stage; and of interests that have long since given place to others in the infinite fluctuations of human affairs. Longinus complains of the want of interest in the Odyssey, because it does not, like the Iliad, treat of war. The very complaint we make against the latter is that it treats of nothing else; or that, as Fuseli expresses it, every thing is seen ‘through the blaze of war.’ Books of devotion are no longer read (if we read Irving’s _Orations_, it is merely that we may go as a _lounge_ to see the man): even attacks on religion are out of date and insipid. Voltaire’s jests, and the _Jew’s Letters_ in answer (equal in wit, and more than equal in learning), repose quietly on the shelf together. We want something in England about Rent and the Poor Laws, and something in France about the Charter—or Lord Byron. With the attempts, however, to revive superstition and intolerance, a spirit of opposition has been excited, and Pascall’s _Provincial Letters_ have been once more enlisted into the service. In France you meet with no one who has read the _New Heloise_: the _Princess of Cleves_ is not even mentioned in these degenerate days. Is it not provoking with us to see the _Beggar’s Opera_ cut down to two acts, because some of the allusions are too broad, and others not understood? And in America—that Van Diemen’s Land of letters—this sterling satire is hooted off the stage, because fortunately they have no such state of manners as it describes before their eyes; and because, unfortunately, they have no conception of any thing but what they see. America is singularly and awkwardly situated in this respect. It is a new country with an old language; and while every thing about them is of a day’s growth, they are constantly applying to us to know what to think of it, and taking their opinions from our books and newspapers with a strange mixture of servility and of the spirit of contradiction. They are an independent state in politics: in literature they are still a colony from us—not out of their leading strings, and strangely puzzled how to determine between the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. We have naturalised some of their writers, who had formed themselves upon us. This is at once a compliment to them and to ourselves. Amidst the scramble and lottery for fame in the present day, besides puffing, which may be regarded as the hotbed of reputation, another mode has been attempted by _transplanting_ it; and writers who are set down as drivellers at home, shoot up great authors on the other side of the water; pack up their all—a title-page and sufficient impudence; and a work, of which the _flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication_, in Shenstone’s phrase, is well known to every competent judge, is _placarded_ into eminence, and ‘flames in the forehead of the morning sky’ on the walls of Paris or St. Petersburgh. I dare not mention the instances, but so it is. Some reputations last only while the possessors