shingling;, &c.; or, through a kindred change, both - bofe; youth - youf; but mouth - mout'; earth - eart'; south - sout'; waiting - vaiten;' was - vas; widow - vidow; woman - voman; work - vork; one - von; we - ve, &c. And hence, by way of a compound mixture, we get from him drafel for travel, derriple for terrible, a daple-leck for a table-leg, bepples for pebbles, tisasder for disaster, schimnastig dricks for gymnastic tricks, let-bencil for lead-pencil, &c. The peculiarity of Germans pronouncing in their mother tongue s like sh when it is followed by a t or p, and of Germans in southern Germany often also final s like sh, naturally produced in their American jargon such results as shplit, shtop, shtraight, shtar, shtupendous, shpree, shpirit, &c; ish(is), ash(as), &c.; and, by analogy led to shveet(sweet), schwig(swig), &c. We need not notice, however, more than these freaks of the German-American-English of the present poems, as little as we need advert to simple vulgarisms also met with in England, such as the omission of the final g in words terminating in ing (blayin' - playing; shpinnen' - spinning; ridin', sailin', roonin', &c.). We must, of course, assume that the reader of this little volume is well acquainted both with English and German. The reader will perceive that the writer has taken another flight in "Hans Breitmann's Christmas," and many of the later ballads, from what he did in those preceding; and exception might be taken to his choice of subjects, and treatment of them, if the language employed by him were a fixed dialect - that is, a language arrested at a certain stage of its progress; for in that case he would have had to subordinate his pictures to the narrow sphere of the realistic incidents of a given locality. But the imperfect English utterances of the German, newly arrived in America, coloured more or less by the peculiarities of his native idiom, do not make, and never will make a dialect, for the simple reason that, in proportion to his intelligence, his opportunities, and the length of time spent by him among his new English-speaking countrymen, he will sooner or later rid himself of the crudenesses of his speech, thus preventing it from becoming fixed. Many of the Germans who have emigrated and are still emigrating to America belong to the well-educated classes, and some possess a very high culture. Our poet has therefore presented his typical German, with perfect propriety, in a variety of situations which would be imperceptible within which the the dialect necessarily moves, and has endowed him with character, even where the local colour is wanting. In "Breitmann in Politics," we are on purely American ground.