Mr. Bixby, the publisher of this elegant little volume, has done a great deal in his selection of books for republication for the elevation of public taste. To him we owe the only editions we have of Goethe’s Faust, and Correspondence of Southey’s Translation of the Chronicle of the Cid, and of a number of other valuable works. Having removed from Lowell to New York, we trust that he will continue his speculations on public taste; and as an earnest of what he intends to do, we hail with much pleasure this handsome edition of Cousin’s celebrated dissertation on Beauty, a work written with all that accomplished philosopher’s force and brilliancy of style, evincing his usual keenness of analysis and range of generalization, and as readable as it is valuable. We commend it especially to those English readers who are followers of Alison and Jeffrey. The subject discussed is one of the most important in the metaphysics of criticism, and though we cannot say that Cousin has exhausted it, he has presented his own views in a rhetoric so lucid that he cannot fail to charm even the readers whom he may not convince. * * * * * _Southey’s Commonplace Book. Edited by his Son-in-Law, John Wood Warter, B. D. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 8vo._ This volume is calculated to convey even a new idea of the variety of Southey’s studies, and the exhaustlessness of his capacity of labor. The number of his works is sufficiently surprising, convicting as it does most literary men either of indolence or barrenness, but we find that in addition to writing his original productions, he was in the custom of transcribing largely from books as he read them, and the present volume, representing but a portion of these labors, would appear to most readers a work for a life. It consists of striking extracts from a large variety of authors, most of them antiquated to the reader of the present day, and illustrating the manners, custom, opinions, and sentiments of Englishmen for the last three centuries. The editor, who reports himself as Southey’s son-in-law, is an excellent specimen of a snob, who cannot write a sentence without writing himself down an ass. The Harpers have issued the volume in clear type, on white paper, at about one-fifth the price of the English edition. * * * * * _A Compendium of Ecclesiastical History. By Dr. John C. L. Gieseler. Translated from the German by Samuel Davidson, LL. D. New York: Harper & Brothers. 2 vols. 8vo._