government, “with youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.” Indeed, though the book is invaluable as a picture of a defunct social state, it becomes tiresome at last with all its brightness and novelty, and the necessity of some affectation at least of noble sentiment is painfully felt to relieve the monotony of its brilliant baseness—some smiting sentences, here and there, to rend the gauzy veil that these flippant libertines have spread over the pandemonium on which their delicious palace of pleasure is built. The Louis the Fifteenth, whose court these volumes describe, is the same Louis whose death was thus announced by an eminent priest to the mob of courtiers who had shared with their monarch the pillage of France: “Louis, the well-beloved, sleeps in the Lord!” “If each a mass of laziness and lust sleep in the Lord, who, think you, sleeps elsewhere?” is Carlyle’s fierce answer. * * * * * _A Legend of the Waldenses, and Other Tales. By Mary B. Windle. William Moore: Philadelphia._ We take some reproach to ourselves for having omitted to notice the third edition of this very unpretending but very agreeable little volume, which has been on our table for some time past, from the pen of an accomplished lady contributor to many of our monthly magazines. It has decided merit in itself, and gives promise of yet more when the fair writer shall wield a more exercised pen. The style is graceful and pleasant, though occasionally marred by an incorrectly formed and inharmonious word, such, for instance, as “Huguenotic,” where the _ic_ is superfluous as to sense, and ungrateful as to sound. The descriptions of scenery are fresh and vivid; the characters often well conceived and forcibly drawn, and the incidents and conversations quite up to, if not above, the ordinary standard of historical romance.