'Oh, my Ben Hadad, presume not from my ultimate escape. If I have ceased to snap and snarl and growl,--if I now, in the decline of life, pursue the even tenor of my way,--if I have been redeemed from snares, and learned even to forgive my enemies, it is because the fair Xarifa represented my better nature, and that has triumphed because I took counsel of her. Farewell, my son, and, in the pilgrimage of life, reflect upon the dear-bought experience of SIDI NORMAN.' * * * * * 'WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH US?' What will we do with you, if God Should give you over to our hands, To pass in turn beneath the rod, And wear at last the captive's bands?' 'What will we do?' Our very best To make of each a glorious State, Worthy to match with North and West,-- Free, vigorous, beautiful and great! As God doth live, as Truth is true, We swear we'll do all this to you. * * * * * JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. A late _National Review_ asserts with true English shrewdness that American literature is yet to be born,--that it has scarcely a substantive existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally still only a province of this country.' With a gallantry too characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual _quid pro quo_, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its co-nationality with Irving.