hor--considering the losses of material he
sustained--cannot be justly criticised; but certainly the bulk of his
volume makes its meagre substance somewhat too apparent.

_Liffith Lank, or Lunacy._ By C. H. WEBB. New York: Carleton.

_St. Twel'mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga._ By C. H.
WEBB. New York: C. H. Webb.

In the first of these clever and successful burlesques, Mr. Webb has
travestied rather the ideas than the manner of Mr. Reade; and one who
turned to "Liffith Lank" from the wonderful parodies in "Punch's Prize
Novelists," or those exquisitely finished pieces of mimicry, the
"Condensed Novelists" of the Californian Harte, would feel its want of
fidelity to the method and style of the author burlesqued. Yet the
essential absurdities of "Griffith Gaunt" are most amusingly brought out
in "Liffith Lank"; and as the little work makes the reader laugh at the
great one, he has no right, perhaps, to ask more of it, or to complain
that it trusts too much to the facile pun for its effects, which are
oftener broad than poignant.

Nevertheless, in spite of our logical content with "Liffith Lank," we
are very glad to find "St. Twel'mo" much better, and we only doubt
whether the game is worth the candle; but as the candle is Mr. Webb's,
he can burn it, we suppose, upon whatever occasion he likes. He has here
made a closer parody than in his first effort, and has lost nothing of
the peculiar power with which he there satirized ideas. That quality of
the Bronte sisters, of which Miss Evans of Mobile is one of the many
American dilutions,--that quality by which any sort of masculine
wickedness and brutality short of refusing ladies seats in horse-cars is
made lovely and attractive to the well-read and well-bred of the
sex,--is very pleasantly derided, while the tropical luxuriance of
general information characteristic of "St. Elmo" is unsparingly
ridiculed, with the help of frequent extracts from the novel itself.

Mr. Webb appears in "St. Twel'mo" as both publisher and author, and,
with a good feeling significant of very great changes in the literary
world since a poet toasted Napoleon because he hanged a bookseller,
dedicates his little work "To his best friend and nearest relative, the
publisher."

_The Literary Life of James K. Paulding._ Compiled by his Son, WILLIAM
I. PAULDING. New York: Charles Scribner and Company.

James K. Paulding was born in 1778 at Great-Nine Partners, in Dutchess
County