_The Orators of France. By Viscount de Cormenin. Translated by a Member of the New York Bar. With an Essay by J. T. Headley. Edited by G. H. Colton. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo._ The popularity of this book in France has been very great. The present translation is from the fourteenth Paris edition, and shines with the author’s last polishing touches. The introductory essay by Headley, on the rise of French Revolutionary eloquence, and the orators of the Girondists, contains much information which the reader of the sketches will find useful. Mr. Colton has ably edited the work, and supplied some fifty pages of biographical addenda. The work itself is written in sharp, snapping style, each sentence exploding like a percussion cap, and abundantly charged with French enthusiasm and French affectation. The translator has happily seized the spirit of the book, especially its tone of military precision and authoritativeness. The work is comprehensive in its subjects, sketching the prominent orators of the Constituent Assembly, the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration, and the Revolution of July. The portraits of Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon, M. de Serre, General Foy, Constant, Royer Collard, Manuel, Sauzet, La Fayette, Odillon-Barrot, Dupin, Berryer, Lamartine, Guizot and Thiers, are exceedingly interesting, as introducing us to men who are familiar to everybody by name, but of whose personal appearance and style of oratory few readers have had an opportunity of knowing much, from the descriptions of an independent eye and ear witness. The volume is very readable in spite of its affected conciseness and elaborate rhodomontade, and we have little doubt conveys many accurate impressions of the French politicians and orators whose merits it discusses. We know of few volumes better calculated to give the reader a notion of the modern French mind. Where the author, however, criticises politicians to whom he is opposed in principle, he falls generally short of his mark. He has little notion of the meaning of wisdom as applied to action. * * * * * _The Life of Wesley; and Rise and Progress of Methodism. By Robert Southey, L.L.D. Second American Edition, with Notes, &c. By the Rev. Daniel Curry, A. M. New York: Harper & Brothers. 2 vols. 12mo._