before the chapters which preceded it were even thought of. The Culprit Fay, we are told by the biographer of Drake, was composed hastily among the Highlands of the Hudson, in the summer of 1819. The author was walking with some friends on a warm moonlight evening, when one of the party remarked that it would be difficult to write a fairy poem, purely imaginative, without the aid of human characters. When the party was reassembled two or three days afterward, The Culprit Fay was read to them, nearly as it is now printed. Drake placed a very modest estimate on his own productions, and it is believed that but a small portion of them have been preserved. When on his death-bed, a friend inquired of him what disposition he would have made of his poems. "Oh, burn them," he replied; "they are quite valueless." Written copies of a number of them were, however, in circulation, and some had been incorrectly printed in the periodicals; and for this reason was published the single collection of them which has appeared. A mere rumor that Erasmus' Colloquies had got into the Index Expurgatorius, sold an impression of four-and-twenty thousand copies, and made the fortune of the publisher. Fenelon's Adventures of Telemachus, which had hitherto remained in manuscript, was given to the world by the dishonesty of a servant who had been employed to have the work copied, but who sold it to a bookseller without disclosing the author's name. The king, having been told that it was from the pen of the Archbishop of Cambrai, and probably sharing an unfounded suspicion then current, that the book was a satire on the court, took measures to suppress it; but a few copies escaped seizure, and an imperfect edition was printed in Holland in 1699. Others followed rapidly, and for a long time the press was unable to keep up with the public demand. Sir Matthew Hale wrote four volumes in folio, "three of which I have read," says Baxter, "against atheism, Sadduceeism, and infidelity, to prove first the Deity, and then the immortality of man's soul, and then the truth of Christianity and the Holy Scripture, answering the infidel's objections against Scripture. It is strong and masculine, only too tedious for impatient readers. He said he wrote it only at vacant hours in his circuits, to regulate his meditations, finding, that while he wrote down what he thought on, his thoughts were the easier kept close to work, and kept in a method. But I could not persuade him to publish them."