r; for he, who can talk more wisely of old clothes than most
preachers of eternity, gets out of the nothings that tourists see the
very life and spirit of a country. Here is something also about modern
art and pictures in England and France, which comes as near not at all
boring as anything of that nature can; but we find the account of
"Dickens in France" so much more attractive, that we shall always read
it by preference hereafter.

For this is a book to be read many times by those loving to feel the
conscious felicity of a writer who knows that every sentence shall
happily express his mind, and succeed in winning the reader to the next.
The security is tacit in the earlier papers here reprinted; in the later
ones it is more declared, and becomes somewhat careless, though it can
never beget slovenliness. It appears to this great master that what he
does so easily can scarcely be worth doing, and he mocks his own
facility.

The spirit of the book is the same throughout. It is not different from
that of Thackeray's other books, and it is that of a man too sensible of
his own love of the advantages he enjoys from the existing state of
things ever to assail, with any great earnestness of purpose, the errors
and absurdities of the world,--who trusted, for example, in one of his
essays, never to be guilty of speaking harshly either of the South or
North of America, since friends in both sections had offered him equally
good claret. He is forever first in his art; and if we do not expect too
much from him, he gives us so much that we must rejoice over every line
of his preserved for our perusal.

_A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N.
J., to the Authorship of the Poem, "Rock me to Sleep, Mother."_ By A. O.
MORSE, of Cherry Valley, N. Y. New York: M. W. Dodd.

It is no great while since Miss Peck proved to her own satisfaction her
claim to what Mr. Morse would style the "maternity" of "Nothing to
Wear," and now hardly has Judge Holmes of Missouri determined that the
paternity of Shakespeare is due to Bacon, when the friends of Mr. Ball
of New Jersey spring another trouble upon mankind by declaring him the
author of Mrs. Akers's very graceful and touching poem, "Rock me to
Sleep, Mother," which we all know by heart. In the present pamphlet they
give what evidence they can in Mr. Ball's behalf, and, to tell the
truth, it is not much. It appears from this and other sources that Mr.
Ball is a