We really beg pardon of our readers for covering so much space with this flummery. We intended to despatch it with a thrust or two; but when our pen was once caught in the flimsy stuff, it was difficult to withdraw it again without bringing away considerable portions of the tangle. Moreover, a book of so much pretension is not to be as lightly passed by as its humbler brethren. A book that comes to us in fair type and fine paper, bearing the imprint of a well-known and highly respected publishing house,--a book that invokes the first names in literature and meddles with the higher laws of life, that takes on the airs of a censor and pushes forward into the guild of genius, that by the assumption of its tone and the broadcast scatteration--depend upon it, that is the word--of its odds and ends of learning, or by what hocus-pocus we know not, has attained to a third edition in a country proud of the accuracy and elegance of its scholarship, and that now brings its brazen face to our doors, seeking a welcome at the hearthstones which it has insulted, is not to be dismissed with a simple "Not at home." We have chosen rather to pillory the pretender, pelting him only with such missiles as his own pockets furnished. We now discharge him from custody, bidding him and all his kind bear in mind the assurance, that, while for English genius, English wisdom, English truth, and English love, we have only admiration and gratitude, the time has gone by for English charlatanry to expect from our hands anything but the scourging it deserves. _Essays in Criticism_. By MATTHEW ARNOLD. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. A more satisfactory volume of English prose than this has not come into our hands since the first appearance of the famous "Essays and Reviews." Differing widely from that collection in kind and scope, it yet belongs in the main to the same school of liberal thought in which England has made of late such rapid strides.