imitation was not beyond his powers. The general character of the play shows that Shakspeare, at any rate, merely contributed to it. It is conceived and developed in the hot and hectic style of Fletcher, and abounds in his strained heroics and gratuitous obscenities. The Jailor's Daughter, a coarse caricature of Ophelia, is one of the greatest crimes against the sacredness of misery which a poet ever perpetrated. Schlegel said of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, that they were not only Shakspeare's, but in his opinion deserved to be classed among his best and maturest works. This is the most ridiculous judgment which a great critic ever made, and coming as it does, after the author's profound view of Shakspeare's genius, is as singular as it is ridiculous. _Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By Alphonse de Lamartine. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 2 vols. 12mo._ Lamartine is a man of fine genius and great courage, but both as an author and politician is a sentimentalist. His characteristic mental quality, that of seeing all external objects through a luminous mist exhaling from his heart and imagination, is as prominent in the present volume of travels as in his political speeches and state papers. He sees nothing in clear, white light; every thing through a personal medium. To use a distinction of an ingenious analyst, he tells you rather of the beauty and truth of his feelings than the beauty and truth he feels; and accordingly his sentimentality is closely allied to vanity. This absence of clear perception is not the result of his being a poet, but of his being a poet of the second class. Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, even Milton, would not fail in politics from a similar lack of seeing things as they are. We believe that Homer and Shakspeare might have made better statesmen than Pericles and Bacon. The great poet fails in practical life not from seeing things through a distorting medium, but from viewing them in relation to an ideal standard. This was the case with Milton. Now Lamartine is in the habit of _Lamartinizing_ the whole world in his writings. The mirror he holds up to life and nature simply reflects himself. He cannot pass beyond his own individuality--he has no objective insight.