ply interested
in his own work. That he is sometimes rather weakly grotesque, as in his
sporting with the negro dialect, which in the person of a servant he
affects to discard and yet resumes, is a trifle. That he shows
throughout the noblest sympathies and instincts of a gentleman, a
philanthropist, and a cosmopolite is, however, something which can not
be too highly praised, since it is these indications which lend a grace
and a glory to all that Winthrop wrote. _Noblesse oblige_ seems to have
been the great consciousness of his nature, and he therefore presented
in his life and writings that high type of a gentleman by birth and
culture, who without lowering himself one whit, was a reformer, a
progressive, yes, a 'radical' in all things where he conceived that the
root to be extracted was a great truth.

In many things 'Edwin Brothertoft' is most appropriate to these our
times, since its scenes are laid in that Revolutionary War for the cause
of freedom, of which this of the present day is, in fact, a repetition.
We feel in its every page the anxiety and interest of war, an American
war for the right, sweeping along through trials and sorrows. To
characterize it in few words, we may say that in it the author reminds
us of Cooper, but displays more genius and _life_ than Cooper ever did.

OUT OF HIS HEAD. By T. B. Aldrich. New-York. Carleton.

It is said that the 'grotesque' romance is going out of fashion; if this
be so, the beautiful and quaint collection of interwoven fancies before
us proves that in literature as in horticulture, the best blooms of
certain species are of the latest. Strange, indeed, is the conception of
this work--the fancied biography of one literally 'out of his head,' who
imagines himself surrounded by a world of people who act very
singularly. Madmen are never ordinary; therefore the writer has not,
while setting forth the most extraordinary fancies, once transgressed
the limits of the probable. This was a bold stroke of genius in the very
inception, and it is developed with a subtle tact which can hardly fail
to claim the cordial admiration of the most carping critic. It is true
that in using the strange aberrations of a lunatic as material for
romance, Aldrich has provoked comparison with some of the world's
greatest writers; and it is to his credit that he has met them evenly,
and that too without in any particular incurring the charge of
plagiarism. But had the _thema_ of the work