t!

M.L.B.

* * * * *

THE SELECTOR AND LITERARY NOTICES OF _NEW WORKS_.

* * * * *

POLAND.

Dr. Lardner has commenced a "_Library_," as a kind of succedaneum
to his valuable "Cyclopaedia." Both are styled _Cabinet_, and the
first may be considered an amplification of the second. Two of the
Cabinet Library volumes contain a Retrospect of Public Affairs for
1831--not a chronology of shreds and patches, but a well-digested review
of the great events of the year--and important indeed they are. The work
is the quintessence of an "Annual Register:" it is not so porous and
pursy as the last mentioned book, but is a pleasant volume to put in
one's pocket and read inside a coach, if the passengers will allow you
to do so; and it seems to be a good book for newspaper readers, to
arrange their head-pieces, for they are usually crammed with all kinds
of recollections, and have but few right-set views. We do not content
ourselves with saying the _Retrospect_ is well written, but quote
a proof of equal length and interest--for it relates to a country whose
fate is anxiously watched by all Europe, nay, by all the world. It is
from the author's Chapter on the State of Poland. After some pages on
the oppressed Poles, the writer proceeds:--

"Thus the army, both in its numbers and management, was entirely at
the mercy and under the direction of Muscovite despotism; the resources
of the state were employed, without the legal control of the diet, to
strengthen Russian tyranny, the press was enslaved, that no remonstrance
might be made against Russian oppression; the citizens were arrested,
imprisoned, and punished by a Russian military chieftain, without being
brought to trial before the proper native tribunals; the legislative
chambers were deprived of their just prerogatives; the national customs,
habits, and feelings were hourly insulted; the citizens were beset with
an infamous police, an deprived even of the melancholy consolation of
complaint; thus, in short, every Polish right was violated--every
article of the charter broken--and the whole efforts of an imperial
savage, at the head of a strong military force, directed to efface from
the countrymen of the Sobieskis and Kosciuszkos all the remains of the
Polish character.

"This, it must be allowed, is a picture of tyranny and misgovernment
sufficiently appalling to justify the resistance of any people,