tic and feudally plebeian, in
which the poor are little better than vassals, and their women toil in
the fields like beasts of burden, and the women of all classes are
treated with rude and clumsy disesteem.

Mr. Browne's book is devotedly funny, as we hinted, but, in spite of
this, is really very amusing. A Californian, rich from the _subiti
guadagni_ of his shares in the Washoe mines, is carried to Frankfort by
his enthusiastic wife, who is persuaded that Germany is the proper place
to bring up American children. They live there in the German
fashion,--Mrs. Butterfield charmed and emulous of German civilization,
Mr. Butterfield willing, but incorrigibly Californian to the last, and
retaining throughout that amazing local pride in the institutions,
productions, and scenery of his adopted State which Americans so swiftly
acquire in drifting from one section of the Union to another. The
invention of this family is not the least truthful thing in the book,
which in many respects is full of droll good-sense and good humor.

_Charles Lamb. A Memoir._ By BARRY CORNWALL. Boston: Roberts
Brothers.

It is not to any very definable cause that this charming book owes the
interest with which it holds the reader throughout. It can scarcely be
said to present the life or character of Lamb in a novel aspect, and
even the anecdotic material in which it abounds does not appear
altogether fresh. The very manner in which the subject is treated is
that to which we are accustomed: for who has ever been able to write of
Charles Lamb but in a tone of tender and compassionate admiration?

Something, however, better than novelty of matter or method appears in
this Memoir, and makes it the best ever written concerning the fine
poet, exquisite humorist, and noble man, who it brings nearer than ever
to our hearts. Much was to be expected of Mr. Proctor in such a work,
though much would have been forgiven him if he had indulged himself far
more than he has done in an old man's privilege to be garrulous upon old
times and old friends, and had confined himself less strictly to the
life and character illustrative of Lamb's. As it is, there is nothing
concerning any of Lamb's contemporaries that we would willingly lose
from this book. In these sketches of the humorist's friends the subtile
and delightful touches bring out his own nature more clearly, and he
appears in the people who surrounded him hardly less than in his essays
or the events of