"Mr. Seddon's works," says Mr. Ruskin, "are the first which represent a truly historic landscape Art; that is to say, they are the first landscapes uniting perfect artistical skill with topographical accuracy,--being directed with stern self-restraint to no other purpose than that of giving to persons who cannot travel trustworthy knowledge of the scenes which ought to be most interesting to them. Whatever degrees of truth may have been attempted or attained by previous artists have been more or less subordinate to pictorial or dramatic effect. In Mr. Seddon's works, the primal object is to place the spectator, as far as Art can do, in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect sensation of its reality, wholly unmodified by the artist's execution." Mr. Ruskin's judgment will not be questioned by those who have seen Seddon's pictures. But it might also be added, that such accuracy as he attained is by no means the result of mere laborious and conscientious copying, but implies and requires the possession of strong and well-balanced imagination. We trust that the extracts we have given may lead lovers of Art to read the whole of the little volume from which they are taken. _Passages from my Autobiography_. By SYDNEY, LADY MORGAN. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. Aged sportiveness is not seductive, and we do not become slaves at the tap of a fan, when the hand that holds it is palsied and withered. We have in the volume before us the melancholy spectacle of an aged female of quality setting her cap at everybody. When an old woman makes up her mind to be young, she invariably overdoes it. The gypsy horse-dealers, when they have a particularly ancient horse to dispose of administer a nostrum to the animal, which has the effect of keeping him continually in motion, and bestowing on him a temporary vivacity which a colt would hardly exhibit. Lady Morgan is unnecessarily frisky. The gypsy's horse, when the effect of the medicine has passed off, becomes more aged and infirm than ever. What a terrible reaction must have been the lot of this old lady, after all the capers she had cut in these passages from her autobiography!