* "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: "Without prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep a conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, with entire control of her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume, full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation--criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on Shakespeare.... There was a great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud.... I believe that it has been the faith of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in isolated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But since my return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work--it belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public." ("Our Old Home.") The volume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops and at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand.