This elegantly printed volume, from the press of a firm celebrated all over the country for tasteful books, is one of Mr. Whittier’s most characteristic productions. It contains strongly marked representations of John Bunyan, Thomas Ellwood, James Naylor, Andrew Marvell, John Roberts, Samuel Hopkins, Richard Baxter, William Leggett, Nathaniel P. Rogers, and Robert Dinsmoore. If sympathy be, as Carlyle says, the first condition of insight, there can be no doubt that these striking individualities have sat to the right artist for their portraits. The best pieces in the volume are John Bunyan, Naylor, Marvell and Baxter, which are really mental portraits, glowing with life and meaning. The inspiration of Whittier is impassioned conscience—a conscience as bold and resolute as it is quick and delicate; and wit, imagination, understanding and learning, all work under the direction of this moral force. His general taste is for the strong and daring in action and meditation; his field, the region of great ideas and universal sentiments; but at the same time he has a capacity for embodying the delicacies and refinements of thought and emotion, and in pure pathos and beauty he has few American superiors. All these qualities are displayed in this volume in their most genial action, and the result is a book of equal fineness and power. * * * * * _History of Spanish Literature. By George Ticknor. New York: Harper & Brothers. 3 vols. 8vo._ Ben Jonson was wont to congratulate himself that his solid dramas were called “works,” while the dramatic productions of his contemporaries were but “plays.” Professor Ticknor’s History is eminently a “work,” the result of twenty years of thought and research. To its erudition no other epithet can apply than Dominie Sampson’s epithet of “prodigious.” Every department of the literature of a whole nation, through some ten centuries of existence, the author has thoroughly mastered. No intellectual history with which we are acquainted rests on such a solid basis of authorities. As the author has had the subject in his thoughts from his youth, his erudition, immense as it is, does not encumber his mind. It does not use him, but he uses it; and the result is that the work has the great merit of clear statement. It is not only full of knowledge, but the knowledge is so presented as to be communicated to every reader. Those who are little interested in the subject as a whole, will still find the work attractive from its biographical matter, its analysis of the plot and characters of different plays, and its fine translations of particular poems and ballads. The accounts given of the stories forming the plots of some of the dramas, are interesting as mere tales.