The present number is uncommonly rich. It opens with some valuable hints upon the necessity of selection in reading, a capital discourse of a column and a half upon the startling text, "if you have forty years to employ in reading, and can read fifty pages a day, you will be able in those forty years to accomplish only about _sixteen hundred volumes_, of 500 pages each." This consideration, ably put by the editor, is an antidote, one would think, to "smattering." The next is No. X. of a very interesting series of Historical sketches of Barbary States. This number brings the history of Algiers down to the close of Charles Xth's reign. Taken together, these papers are very valuable, and will form a useful reference hereafter. It is such papers as these that make a periodical worth keeping. The next prose article is amusing. It is a translation from the French, and gives a most humorous account of "a Cousin of the Married," a man who acquired that quaint _sobriquet_ by attending all weddings, where there was a large company assembled and making himself useful by proposing sentiments, reciting _epithalamia_, and singing songs appropriate to those happy occasions, until he was discovered by an aristocratic groom, and compelled to vacate the premises. The paper contains a similar narrative of "a Cousin of the Dead," who, having been advised to ride for his health, and being too poor, used to go to all funerals as a mourner, and thus obtained the medicine prescribed by his physician, with no other cost than a few crocodile tears. Then comes one of that eccentric writer, _Edgar A. Poe's_, characteristic productions, "_The Duc de L'Omelette_," which is one of the best things of the kind we have ever read. _Mr. Poe_ has great powers, and every line _tells_ in all he writes. He is no spinner-out of long yarns, but chooses his subject, whimsically, perhaps, yet originally, and treats it in a manner peculiarly his own. "Rustic Courtship in New England" has not the verisimilitude which is necessary to entitle it to the only praise that such sketches usually obtain; unless they were well done, it were always better that Yankee stories be not done at all. We hate to be over-critical, but would recommend to the "_Octogenarian_" to take the veritable _Jack Downing_ or _John Beedle_, as his models, before he writes again. Those inimitable writers have well-nigh, if not quite, exhausted the subject of New England Courtship, and (we speak "as one having authority, and not as the scribes," by which we mean the critics) the writer before us has done but very indifferently what they have done so well, as to gain universal applause. "Palæstine" is a useful article, containing geographical, topographical, and other statistical facts in the history of that interesting county, well put together, and valuable as a reference.