The French translation of St. John (de Creve-cœur's) _American Farmer's Letters_--a book once very popular--was adorned with engravings, to fit it to the European imagination of the Arcadian state of things in America. The frontispiece presents an allegorical picture, in which a goddess of those robuster proportions which designate Wisdom, or Philosophy, leads by the hand an urchin--the type, no doubt, of this country--with ne'er a shirt upon his back. More delightfully still, however, in the back ground, is seen, hand in hand, with knee-breeches and strait-collared coats, a band of Pennsylvania quaker men, dancing, by themselves, a true old fashioned six-handed Virginia reel. But of the Pyrrhic dance, more particularly: the learned Scaliger--that terror and delight of the critical world--assures us, in his _Poetica_, (book i, ch. 9) that he himself, at the command of his uncle Boniface, was wont often and long to dance it, before the Emperor Maximilian, while all Germany looked on with amazement. "Hanc saltationem Pyrrhicam, nos sæpe et diu, jussu Bonifacii patrui, coram divo Maximiliano, non sine stupore totius Germaniæ, representavimus." _Ariosto_.--Has not the following curious testimony in regard to him escaped all his biographers? Montaigne, in his Essays, (vol. iii, p. 117, Johanneau's edition, in 8vo.) says, "J'eus plus de despit encores, que de compassion, de le veoir à Ferrare en si piteux estat, survivant à soy mesme, mecognoissant et soy et ses ouvrages; lesquels, sans son sςeu, et toutesfois en sa veue, on a mis en lumiere incorrigez et informes." "I was touched even more with vexation than with compassion, to see him, at Ferrara, in a state so piteous, outliving himself, and incapable of recognizing either himself or his works; which last, without his knowledge, though yet before his sight, were given to the world uncorrected and unfinished." _Thin Clothing_.--It would be difficult more skilfully to turn a reproach into a praise, than Byron has done, as to drapery too transparent, in his voluptuous description of a Venitian revel. --------"The thin robes, Floating like light clouds 'twixt our gaze and heaven," form the very climax of many intoxicating particulars.