Hoping that the vital importance of the subject which I have so imperfectly considered will induce you to pardon the length of this communication, I remain, as ever, Very sincerely yours, ---- ---- * * * * * REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES. _The History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy._ By JOHN FOSTER KIRK. Two Volumes. 8vo. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co. There is probably no period of European history which has been so thoroughly explored and so richly illustrated as the sixteenth century,--that century of great men, lofty ideas, and gigantic enterprise, of intellectual activity, and of tremendous political and religious struggles. The numerous scholars of Continental Europe who have made this era the subject of their researches have generally been content to dig that others might plant and reap, sending forth in abundance the raw material of history to be woven into forms adapted to popular appreciation. In England, also, but only within a very recent period, much solid labor of the same kind has been performed. But the Anglo-Saxon mind, on some sides comparatively deficient in plastic and inventive power, as well as in that of abstract thought, seems to possess in a peculiar degree the faculty of comprehending, representing, and idealizing the varied phases and incessant motion of human life and character. In science it excels less in the discovery than in the application of laws. In what may be termed "pure art," music, sculpture, painting, except where the representation of the Beautiful is subservient to that of the Real, lyrical and idyllic poetry, and all departments of literature in which fancy predominates over reason, it must yield the palm to the genius of Italy, of Germany, of Spain. But in the drama, in the novel, in history, and in works partaking more or less of the character of these, its supremacy is established. Shakespeare and Chaucer are at once the greatest and the most characteristic of English poets; Hogarth and Wilkie, of English painters; Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, Thackeray, and others whose names will at once suggest themselves, of English writers of fiction; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Hallam, of English historians. The drama, in its highest forms, belongs to the past, and that past which was at once too earnest in its spirit and too narrow in its development to allow of a less vivid or a more expansive delineation. Fiction, to judge from a multitude of recent specimens, seems at present on the decline, with some threatenings of a precipitate descent into the inane. History, on the other hand, is only at the outset of its career. Its highest achievements are in all probability reserved for a still distant future, when loftier points of view shall have been attained, and the haze that now hangs over even the nearest and most conspicuous objects in some measure dissipated. Its endeavors hitherto have only shown how much is still to be