Mr. John R. Thompson, the accomplished and much esteemed editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, whose genuine and intelligent love of literature is illustrated in every number of his excellent magazine, has just published a wise and eloquent address on the present state of education in Virginia, which was delivered before the literary societies of Washington College, at Lexington. It discloses the causes of the ignorance of reading and writing by seventy thousand adults in Virginia, and forcibly and impressively urges the necessity of a thorough literary culture to the common prosperity. * * * * * A New Play by Mr. Marston, founded on the story of Philip Augustus of France and Marie de Méranie, has been put into rehearsal at the Olympic Theater in London. * * * * * The Leipzic _Grenzboten_ notices Mrs. Maberly's new romance of "Fashion" (which we believe has not yet been republished in America) with great praise, as a work of striking power and artistic management. Nevertheless, says the critic, this romance has excited in England as much anger as attention, and this he attributes to the truth with which the authoress has depicted the aristocratic world. He then makes the following remarks, which are curious enough to be translated: "The meaning of the word 'fashion' cannot be rendered in a foreign language. _La mode_ and its tyranny approach somewhat to the sense, but still it remains unintelligible to us Germans, because we have no idea of the capricious, silly, and despotic laws of fashion in England. They do not relate, as with us, to mere outward things, as clothes and furniture, but especially to position and estimation in high society. In order to play a part on that stage it is necessary to understand the mysterious conditions and requirements which the goddess Fashion prescribes. High birth and riches, wit and beauty, find no mercy with her if her whimsical laws are not obeyed. In what these laws consist no living soul can say: they are double, yes three-fold, the _je ne sais quoi_ of the French. The exclusiveness of English society is well known, a peculiarity in which it is only excelled by its copyist the American society of New York and Boston. But it is not enough to have obtained admission into the magic circle: there, too, fashion implacably demands its victims, and to her as to Moloch earthly and heavenly goods, wealth, and peace of soul, are offered up." * * * * *