But we regret that our space will not allow us to cull even a few of the good things with which the book abounds. The whole volume is exceedingly _piquant_, and replete with that racy wit which is so peculiarly French as to make us believe it a consequence of the _tournure_ of the language itself. But if a Frenchman is invariably witty, he is not the less everlastingly bombastic; and these memoirs are decidedly French. What can we do but smile when we hear any one talk about Châteaubriand’s _Essay upon English Poetry_, with his _Translation of Milton_! as a task which he alone was qualified to execute!—or when we read page after page in which Lamartine is discoursed of as “a noble child, with flaxen locks,” “disporting upon the banks of the Seine,” “picking up Grecian lyres dropped by the mild Chenier,” “enriching them with Christian chords,” and “ravishing the world with new melodies!” What can we do but laugh outright at such phrases as the “sympathetic swan-like cries,” and the “singular lyric precocity of the crystal soul”—of such an ass as the author of Bug-Jargal? So far as mere translation goes, the volume now before us is, in some respects, not very well done. Too little care has been taken in rendering the French idioms by English equivalents; and, because a French writer, through the impulses of his vivacity, cannot avoid telling, in the present tense, a story of the past, it does not follow that such a misusage of language is consonant with the graver genius of the Saxon. Mr. Walsh is always too literal, although sufficiently correct. He should not employ, however, even in translation, such queer words as “to legitimate,” meaning “to legitimatize,” or “to fulmine,” meaning “to fulminate.” At page 211, the force of the compound “_l’homme-calembourg_” is not conveyed by the words “_the_ punster,” even when we italicize _the_. _The walking-pun_, perhaps, is an analogous phrase which might be more properly employed. There is some odd mistake at page 274, where the translator speaks of measuring the diameter of the earth by measuring its _rays_. We presume the word in the original is _rayons_; if so we can only translate it by the Latin _radii_. No doubt a radius, literally, is a ray; but science has its own terms, and _will_ employ them. We should like to see either Mr. Walsh or Monsieur Arago (or both together) trying to measure a _ray_ of the earth. The mechanical execution of the book is good, saving a thousand outrageous typographical blunders, and _that_ lithograph of Thiers. We have no doubt in the world that this gentleman (who ran away during the three days and hid himself in the woods of Montmorency), is a somewhat dirty, insignificant little fellow, and so be it; but we will never be brought to believe that any individual in Christendom ever did or could look half as saucy, or as greasy, as does “Monsieur Mirabeau-mouche” in that picture. * * * * *