ng the early part of his life. The Scotch
captain, who, with his scanty merchant-crew, beats off a Bordeaux
privateer, and then, crippled and half-sinking, clears for action with
what he supposes to be a French frigate, but which turns out to be
English, is a personage whose acquaintance it is pleasant to make. The
sketches of life in Lisbon, too, are very lively, and the picture of
the decayed Portuguese nobleman's family, for whose pride of birth an
imaginary dinner-table was set every day in the parlor with the remains
of the hereditary napery and plate, the numerous covers hiding nothing
but the naked truth, while their common humanity, squatting on the floor
in the kitchen, fished its scanty meal from an earthen pot with pewter
spoons, is pathetically humorous and would have delighted Caleb
Balderstone. In after-life, Leslie's profession made him acquainted with
some of the best London life of his time, and the volume is full of
agreeable anecdotes of Scott, Irving, Turner, Rogers, Wilkie, and
many more. It contains also several letters of Irving, of no special
interest, and some from a sort of Lesmahago of a room-mate of Leslie's,
named Peter Powell, so queer, individual, and shrewd, that we are sorry
not to have more of them and their writer. Altogether the book is one of
the pleasantest we have lately met with.

_The Old Battle-Ground_. By J.T. TROWBRIDGE, Author of "Father
Brighthopes," "Neighbor Jackwood," etc. New York: Sheldon & Company.
1860. pp. 276.

Mr. Trowbridge's previous works have made him known to a large circle of
appreciating readers as a writer of originality and promise. His "Father
Brighthopes" we have never read, but we have heard it spoken of as one
of the most wholesome children's books ever published in America, and
our knowledge of the author makes us ready to believe the favorable
opinion a just one. Parts of "Neighbor Jackwood" we read with sincere
relish and admiration; they showed so true an eye for Nature and so
thorough an appreciation of the truly humorous elements of New England
character, as distinguished from the vulgar and laughable ones. The
domestic interior of the Jackwood family was drawn with remarkable truth
and spirit, and all the working characters of the book on a certain
average level of well-to-do rusticity were made to think and talk
naturally, and were as full of honest human nature as those of the
conventional modern novel are empty of it. An author who puts us