A thing all life and sunshine, A glad and happy child, With spirits ever changing, Half earnest and half wild; As fleet a little fairy As ever graced a dell, Or frolicked in a blossom, Is our sweet Rosabelle! * * * * * REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. _Lives of the Early British Dramatists. By Thomas Campbell, Leigh Hunt, George Darley and William Gifford. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart. 1 vol. 12mo._ This volume contains the biographies prefixed to Moxon’s library editions of the elder dramatists. The Life of Shakspeare, by Campbell, embodies all that is known of the poet, with some reasonable conjectures in regard to what is unknown, together with a short criticism on each of the plays. Though it has not that sustained excellence, either in composition or criticism, we might expect from the pen of such a writer, it still abounds in felicitous expressions and striking remarks, and, with the exception of De Quincy’s Life of Shakspeare, published in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the most interesting biography of Shakspeare, for the general reader, we can bring to mind. A few of the criticisms are very lame, and all of them imperfect—but the last objection is a natural consequence of the limited space in which the life is compressed. The style glitters occasionally with those smart impertinences which Campbell affected in his later compositions. Some of these are exceedingly pleasant. Thus in speaking of Much Ado About Nothing, he remarks that he once knew such a pair as Benedick and Beatrice. “The lady was a perfect Beatrice; she railed hypocritically at wedlock before her marriage, and with bitter sincerity after it. She and her Benedick now live apart, but with entire reciprocity of sentiments, each devoutly wishing that the other may soon pass into a better world.” Again, in some slight observations on Coriolanus, which neither charity nor flattery could call criticism, there occurs a good hit at a common play-house profanation: “The enlightened public, in 1682, permitted Nahum Tate, _the executioner of King David_, to correct the plays of Shakspeare, and he laid his hangman hands on Coriolanus. . . . This mode of rewriting Shakspeare, was, for the time being, called correcting the saint of our stage. In like manner the Russians correct their patron saint when they find him deaf to their prayers for more favorable weather; they take him out in his wooden effigy and whip him soundly and publicly. I suspect they borrowed this custom from our mode of correcting Shakspeare.”