* * * * * _My Uncle the Curate. A Novel. By the Author of “The Bachelor of the Albany” etc. New York: Harper & Brothers._ The mere announcement of any thing from the sparkling brain of the Bachelor of the Albany, is sufficient to raise anticipations of brisk and business-like satire, of felicitous expression, and of good-natured representation of the follies of conventional life. The present work evinces more of the novelist, and less of the wit-snapper, than any thing the author has previously written. The story and the characters, though plentifully bespangled with epigrams, are still not immersed and lost in them; and there is not that incessant effort after smartness and point which at one period seemed to be the law of the writer’s mind. Mr. Woodward, the Curate, has some capital traits of character felicitously developed, and his wife, belonging to that kind of women known as everybody’s mother, is drawn to the life. In Mrs. Spenser we have one of those plagues of mankind, who cause more misery than pestilence and war—a nervous, fretful, peevish, unsatisfied, vinegar-souled wife, engaged in slaughtering her husband with pins, and making up for the weakness of her instruments by the continuity of her attacks. Lucy McCracken appears to have been suggested by Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, and she is in every way inferior to the latter in the logic of her artfulness. Dawson, Sidney Spenser, Markham and Vivyan, are all well discriminated delineations of young men, though the lover is the least interesting. The author is something of a bungler in handling the passions and affections, and considered as a man of wit, is singularly blind to the ludicrous effect which his serious scenes often produce. He is a capital laugher at the sentimentalities and agonies of other novelists, but when he ventures into their region he is as far from common sense and natural feeling as any of the dabblers in broken hearts and crushed affections whom he ridicules. * * * * * _The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by H. K Browne. New York: John Wiley. Part I._