The title of this book constitutes its chief, we had almost said its sole, claim to consideration. We open its pleasant-looking pages with pleasant memories of Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, and pleasant anticipations, not of brilliancy, indeed, nor trenchant truth, but of medicine for our weariness, a moment of quiet in the rush and whirl of things, a breath of repose from over the sea to cool and tranquillize these fervid days of ours. We are tranquillized, indeed! We find ourselves straightway in a desert, stuck full of flowers, it is true, from innumerable gardens, but a desert still: for the unhappy exotics have suffered so severely in the transportation as to be scarcely able to hold up their heads, and, where they still preserve their original beauty, only serve to throw into stronger relief the surrounding sterility. It is a medley of dismal platitudes; truths which have been truisms for at least a century, uttered with all the pomp and circumstance of newly discovered laws; quotations garbled, pointless, or dipped in a feeble venom; shreds of learning pieced together, with or without adaptation, in a nondescript patchwork; the fragments of a thousand feasts huddled into one pot, simmered over a slow fire, and served up as a pretty dish to set before a king. The uniformity of the book is wonderful. It is always heavy. Its falsehood is insipid. Its very malice has no pungency. It is dull even where it hates. Now and then we stumble on a paragraph which starts up from the dead level around it, glowing with real fire; but at the end we are sure to find that it is translated from Victor Hugo or transferred from Emerson; and generally these borrowed plumes are so torn and bedraggled in their clumsy removal that the very bird they grew on would scarcely recognize them. There is no intentional, no malign maltreatment, to give us the relief of a real indignation; but we are kept in a state of constant irritation by a series of petty encroachments upon the integrities of literature. There is no law compelling a man to garnish his speech with floating verse; but if he choose to do so, he should make a point of presenting it in its true form. At the very least, if he must garble, let him garble rhythmically, and not add splay feet to spoiled force. One may not have a poetic taste or a musical ear; but if he has fingers and toes, he need not say, "Yet I doubt not through ages one increasing purpose runs."