We can understand how great an attraction so brilliant and picturesque an epoch of history should have for a spirit like Mr. Towle's; but we cannot help thinking it a pity that he should have attempted to reproduce, in such an ambitious form, the fancies which its contemplation suggested. The book is scarcely too large for the subject, but it is much too large for Mr. Towle, whose grievous fashion of _padding_ must be plain enough, even in the few passages which we have quoted from his book. A writer may, by means of a certain dead-a-lively expansive style of narration, contrived out of turns of expression adapted from Percy's Reliques, the Waverly Novels, the newspapers, and the imitators of Thackeray's historical gossip, succeed in filling five hundred pages, but he will hardly satisfy one reader; and we are convinced by Mr. Towle's work that, whatever other species of literature may demand the exercise of a childish imagination,--a weak fancy easily caught with the prettiness as well as the pomp of words,--a slender philosophy incapable of grasping the true significance of events,--a logic continually tripped upon its own rapier,--and a powerful feeling for anti-climax, with no small sentiment for solecism,--History, at least, has little to gain from them. _War of the Rebellion; or, Scylla and Charybdis. Consisting of Observations upon the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Late Civil War in the United States._ By H. S. FOOTE. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1866. The slight value which this volume possesses is of a nature altogether different from that which the author doubtless ascribes to it, though we imagine most of his readers will agree with us in esteeming it chiefly for its personal reminiscences of great events and people. As for Mr. Foote's philosophization of the history he recounts, it is so generally based upon erroneous views of conditions and occurrences, that we would willingly have spared it all, if we could have had in its place a full and simple narrative of his official career from the time he took part in secession up to the moment of his departure from the Rebel territory. We find nothing new in what he has to say concerning the character of our colonial civilization and the unity of our colonial origin; and, as we get farther from the creation of the world and approach our own era, we must confess that the light shed upon the slavery question by Mr. Foote seems but vague and unsatisfactory. A few disastrous years have separated us so widely from all the fallacies once current here, that Mr. Foote's voice comes like an utterance from Antediluvia, when he tells us how compromises continually restored us to complete tranquillity, which the machinations of wicked people, North and South, instantly disturbed again. There was once a race of feeble-minded politicians who thought that, if the Northern Abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters were destroyed, there could be no possible disagreement