A volume of brilliant French criticism will be published in a few days by Charles Scribner, under the title of _Anglo-American Literature and Manners_, by PHILARETE CHASLES, Professor in the College of France. Mr. Chasles, in a book of five hundred pages, considers the literature and manners of the people of the United States--their institutions, capacity for self-government, actual condition and probable future--with all the sprightly grace of a Frenchman, and with a great deal of cleverness prosecutes his industrious researches from the landing of the Mayflower to the present day. He finds in the United States neither an Utopia, nor a land worthy merely of ridicule. He does not simply condemn, like some travellers, nor give us universal and unreasonable praise, as our egotism and contentment lead us to desire, but takes a fair view of the country, its claims, position, and prospects. In the beginning of his performance he considers that the most essential thing for the founding of a new commonwealth, is moral force; this he finds in the Puritans, who possessed "sincerity, belief, perseverance, courage;" they could "wait, fight, suffer." Their energy, he thinks, comes from their Teutonic or Saxon blood; their indomitable perseverance is a fruit of Calvinism, added to which they are clannish, or mutual helpers one of another. This is the key to the philosophical, political and prophetic portion of his work. The literary part is honest criticism, freely spoken, by the aid of such light as happened to be around him. He begins with the landing of the Pilgrims, speaks of their literature, which, like all other American literature down to the present day, he regards as destitute of originality. Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and others, all lack this quality. The author of the _American Cultivator_ has the most of it; but Franklin is made up of Fénelon, Banyan, and Addison; Edwards partakes of Hobbes, Priestley, and in his better moments of the close reasoning Descartes. He gives us then a politician, a journalist, and a gentleman, "the American Aristocrat" as he calls him, Gouverneur Morris, our minister at Paris during the old revolution. Brockden Brown is characterized as a copyist of Monk Lewis; and he comes then to Washington Irving, but while all the charms of this delightful writer are thoroughly appreciated and minutely described, it is denied that he has originality. "In some square house in Boston, he sees in thought St. James's Park: in reveries he is led through the umbrageous alleys of Kensington--he talks with Sterne--he shakes hands with Goldsmith." "It is a copy, somewhat timid, of Addison, of Steele, of Swift." You would think of him as of "a young lady of good family, a slave to propriety, never elevating her voice, never exaggerating the _ton_, never committing the sin of eloquence;" "a refined continuation of the style of Addison," &c. Nevertheless a dawn of freshness appears in his writings when they treat of forest scenes.