Lord Jeffrey, in a letter to Campbell, on the subject of “Gertrude of Wyoming,” very felicitously indicates the prominent faults of that exquisite poem, and of Campbell’s general artistic method. “The most dangerous faults,” he says, “are your faults of diction. There is a good deal of obscurity in many passages—in others a strained and unnatural expression—an appearance of labor and hardness; you have hammered the metal in some places till it had lost all its ductility. These are not great faults, but they are blemishes; and as dunces will find them out—noodles will see them when they are pointed to. I wish you had courage to correct, or rather to avoid them, for with you they are faults of over-finishing, and not of negligence. I have another fault to charge you with in private—for which I am more angry with you than for all the rest. Your timidity, or fastidiousness, or some other knavish quality, will not let you give your conceptions glowing, and bold, and powerful, as they present themselves, but you must chasten, and refine, and soften them, forsooth, till half their nature and grandeur is chiseled away from them.” An interesting feature in this biography is the number of poems it contains not included in any edition of Campbell’s works, and the original drafts it gives of many of Campbell’s well-known productions. The “Battle of the Baltic” originally contained twenty-seven stanzas, and in that shape was enclosed in a letter to Scott. We extract a specimen of the omitted verses: Not such a mind possessed England’s tar; ’Twas the love of nobler game Set his oaken heart on flame, For to him ’twas all the same, Sport or war. All hands and eyes on watch As they keep; By their motion light as wings, By each step that haughty springs, You might know them for the kings Of the deep! ’Twas the Edgar first that smote Denmark’s line; As her flag the foremost soared, Murray stamped his foot on board, And a hundred cannons roared At the sign! This Life of Campbell, and the Life of Southey, now in course of publication by the same house, are the best literary biographies we have had since The Life of Mackintosh, edited by his Son. We wish the Harpers would reprint the latter, as there has been no complete American edition of it ever published. It contains more matter than any similar work since Moore’s Life of Byron. * * * * * _The National Cook Book. By a Lady of Philadelphia, a Practical Housewife. Philada.: Robert E. Peterson. 1 vol. 12 mo._