Mr. Chambers's pamphlet is one that we should hardly have expected from the editor of the best collection of ballads in the language before that of Professor Child. Directly in the teeth of all probability, he attributes the bulk of the _romantic_ Scottish ballads to Lady Wardlaw, who wrote "Hardyknute." This is one of those theories (like that of Lord Bacon being the author of Shakspeare's plays) which cannot be argued, but which every one familiar with the subject challenges peremptorily. Without going very deeply into the matter, Mr. Norval Clyne has put in a clever plea in arrest of judgment. The truth is, that, in the present state of our knowledge, "Hardyknute" could not pass muster as an antique better than "Vortigern," or the poems of "Master Rowley"; and the notion that Lady Wardlaw could have written "Sir Patrick Spens" will not hold water better than a sieve, when we consider how hopelessly inferior are the imitations of old ballads written by Scott, with fifty times her familiarity with the originals, and a man of genius besides. * * * * * _Miss Gilbert's Career_. An American Story. By J.G. HOLLAND. New York: Charles Scribner. There is scarcely a more hazardous experiment for any novelist than "a novel with a purpose." If the moral does not run away with the story, it is in most cases only because the author's lucky star has made the moral too feeble, in spite of his efforts, to do that or anything else,--in other words, because his book has fortunately defeated its own object. That any clever girl will be kept from the perilous paths of authorship by the warnings, however strongly inculcated, of any novel whatever, we are not prepared to assert: we venture to say no one will be deterred by the history of Miss Fanny Gilbert. If a woman's happiness is to be found in love, and not in fame, the question nevertheless recurs,--What is she to do before the love comes? Our author only shows that his heroine's restless unhappiness was owing to her having to wait for her heart to be awakened: to prove what he desires to prove, he should demonstrate that it was owing to her having adopted authorship during the time of her waiting. During that time, Miss Fanny Gilbert wrote novels, and was unhappy: would she have been happy, if, in the interval, she had chronicled small beer? And even admitting that her authorship caused her unhappiness, we can scarcely believe Dr. Holland prepared to say, after having allowed his heroine a real talent, as one condition of the problem, that she ought to have concealed that talent in the decorous napkin of silence.