A book to be read by the students of literature and by critics is HETTNER'S _Moderne Drama_, just published at Brunswick. We do not know of a profounder and keener discussion of the principles and laws of dramatic writing, or of more just and striking dramatic criticisms than it contains. * * * * * LAYARD'S popular account of his excavations and discoveries at Nineveh has been translated into German by one of the Meissners (not the poet, we believe), and is published at Leipsic. * * * * * FRAULEIN FRIEDERIKE FRIEDEMANN has published, at Leipsic, a metrical version of Lord BYRON'S _Corsair_, which is worthy of all commendation. The gloomy hue and passionate vehemence of the original are preserved in the translation with surprising fidelity, and the rhythm is hardly less perfect than in Byron's English itself. * * * * * The last number of the _Theologische Quartalschrift_ (Theological Quarterly), published at Tübingen, by Laupp, contains an interesting paper on the pretended objections to the historical truth of the Pentateuch, by WELTE; the critical historical examination of the xxxi. xxxii. Jeremiah, by REINKE; and the Aloge, with their relations to the Montanists, by HEFELE. * * * * * MR. GEORGE STEPHENS, the translator of Tegner's _Frithiof's Saga_, and whose intimate acquaintance with the early literature of Sweden has been shown by the collection of legends of that country which he edited in conjunction with Hylten-Cavallius, and by various works superintended by him for the _Svenska Fornskrift-Salskapet_, (a sort of Stockholm Camden Society,) has removed to Copenhagen in consequence of his having been appointed Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University there. The subject of his first course of lectures was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We have in our possession the MS. translations of some very interesting ancient Swedish poems made by Mr. Stephens some five years ago, and not yet published. * * * * * The London _Leader_, socialist and avowedly and industriously infidel, says of EUGENE SUE, not long ago the rage of half the world: "We have to announce the third and last volume of Eugene Sue's _Fernand Duplessis_, wherein the memoirs of a husband are recounted with a license which only a French public could permit. Perhaps the worst thing in Sue is not his positive passion for what is criminal and odious, so much as the way in which he always contrives to render the good people odious. Much as we reprobate his pictures of vice, we think them less offensive than his pictures of virtue. How a man so essentially vulgar-minded could ever have attained the position he had once!" * * * * *