now-forgotten travellers, who wrote of adventure in the United States
when, as Mr. Dickens intimates, one of the readiest means of literary
success in England was to visit the Americans and abuse them in a book.
Mr. Paulding's parody gives the idea that their lies were rather dull
and foolish, and that the parodist's work was not so entirely a
diversion as one might think. He wrote for a generation now passing
away, and it is all but impossible for us to enter into the feeling that
animated him and his readers. For this reason, perhaps, we fail to enjoy
his book, though we are not entirely persuaded that we should have found
it humorous when it first appeared.

_The Life and Death of Jason._ A Poem. By WILLIAM MORRIS.
Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Whether the reader shall enjoy and admire this poem or not, depends
almost solely upon the idea with which he comes to its perusal. If he
expects to find it a work of genius, with an authentic and absolute
claim upon his interest, he will be disappointed. If he is prepared to
see in it a labor of the most patient and wonderful ingenuity, to behold
the miracle of an Englishman of our day writing exactly in the spirit of
the heroic ages, with no thought or feeling suggested by the experience
of the last two thousand years, it will fully answer his expectations.
The work is so far Greek as to read in many parts like Chapman's
translation of the Odyssey; though it must be confessed that Homer is,
if not a better Pagan, at least a greater poet than Mr. Morris. Indeed,
it appears to us that Mr. Morris's success is almost wholly in the
reflected sentiment and color of his work, and it seems, therefore, to
have no positive value, and to add nothing to the variety of letters or
intellectual life. It is a kind of performance in which failure is
intolerably offensive, and triumph more to be wondered at than praised.
For to be more or less than Greek in it is to be ridiculous, and to be
just Greek is to be what has already perfectly and sufficiently been. If
one wished to breathe the atmosphere of Greek poetry, with its sensuous
love of beauty and of life, its pathetic acceptance of events as fate,
its warped and unbalanced conscience, its abhorrence of death, and its
conception of a future sad as annihilation, we had already the Greek
poets; and does it profit us that Mr. Morris can produce just their
effects and nothing more in us?

We are glad to acknowledge his transcendent