This work combines the rich embellishments of the very best of the race of Annuals, with a far higher claim to notice than any of them in its strictly literary department. If we regard this volume as the only one to appear, the title will convey no idea of the design—but we are promised a continuation. The whole, if we comprehend, will contain specimens of _all_ the principal poets and artists of Great Britain. In the present instance we have the poets as far as Prior, including a period of about four hundred years, with extracts from Chaucer, Lydgate, James I, Hawes, Carew, Quarles, Shirley, Habington, Lovelace, Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Vere, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Spenser, Sidney, Brooke, Southwell, Daniel, Drayton, Shakspeare, Walton, Davies, Donne, Jonson, Corbet, Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, Drummond, Wither, Carew, Browne, Herrick, Quarles, Herbert, Davenant, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Butler, Crashaw, Denham, Cowley, Marvell, Dryden, Roscommon, Dorset, Sedley, Rochester, Sheffield, and Prior. Of these, all the autographs have been obtained and are published collectively at the end of the book, with the exception of the nine first mentioned. The work is illustrated by fifty-three engravings, each by different artists. A sea-side group by Harding, and L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by Parris, are particularly good—but all are excellent. We had prepared some observations in regard to the book itself, (over which we have been poring for many days with intense delight) and in regard more especially to the character and justice of that deep feeling with which most men, having claim to taste, are wont to look, even through a veil of exceedingly troublesome obscurity and antiquity, upon the writings of the elder poets and dramatists of Great Britain. But we have been so nearly anticipated in our design by a paper in the American Monthly Magazine for July, that what we should now say, and say _con amore_, would be looked upon as little better than a _rifacimento_ of the article we mention. At the same time it would be an ill deed to remodel our thoughts, and proceed to think falsely, for the mere purpose of proving that we can think originally. In this dilemma then, we will merely express our general accordance in the opinions of the Northern Magazine, copy, of its _critique_, a portion which seems to embody, in little compass, much of what we have said less forcibly and more diffusely, and add some few additional observations which have lately suggested themselves.