_The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: with a Biographical Account of Defoe. Illustrated with Fifty Characteristic Cuts, from Drawings by William Harvey, Esq. and engraved by Adams. New York: Published by Harper and Brothers._ This publication is worthy of the Harpers. It is an honor to the country--not more in the fine taste displayed in its getting up, than as evincing a just appreciation of an invaluable work. How fondly do we recur, in memory, to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe!--when we first found the spirit of wild adventure enkindling within us, as, by the dim fire light, we labored out, line by line, the marvellous import of those pages, and hung breathless and trembling with eagerness over their absorbing--over their enchaining interest! Alas! the days of desolate islands are no more! "Nothing farther," as Vapid says, "can be done in that line." Wo, henceforward, to the Defoe who shall prate to us of "undiscovered bournes." There is positively not a square inch of new ground for any future Selkirk. Neither in the Indian, in the Pacific, nor in the Atlantic, has he a shadow of hope. The Southern Ocean has been incontinently ransacked, and in the North--Scoresby, Franklin, Parry, Ross, Ross & Co. have been little better than so many salt water Paul Prys. While Defoe would have been fairly entitled to immortality had he never written Robinson Crusoe, yet his many other very excellent writings have nearly faded from our attention, in the superior lustre of the Adventures of the Mariner of York. What better possible species of reputation could the author have desired for that book than the species which it has so long enjoyed? It has become a household thing in nearly every {128} family in Christendom? Yet never was admiration of any work--universal admiration--more indiscriminately or more inappropriately bestowed. Not one person in ten--nay, not one person in five hundred, has, during the perusal of Robinson Crusoe, the most remote conception that any particle of genius, or even of common talent, has been employed in its creation! Men do not look upon it in the light of a literary performance. Defoe has none of their thoughts--Robinson all. The powers which have wrought the wonder have been thrown into obscurity by the very stupendousness of the wonder they have wrought! We read, and become perfect abstractions in the intensity of our interest--we close the book, and are quite satisfied that we could have written as well ourselves? All this is effected by the potent magic of verisimilitude. Indeed the author of Crusoe must have possessed, above all other faculties, what has been termed the faculty of _identification_--that dominion exercised by volition over imagination which enables the mind to lose its own, in a fictitious, individuality. This includes, in a very great degree, the power of