Our author exercises the utmost severity of his pertness on the female poets whom he selects from our “forests of versifiers;” but we are too gallant to quote his impertinences. There is a good chapter on Audubon, and the introductory paragraph of description is so striking that we cannot refrain from extracting it. “Had you visited the English drawing-rooms in 1832, you would have remarked in the midst of a philosophic crowd, speaking obscurely, and overthrowing without pity the highest questions of metaphysics, a man very different from those about him. The absurd and mean European dress could not disguise that simple and almost wild dignity which is found in the bosom of the solitude which nurses it. While men of letters, a vain and talking race, disputed in the conversational arena, the prize of epigram or the laurels of pedantry, the man of whom I speak remained standing, head erect, with free, proud eye, silent, modest, listening sometimes with disdainful, though not caustic air to the æsthetic tumult, which seemed to astonish him. If he spoke it was at an interval of repose; with one word he discovered an error, and brought back discussion to its principle and its object. A certain naive and wild good sense animated his language, which was just, moderate and energetic. His long, black, waving hair was parted naturally upon his smooth white forehead, upon a front capable of containing and guarding the fires of thought. In his whole dress there was an air of singular neatness; you would have said that the waters of some brook, running through the untrodden forest, and bathing the roots of oaks old as the world, had served him for a mirror. . . . At the sight of that long hair, that bared throat, the independent manner, the manly elegance which characterized him, you would have said, ‘that man has not lived long in old Europe.’” In taking leave of this volume it may be proper to remark, that it is rather a series of sketches, published originally in a separate form, than a connected view of American institutions and literature. This will account, in some degree, for its lack of proportion and its omissions. As a whole, if a conglomerate can be called a whole, it is a shrewd, mischievous, witty, sparkling, egotistical, flippant, free-and-easy, cut-and-come-again, impertinent, inconsistent, sprightly, Frenchified performance, sipping “the foam of many minds.” * * * * * _The Clifford Family; or A Tale of the Old Dominion. By One of her Daughters. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo._