When he died, he passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our own more pyrotechnic literary time. Of Paulding himself one thinks, after reading the present memoir, with much regard and some regret. He was a sturdy patriot and cordial democrat, but he seems not to have thought human slavery so very bad a thing. He is perceptibly opinionated, and would have carried things with a high hand, whether as one of the government or one of the governed. He was not swift to adopt new ideas, but he was thoroughly honest in his opposition to them. His somewhat exaggerated estimate of his own importance in the world of letters and of politics was one of those venial errors which time readily repairs. _History and General Description of New France._ By the Rev. P. F. X. DE CHARLEVOIX, S. J. Translated, with Notes, by JOHN GILMARY SHEA. New York: J. G. Shea. Vol. I. Charlevoix's "History of New France" is very well known to all who study American history in its sources. It is a well-written, scholarlike, and readable book, treating of a subject which the author perfectly understood, and of which he may be said to have been a part. Tried by the measure of his times, his research was thorough and tolerably exact. The work, in short, has always been justly regarded as a "standard," and very few later writers have thought it necessary to go beyond or behind it. Appended to it is a journal of the author's travels in America, in the form of a series of letters to the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, full of interest, and a storehouse of trustworthy information. Charlevoix had been largely quoted and extensively read. Not to know him, indeed, was to be ignorant of some of the most memorable passages in the history of this continent; but, what is certainly remarkable, he had never found an English translator. At the time of the Old French War, when the public curiosity was strongly interested in everything relating to America, the journal appended to the history was "done into English" and eagerly read; but the history itself had remained to this time in the language in which it was originally written. This is not to be regretted, if it has been the occasion of giving us the truly admirable work which is the subject of this notice.