occupies himself for many hours in throwing gifts from a
raised platform, to the people below. The last of these gifts consists
of a number of live prisoners, who have been exhibited bound upon the
platform; they are flung down to be cut and torn in pieces by the
savages. On the occasion when the author was present there were fourteen
of these victims, of whom he succeeded in saving the lives of three. The
object of the expedition was to induce the king to abandon the
slave-trade, and was altogether unsuccessful.

_The Dynamical Theory of the Formation of the Earth,_ two mighty octavo
volumes, elicits the following complimentary remarks from the
_Athenaeum._ "This work is saved from being mischievous only by the
circumstance of the excessive dullness diffused over these twelve
hundred pages--which will in all probability prevent their being much
read.... Of no one department of science does the author appear to have
a correct conception. His views are all distorted. He is false alike in
his Mechanics, in his Geology, in his Natural History, in his Chemistry,
in his Electricity--in every other consideration of the physical
agencies, and still more false in that which we suppose we must bring
ourselves to call his Logic."

_Memoirs of a Literary Veteran_, by R. P. Gillies is a book almost worth
reading, quite worth looking at. The author, nephew to the celebrated
historian of Greece, born to a fair estate, and with a propensity to
make verses, spent the one without turning the other to any special
account. Amidst much idle matter, whose only purpose is to swell the
bulk of the volumes, are some rather interesting anecdotes of literary
celebrities. Some over-laudatory epistles from Sir Egerton Brydges, and
a characteristic letter or two from Wordsworth, containing among other
matters, a criticism upon Scott's Guy Mannering, in which considerable
praise is awarded to the management of "this lady," as he solemnly
denominates Meg Merrilies, are perhaps the best things in the book. It
reminds one, but at a wide interval, of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.

_A Life of Hartley Coleridge_ prefixed to a volume of his poems, tells a
sad story of powers neutralized and a life thrown away. He was the
eldest son of _the_ Coleridge, and with a portion of his father's genius
combined a large share of his infirmity of purpose and feebleness of
will. He gained a college fellowship, and forfeited it within a year, by
intemperance; after whi