AGNES OF SORRENTO, By Mrs. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1862. If there be, at the present day, an ungrateful task for an intelligent reader or a conscientious reviewer, it is to be obliged to deal with a work whose whole compass is merely that of a second-rate romance inspired by rococo sentimentalism. We regret to speak thus of a book by so eminent a writer as Mrs. Stowe; but when any one at this time undertakes to build up a novel out of such material as cloisters, monks, and nuns, Beato Angelico and frankincense, cavaliers and Savonarola, with the occasional 'purple patch' of a rhyming Latin hymn--in short, when we see the long-exhausted melo-dramatic style, which was years ago thoroughly quizzed in 'Firmilian,' revived in the year 1862 in a work of fiction, we can not refrain from expressing sorrow that a public can still be found to welcome such a bouquet of faded and tattered artificial flowers. There is something, indeed, almost painfully amusing in the liberal use of perfectly exhausted and thoroughly hackneyed elements of popular romance which appear in every page of _Agnes of Sorrento_. A writer has said of the heroine, that 'she is one of those ethereal females, only encountered in romance, who dwell on the brink of exaltation, and never eat bread and butter without seeming to fly in the face of Divine Providence.' But this feebly expresses the worn-out ornamental piety of the work. It would require but very little alteration to become one of the most intensely amusing books of the age. SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE INSURANCE COMMISSIONERS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. An interesting collection of documents, which will be read or examined with great pleasure by all who devote their attention to the rapidly maturing science of insurance, a science which perhaps combines in its range of material as much of the curious and useful as any other known; the whole tending to one great lesson: that every thing should be insured and that _no insurance should be taxed by Government_. TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION. Boston: William White. 1862. Apart from the vastly important testimony which these works bear to the efforts annually made in our good State in the cause of education--the great source, let us trust, of the politics to be--we seldom fail to find in them many useful hints as to the practical business of teaching, of which any writer on the subject would be glad to avail himself. Many such, at least, we detect in the volume before us, and sincerely trust that all will in due time bear their good fruit. CONCORD FIGHT. By S. R. BARTLETT. Second edition. Concord: Albert Tracy. Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Co. 1862.