'THE poem,' says the author of this miniature pamphlet-volume, 'of which the four first cantos (he means the _first four_, no doubt) are here submitted to the reader, was chiefly the work of the writer's youth.' He does not claim, however, that this fact forms any sufficient excuse for giving it to the public at this late day; but offers rather the natural tenacity 'with which the mind treasures up, and seeks to preserve, the performances which revive its early associations.' We have run through these cantos with some attention. The story does not strike us as possessing either great originality or interest. The verse itself is after the model of 'Don Juan,' then recently published, and rife in the literary world; but like the thousand-and-one imitations which we have encountered of that most facile and felicitous composition, its 'laborious ease' cannot be concealed. With BYRON, the play of fancy and of words was equally unconstrained, in this species of versification; but all his imitators have evidently been stretched upon Procrustean beds; and with all the seeming _abandon_ of their manner, and the smirk of their 'varnished faces,' it has yet been but too evident that their situation was any thing but comfortable. In 'Donna Florida' however there is a good degree of cleverness. There are many thoughts interspersed throughout its cantos which the reader will encounter with surprise and remember with pleasure. Nevertheless we are compelled to say, that where the stanzas are most original, they are the least to our liking. We enter our protest against the writer's frequent habit of saying a plain thing in an involved, roundabout way, as well as against numerous words and similes which he employs. 'You can call a hat,' says Mr. YELLOWPLUSH, a 'glossy four-and-nine' or a 'swart sombréro;' but in the long run praps it's as well to call it _a hat_. It _is_ a hat; and where's the use o' mystifying?' Would it not, for example, be 'as well' also, and quite as natural, to write 'half of the rest,' as 'the subdivision of the remaining moïety?' Or in saying that old jokes were laughed at, to express it in less magniloquent phrase than 'Old jokes _found revivified expansion_?' Where does Mr. SIMMS find authority for such a word as '_voicing_?'--'the voicings of a bird?' In any dictionary of the English language? Guess not! As little do we admire the simile which makes a lady's eye the 'polar light in love's astrology,' or which represents it as ----'peering beneath her forehead like a star, Bestowing a sweet glory on the sky.' All these are 'affectations, look you;' and are in our judgment even worse sins against taste (to say nothing of truth) than the occasional instances of an opposite tendency which might be pointed out; such as 'the beast enjoying his _grunt and stye_;' or the coy damsel, of whom the writer says: 'One moment grows she most abruptly willing, The next, she _slaps the chaps that think of billing_!'