The _Southern Literary Messenger_ for February is, we think, the best of the fifteen numbers that have been published. Most of its articles, prose and verse, are of good Magazine quality, sprightly and diversified. The first, on "Selection in Reading," contains in a brief space a useful lesson in these book-abounding times, when many people take whatever publishers please to give them, or surrender their right of selection to the self-complacent and shallow editors of cheap "Libraries." Of the interesting "Sketches of the History and present condition of Tripoli, with some account of the other Barbary States," we have here No. 10, which concludes with the preparations of the attack on Algiers by the French in 1830. "The Cousin of the Married" and the "Cousin of the Dead" are two capital comic pictures from the French. "The Duc de L'Omelette, by Edgar A. Poe" is one of those light, spirited, fantastic inventions, of which we have had specimens before in the Messenger, betokening a fertility of imagination and power of execution, that with discipline could, under a sustained effort, produce creations of an enduring character. "Rustic Courtship in New England" is of a class that should not get higher than the first page of a country newspaper,--we mean no disrespect to any of our "cotemporaries,"--for it has no literary capabilities. The best and also the largest portion of the present number of the Messenger is the department of critical notices of books. These are the work of a vigorous, sportive, keen pen, that, whether you approve the judgments or not it records, takes captive your attention by the spirit with which it moves. The number ends with the amusing Miller correspondence, of which we have already spoken. From the Petersburg Constellation.