Though we do not find in Dr. Vaughan the fascinating qualities which we have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded, sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons,--a supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,--an aptitude on which French influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in aesthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were no reproduction of Saxon models. But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events, Dr. Vaughan's history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of the facts with which it deals. _Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago; with Other Things_. By the Author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 121. In noticing the "New Priest," in a former number of the "ATLANTIC," we had occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature, his comic power, and his original conception of character. At the same time we could not but feel that a certain tendency to multiplicity of detail, and a neglect of form or insensibility to it, hindered the book of that direct and vigorous effect which its power and variety of resource would otherwise have produced. Something of the same impression is made by the present volume. There are glimpses in it of real genius, but it shows itself generally here and there only, as the natural outcrop, seldom in the bars and ingots which give proof of patient mining and smelting at furnace-heat, still more seldom in the beautiful shapes of artistic elaboration. Here, again, we find the same unborrowed feeling for outward Nature and familiarity with her moods, the same poetic beauty of expression, and in many of the pieces the same overcrowdedness, as if the author would fain say all he could, instead of saying only what he could not help.