This volume, one of the pleasantest of Hood’s many pleasant books, was first published in 1840, and has never before been reprinted. It is composed of letters, written by the various members of a family traveling up the Rhine, and conceived somewhat after the model of Humphrey Clinker. Hood’s characters are a hypochondriac, a widow, a dashing young gentleman, and a servant maid; and it is in exhibiting the oddities and humors of these, rather than in any description of the scenery, that the charm of the book consists. The letters of Martha Penny, the servant maid, are the gems of the volume. Her spelling and grammar are so felicitous in their infelicities, as to amount to a kind of genius; and the character is one of the best that Hood ever delineated. Her letter, describing the effects of a storm at sea, is perhaps the richest in the volume. “To add to my frite,” she says, “down flumps the stewardis on her nees and begins shrieking we shall be pitcht all over! Think I if she give up we may prepair for our watery graves. At sich crisisus theres nothing like religun and if I repeted my catkism wunce I said it a hundered times over and never wunce rite. The only comfort I had besides Christianity was to give Missus warnin witch I did over and over between her attax. At last Martha says she we are going to a world where there is no sitivations. What an idear! But our superiors are always shy of our society, as if hevin abuv was too good for servants. Talking of superiers there was a Tittled Lady in Bed in the cabbin that sent every five minits for the capting, till at long and at last he got Crusty. Capting says she I insist on your gitting the ship more out of the wind. I wish I could says he. Dont you no who I ham, says she vary dignifide.” The last touch is especially fine. * * * * * _A Step from the New World to the Old and Back Again: With Thoughts on the Good and Evil in Both. By Henry P. Tappan. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 2 vols. 12mo._