As a stylist, he is singularly inartificial. Would that our American writers might take a lesson from Arnold's prose, and correct their ambitious rhetoric, affected quaintness, and other varieties of fine writing, by this pure, simple, honest English. The peculiarity of his style, we should say, is its freedom from peculiarity. It is the style of a cultivated, thoughtful man, without the pedantry and mannerism which thoughtful and cultivated men so often contract. Easy, almost careless in its movement, but far from careless in its choice of words, it is neither bookish nor vulgarly colloquial, but maintains a just mean between elaborateness and rudeness. In our young days Macaulay was considered the model writer, and Ruskin has been thought to occupy that place in these latter years; but Macaulay is tumid, and even Ruskin stilted and stiff, in comparison with Matthew Arnold. For the matter, here are fourteen essays, including the three lectures, "On translating Homer," and the "Last Words," not ponderously and oppressively learned, and not abstrusely and obtrusively philosophical, but as full of wisdom and intellectual stimulus and graceful humor as any we know, and more tolerant and liberal than most,--together with a preface as entertaining as any of the essays. So healthy and nourishing a book, in the way of literary essays, has not for a long while appeared among us. We are far from assenting to all of Professor Arnold's positions. We altogether repudiate the statement, that "on Heine, of all German authors who have survived Goethe, incomparably the largest portion of Goethe's mantle fell"; nor can we adopt all his criticisms and views on the Homeric question; nevertheless, we can with the utmost confidence recommend this volume to the literary men of America to whom the author is yet unknown, or known only by name. RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS. A Dictionary of Medical Science; containing a Concise Explanation of the Various Subjects and Terms of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, Therapeutics, Pharmacology, Pharmacy, Surgery, Obstetrics, Medical Jurisprudence, and Dentistry; Notices of Climate, and of Mineral Waters; Formulæ for Officinal, Empirical, and Dietetic Preparations; with the Accentuation and Etymology of the Terms, and the French and other Synonymes, so as to constitute a French as well as English Medical Lexicon. By Robley Dunglison, M.D., LL. D., Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, etc., in the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia. Thoroughly revised, and very greatly modified and augmented. Philadelphia. Blanchard and Lea. 8vo, pp. 1047. $6.75.