This is the most delightful of Mr. Tuckerman’s many volumes of essays. It contains twenty-two papers, on as many subjects, is written in a style which evinces a graceful mastery of the resources of language, and is no less fluent in thought than in expression. Perhaps the most pleasing quality of the volume is its wealth of illustration. The writer’s mind is not only affluent in comparison and imagery, but his literary culture is so extensive as to give him a command of those sources of fascination which come from felicitous allusions to the world of authors and books. The object of the volume is finely stated, in an elegantly written preface, to be the search for the good in life, as that good is exhibited to one who can comment kindly on society, and interpret the true and beautiful in common experience. The best papers in the volume are those on New England Philosophy, Art and Artists, Lyric Poetry, Eye-Language, Flowers, Costume, Music, and Conversation. The volume should be on the shelves of every man who has the heart and imagination to enjoy the English essayists, for to that goodly company it is a positive addition. * * * * * _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon, Esq. With Notes by the Rev. H. H. Milman. A New Edition, to which is added a Complete Index of the Whole Work. In six volumes. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co. Vols. 1 & 2._ This is a cheap reprint of the latest and best edition of Gibbon, and when completed will place one of the greatest historical productions in the world within the reach of the most limited means—the price of the whole not amounting to four dollars. Milman’s edition is in some degree founded upon Guizot’s French edition, and includes the principal notes of the latter. Both Milman and Guizot have gone carefully over Gibbon’s authorities, and while they have thus been enabled to correct his misrepresentations, they have also added much which he overlooked, or which has been brought to light since the period in which the history was written. Of the book itself, it may be said, that in the combination of vast erudition with philosophic thought, it is the object of emulous despair to all succeeding historians. The subject is the greatest within the range of historical composition, and Gibbon has so nearly exhausted it that even a philosophical historian like Guizot is contented to be but an annotator when he approaches it. The general reader, after many repeated perusals of the work, continually returns to it for the depth and acuteness of its reflections, the richness and weight of its style, and that masterly irony, sapping a solemn creed with “solemn sneer,” which, though sometimes an expression of the author’s moral deficiencies, and in a few instances disgracefully disingenuous, is still a weapon which makes falsehood and prejudice wither when it merely gleams, and perish when it strikes.