Congress at its last session appropriated two thousand dollars to commence the purchase of a library for the use of the President of the United States. It is a little singular that a project so eminently useful should have been so long neglected. Its execution has been now undertaken with spirit, under the direction of Mr. Charles Lanman. The birth-day of BURNS was celebrated by a public dinner on the 25th of January at the Astor House, in New York. The poet BRYANT was present as a guest, and made a very happy speech, in which he said that the fact that Burns had taken a local dialect, and made it classical and given it a character of universality, was of itself sufficient to stamp him as a man of the highest order of genius. Mr. HOE, celebrated for his printing presses, has just completed a new one, having eight cylinders, and thus throwing off eight sheets at each revolution, for the use of the _Sun_ newspaper in New York. He was the recipient lately of a public dinner given to him by the proprietors of the paper, at which several of the most eminent literary celebrities in the country were present as guests. The occasion was one of interest: we hope it may be deemed indicative of a growing disposition to tender public honors to the benefactors, as well as to the destroyers, of their race. The literary productions of the month will be found noticed in another department of this Magazine. Several works of interest are promised by the leading publishers. The Harpers have in press a volume of traveling sketches, entitled _Nile Notes_, by an American, which will be found to be one of the best of its kind. It is written with great vivacity and with very marked ability. Many of its chapters are fully equal to _Eothen_, and the work in its general characteristics is not at all inferior to that spirited and admirable book. The Harpers have also in press a work by Mr. H.M. FIELD, giving a succinct history of the _Great Irish Rebellion_ with biographical sketches of the most prominent of the Irish Confederates. It will find a wide circle of readers. The Harpers are also about to publish MAYHEW'S _London Labor and the London Poor in the Nineteenth Century_, made up of his Letters in the London _Morning Chronicle_ upon that subject, revised and extended. These papers reveal a state of things not at all creditable to the English people or to the age in which we live. As originally published in London they excited great attention and have done much toward arousing the public sense of justice to the poor. COOPER, the novelist, has a work in preparation upon the Social History of this country. It will probably, however, not be published until fall. Mr. Putnam has in progress a new and very elegantly printed uniform edition of his novels. Another New York house promise a complete edition of Joanna Baillie's poems, with a new edition of Elizabeth Barret Browning.