The English of the work is sometimes even amusing. We have continually, for example, _eat_, the present, for _ate_, the perfect—see page 17. At page 16, we have this delightful sentence—“Captain Hammersley, however, _never_ took further notice of me, but continued to recount, for the amusement of those _about_, several excellent stories of his military career, which I confess were heard with every _test_ of delight by all save me.” At page 357 we have some sage talk about “the entire of the army;” and at page 368, the accomplished O’Malley speaks of “_drawing_ a last look upon his sweetheart.” These things arrest our attention as we open the book at random. It abounds in them, and in vulgarisms even much worse than they. But why speak of vulgarisms of language? There is a disgusting vulgarism of thought which pervades and contaminates this whole production, and from which a delicate or lofty mind will shrink as from a pestilence. Not the least repulsive manifestation of this leprosy is to be found in the author’s blind and grovelling worship of mere rank. Of the Prince Regent, that filthy compound of all that is bestial—that lazar-house of all moral corruption—he scruples not to speak in terms of the grossest adulation—sneering at Edmund Burke in the same villainous breath in which he extols the talents, the graces and _the virtues_ of George the Fourth! That any man, to-day, can be found so degraded in heart as to style this reprobate, “one who, in every feeling of his nature, and in every feature of his deportment was every inch a prince”—is matter for grave reflection and sorrowful debate. The American, at least, who shall peruse the concluding pages of the book now under review, and not turn in disgust from the base sycophancy which infects them, is unworthy of his country and his name. But the truth is, that a gross and contracted soul renders itself unquestionably manifest in almost every line of the composition. And this—_this_ is the _work_, in respect to which its author, aping the airs of intellect, prates about his “haggard cheek,” his “sunken eye,” his “aching and tired head,” his “nights of toil” and (Good Heavens!) his “days of _thought_!” That the thing is popular we grant—while that we cannot deny the fact, we grieve. But the career of true taste is onward—and now more vigorously onward than ever—and the period, perhaps, is not hopelessly distant, when, in decrying the mere balderdash of such matters as “Charles O’Malley,” we shall do less violence to the feelings and judgment even of the populace, than, we much fear, has been done to-day. ----- [3] Nickname for the populace in the middle ages [4] Callimachus—_Hymn to Apollo_. * * * * * _Ballads and other Poems. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Author of “Voices of the Night,” “Hyperion,” etc.: Second Edition. John Owen: Cambridge._