John Ruskin, who has written of painting, sculpture and architecture, in a manner more attractive to mere amateurs than any other author, will soon publish his elaborate work, "The Authors of Venice." Notwithstanding his almost blind idolatry of Turner, and his other heresies, Ruskin is one of the few writers on art who open new vistas to the mind; vehement, paradoxical, and one-sided he may be, but no other writer _clears_ the subject in the same masterly manner--no other writer suggests more even to those of opposite opinions. * * * * * The first two volumes of Oehlenschlager's _Lebens Erinnerungen_ have appeared at Vienna, and attract more observation than anything else in the late movements in the German literature. The poet's early struggles give one kind of interest to this work, and his friendship with illustrious litterateurs another. Madame de Stael, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Steffens, Hegel, and other representatives of German thought, pass in succession through these pages, mingled with pictures of Danish life, and criticisms on the Danish drama. Like most German biographies, this deals as much with German literature as with German life. * * * * * Gustave Planche, a clever Parisian critic, has in the last number of _La Revue des Deux Mondes_, an article on Lamartine's novels and Confessions, issued within the year. He spares neither the prose nor poetry of the romantic statesman. He classes the _History of the Girondists_ with the novels. On the whole he thinks there is less of fact, or more of transmutation of fact, than in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley series: as in Scott's Life of Napoleon there was less of veracity than in any even of his professed fictions founded upon history. These romancists are never to be trusted, except in their own domains. * * * * * Prosper Mérimée, known among the poets by his _Theatre de Clara Gazul_, and who by his _Chronique du Temps de Charles IX._ and _Colomba_, was entitled to honorable mention in literature, has written a very clever book about the United States--the fruit of a visit to this country last year--which an accomplished New-Yorker is engaged in translating. His last previous performance was a Life of Pedro the Cruel, which has been translated and published in London, and is thus spoken of in the _Literary Gazette_:--