We never longed so much for greater space for our Notes upon Books as we do at this season of gifts and good will, when the Christmas Books demand our notice. Never did writer pen a sweeter tale than that which the author of _Mary Barton_ has just produced under the title of _The Moorland Cottage_. It is a purely English story, true to nature as a daguerreotype, without one touch of exaggeration, without the smallest striving after effect, yet so skilfully is it told, so effectually does it tell, so strongly do Maggie's trials and single-mindedness excite our sympathies, that it were hard to decide whether our tears are disposed to flow the more readily at those trials, or at her quiet heroic perseverance in doing right by which they are eventually surmounted. _The Moorland Cottage_ with its skilful and characteristic woodcut illustrations by Birket Foster, will be a favourite for many and many a Christmas yet to come. Rich in all the bibliopolic "pearl and gold" of a quaint and fanciful binding, glancing with holly berries and mistletoe, Mr. Bogue presents us with a volume as interesting as it is characteristic and elegant, _Christmas with the Poets_. A more elegantly printed book was never produced; and it is illustrated with fifty engravings designed and drawn on wood by Birket Foster; engraved by Henry Vizetelly, and printed in tints in a way to render most effective the artist's tasteful, characteristic, and very able drawings. The volume is, as it were, a casket, in which are enshrined all the gems which could be dug out of the rich mines of English poetry; and when we say that the first division treats of Carols from the Anglo-Norman period to the time of the Reformation; that these are followed by Christmas Poems of the Elizabethan period, by Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and their great cotemporaries; that to these succeed Herrick's Poems, and so on, till we have the Christmas verses of our own century, by Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Tennyson, &c., we have done more than all our praise could do, to prove that a fitter present to one who loves poetry could not be found than _Christmas with the Poets_. While if it be a _little_ lover of poetry--mind, not one who little loves poetry, but one who listens with delight to those beloved ditties of the olden times, which as we know charmed Shakspeare's childhood,--learn that an English lady, with the hand and taste of an artist, guided and refined by that purest and holiest of feelings, a mother's love, has illustrated those dear old songs in a way to delight all children; and at the same time charm the most refined. The _Illustrated Ditties of the Olden Time_ is in sooth a delightful volume, and if a love of the beautiful be as closely connected with a love of the moral as wise heads tell us, we know no more agreeable way of early inculcating morality than by circulating this splendid edition of our time-honoured Nursery Rhymes.