note of pure transparent sentiment rare in the epoch of Louis Philippe. She had, in an uncommon degree, the gift of intelligent admiration: her addresses to the great men of her time appear to be as far as possible from a spirit of calculation or self-interest, but they secured her an answering sympathy all the more valuable as it was never bargained for. Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas; Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars, when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her; Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now Madame Emile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict better the luxury of grief?" M. Raspail, the austere republican, called her the tenth muse, the muse of virtue; and Sainte-Beuve himself, thinking less of her literary life than of her family life and manifold compassions, terms her the "Mater Dolorosa of poetry." His memoir, however, is valuable for its own grace as much as for the modest sweetness of its subject: without his friendly eloquence the name of Madame Desbordes-Valmore would not have got beyond a kind of personal circle of native admirers, nor the present translator have rendered for foreign ears the whispering story of her pure deeds and the plaintive numbers of her verse. Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's School-days." London: Macmillan & Co. Here is a book that was never meant to be dissected and analyzed by critics and reviewers. It is not hard to imagine the "discomfort and annoyance" which the writer has (he tells us) felt in consenting to give to the public a memoir compiled for a private family circle. Still, on the whole, it is altogether well, and there is good reason to call attention to it, for there is much benefit in the book for many readers. It is the loving record of a life that, from first to last, never challenged the world's attention--that was connected with no great movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence, and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this story of it.