The Harpers are printing this entertaining work as fast as the volumes are received from England. The English price is about three dollars and a half a volume; the American twenty-five cents. As a record of Southey’s life, character, and opinions, and as conducting us into the workshop of the greatest of book-makers, the work has great value, apart from its attractive qualities of literary and personal gossip. The impression it leaves of Southey is, on the whole, a favorable one. It makes him appear as an honest, just, active, persistent, independent man,—one who can “toil terribly,”—a staunch friend, a direct and open opponent,—with a good deal of bigotry but no deviltry,—and altogether a person with few of the vices which most commonly beset writers by profession. His letters are admirable, both in themselves and as true specimens of epistolary composition. They show Southey just as he was, quick in forming opinions, confident in expressing them, thoroughly convinced that he had no intellectual superior in England, freed from envy by self-esteem, and ready to settle every question that is started, by a few dogmatic sentences, which sparkle “like salt in fire.” The singular perfection of his character, considered in respect to its capacity for active intellectual labor, came from his almost miraculous confidence in his faculties and content with himself. He has so high an opinion of Robert Southey as to be unconcerned about any thing which lies beyond the grasp of his powers, and, accordingly, however much we may find reason to doubt or deny many of his statements, they ever have a joyous raciness which tingles pleasantly on our perceptions. The present work commences with a delightful autobiography, which Southey carried down to the age of fifteen. His son then takes up the narrative. This, however, is little more than arranging the correspondence, and explaining allusions in it. The great charm of Southey’s style is its stimulating simplicity; and this is felt throughout the present “Life.” We have marked, in reading the work, a number of passages, which seem to us especially characteristic, and cannot refrain from quoting a few of them. He tells us, in his autobiography, that his elder brother was very beautiful; “so much so, that, when I made my appearance on the 12th of August, 1774, I was sadly disparaged by comparison with him. My mother, asking if it was a boy, was answered by her nurse, in a tone as little favorable to me as it was flattering, ‘Ay, a great ugly boy!’ and she added, when she told me this, ‘God forgive me! when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.’” This is the most perfectly dramatic statement of the most important event which can happen to a person, ever given in a biography; and it conciliates the reader at once.