----'Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn: So might I standing on this pleasant lea Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus, rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.' "The new lights promised by our authors turn out to be chiefly composed of very old-fashioned rays of darkness, and, after a careful perusal, many will come to the conclusion that the way to be a modern philosopher, is to quote the ancients, praise Bacon, and talk 'bosh.'" * * * * * New editions of the works of Fielding and Smollett, profusely illustrated by Cruikshank and Kenny Meadows, will soon be published by Stringer & Townsend. These great classics will never cease to be read with the keenest relish by all the English race. The London publishers of the present edition of Fielding observe in their advertisement: "It is altogether unnecessary to enlarge upon the genius of Henry Fielding. There is no man in the brilliant history of English literature, with the single exception of Shakspeare, to whose genius has been paid the homage of a more general attestation. Calumny and misrepresentation--the offspring of envy and malice--these, in his day, he had to endure or to deride, and these, with their authors, have long sunk into oblivion. The greatest of his contemporaries knew and acknowledged his transcendent merit, and since his death, there has not been one man of genius whose opinion of Fielding is recorded, that has not spoken of him with veneration and delight. Dr. Johnson, spite of a personal enmity, could not but concede his extraordinary powers. Lady Mary Wortley Montague reluctantly confessed that 'cousin Fielding' was the greatest original genius of the age; the fastidious Gray was charmed with him; and the more fastidious Gibbon has left his opinion on record, that the illustrious house of Hapsburg, from which Fielding was descended--its name erased, its towers crumbled,--will be forgotten, when the romance of _Tom Jones_ shall flourish in eternal youth. If Coleridge classed him, as one of the true immortals, with Shakspeare, Goethe could not, nor was willing to contest, that he was so; if Byron could cheer his heart and refresh his mind with his pages, so can, and so does, Wordsworth. In a word, the matchless drawing of his characters, which are not likenesses from life, but copies from Nature--the one being a shallow art, the other a profoundly creative power--his exquisite wit, his abounding humor, his natural and manly pathos--in these no writer of narrative fiction has ever approached him.