fitness consists in the predetermined ease with which nature and man yield occasions for point and antithesis to such a charming fellow as Philarète Chasles. In truth, our author is a French Hazlitt. We will give some of his sprightly decisions on our American writers, in illustration of his manner. He is a joking, but a hanging judge, vivacious as a coxcomb but ruthless as a Jeffries. In speaking of Washington Irving, he overlooks Irving’s subtle sentiment, purely native to his character, and calls him a mere graceful imitator of old English literature. All that he writes “is a somewhat timid copy, on silk paper, of Addison, Steele and Swift,” and “it glows with the gentle, agreeable lustre of watered silk.” He praises Cooper, it is true, and praises him intelligently; but then he calls Joel Barlow’s Columbiad “a poem which has both eloquence and vigor.” Afterward, forgetting this praise, he lumps the “Columbiad,” Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” and Colton’s “Tecumseh,” together, as “epics, colossi of cotton and papier maché, forming a mass of about ten thousand verses, which, however, yield the palm in absurdity to the epic called ”Washington,“ printed in Boston, in 1843.” It is needless to say that the first three of these epics few Americans have ever read, and the last, which is made the butt of our author’s satire, no American ever heard of. We have made particular inquiries of “the man who read Cooper’s Monnikens,”--who, we are happy to inform the public, is gradually recovering from the effects of his gigantic feat--and even that remarkable individual had not yet got on the trail of “Washington, an Epic.” It seems, if we may believe Philarète Chasles, that the poet in question had read in one Dr. Channing’s writings that America had no national literature. Struck with this astounding fact, which had never occurred to him before, he naively says, that he resolved at once to present his country with an epic. Our French critic deposes that the present has been made, but as the country, which ought to know, is ignorant of the matter, it will take more than a foreigner’s assertion to make us believe it. The coming man, with his coming epic, should therefore be awaited in breathless wonder; “Expectation sits i’ th’ air;” let all our astronomers of letters be on the watch, with telescopes sweeping the whole field of observation, for this new and “mighty orb of song” which is to “swim into our ken.”