not truth, it is
not fiction; neither biography nor romance; not even romantic
biography; but three volumes of sketches without a purpose, of
narratives without an aim. Mr. Borrow has hit the English taste
by his union of the clerical and scholarly with what we may
call _manly blackguardism_. His sympathies are all with the
blackguards. Not with the ragged nondescripts of the streets,
but the poetic vagabonds of the fields--the Rommany Chals--the
Gipsies, who are as great in "horse-taming" as Hector of old,
and great in the art of "self-defence" as any Greek before the
walls of Troy--not to mention other peculiarities in respect of
property and its conveyance which they share with the
Greeks--the Gipsies in short who are vagabonds in the true
wandering sense of the term."

* * * * *

JAMES T. FIELDS has in press a new edition of his Poems, embracing the
pieces which he has written since the edition of 1849. Mr. Fields has a
just sense of poetical art; his compositions are happily conceived, and
uniformly executed with the most careful elaboration. A few days ago we
saw a letter from Miss Mitford, addressed to a friend in this country,
in which he is referred to as one of the "living classics of our
tongue." We perceive that he is to be the next anniversary poet of the
Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard.

* * * * *

W. G. SIMMS has published at Charleston a fine poem entitled _The City
of the Silent_, written for the occasion of the consecration of a
cemetery near that city. It flows in natural harmony, and in thought as
well as in manner has an appropriate dignity. We wonder that there has
appeared no complete collection of the poems of Mr. Simms, which fill at
least a dozen volumes, nearly all of which are now out of print. Some of
his pieces have remarkable merit.

* * * * *

"NILE NOTES BY A HOWADJI," is not a book of travel, but the book of a
traveller. The traveller is obviously a very charming and veracious one,
but after all, the landscape and the persons, scenes, and manners he
describes are so idealized by him as to have lost much of their natural
identity, and put on the somewhat artificial look of museum specimens.
However, the _Notes_ are not, therefore, to us the less, but all the
more, readable, because we have abundance of mere books of travel, and
sc