The present volume is elegantly printed, and will doubtless have a run. It is full of matter, and that of the most interesting kind. No reader of Lamb, especially, will be without it. _Modern French Literature. By L. Raymond de Vericour. Edited by W. S. Chase, A. M. Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln. 1 vol. 12mo._ This work is the English production of a native Frenchman, and was written for one of Chambers's series of books for the people. It is edited, with notes alluding particularly to writers prominent in the late French Revolution, by a young American scholar, who has recently resided in France. The book, though deficient and sometimes incorrect in details, deserves much praise for its general correctness and accuracy. The author, though by no means a critic of the first class, is altogether above the herd of Grub street hacks who commonly undertake the popularizing of literary history. He is no Winstansley and no Cibber. The range of his reading appears to be extensive. His judgments are somewhat those of a school-master, but one of the highest grade. There are several amusing errors relating to the position of English authors, to some of which we cannot help alluding, as they seem to have escaped the vigilant eye of the editor. Speaking of Guizot and Sismondi as the leaders of the school of French philosophical historians, he remarks that "the English language possesses some good specimens of this class of history; the most remarkable are Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the works of Mr. Millar." This is as if the author had said that England possessed some good specimens of the Romantic Drama, the most remarkable being Shakspeare's Macbeth and the works of Mr. Colman. Again, in speaking of the novels of Paul de Kock, and protesting against those English critics who call him the first writer of his time and country, he says that it is as ridiculous as it would be in Frenchmen to exalt the novels of Charles Dickens above Ivanhoe, _Philip Augustus_ and Eugene Aram, The idea of a Frenchman thinking it a paradox to rank Dickens above James, or even Bulwer, shows how difficult it is for a foreigner, especially a Frenchman, to pass beyond the external form of English literature. The author deserves the praise of being a sensible man, in the English meaning of the phrase. There is one sentence in his introductory which proves that his mind has escaped one besetting sin of the French intellect, which has prevented its successful cultivation of politics as a practical science. In speaking of the histories of Thiers and Mignet, he says that they "have hatched a swarm of _Jeunes Prances_, vociferating in their wild aberrations, emphatic eulogies on Marat, Coulhon and Robespierre, and breathing a love of blood and destruction, which they call the progressive march of events."