just so much as it demonstrates, or makes a show