Again. Although the author evinces, in theory, a very laudable contempt for that silly vanity so often inducing men to blazon forth their intimacy with the distinguished; and although, in the volumes now before us, he more than once directs the arrows of his satire at the infirmity--still he is found not altogether free from it himself; and, in one especial instance, is even awkwardly uneasy, lest we should remain ignorant of his acquaintance with Washington Irving. "I thought," quoth the Lieutenant, when there was no necessity for thinking about any such matter, "I thought of the 'spectral box-coats' of my inimitable friend Geoffrey Crayon; and would have given the world in that moment of despondency, for one of his quiet unwritten jokes, or one friendly pressure of his hand." Upon Mr. Slidell's mechanical style we cannot bring ourselves to look with favor. Indeed while running over, with some astonishment, a few of his singularly ill-constructed sentences, we begin to think that the sentiments expressed in the conclusion of his Preface are not, as we at first suspected, merely the common cant of the _literateur_, and that his book is actually, as he represents it to be, "the result of an up-hill journey," and "a work which he regards with a feeling of aversion." What else than great tedium and utter weariness with his labor, could have induced our author to trust such passages as the following to the critical eye of the public? "The absence of intellectual and moral culture, in occupations which rendered it unnecessary for those who worked only to administer food to themselves and profit or luxury to the class of masters, could only account for the absence of forehead, of the ornamental parts of that face which was moulded after a divine model."