American periodicals, and to give him credit for the power and the
originality which have since borne such ripe fruit in 'The Scarlet Letter'
and 'The House of the Seven Gables.' Little less agreeable is it to see
that acceptance, after long years of waiting, seems not to have soured the
temper of the writer--not to have encouraged him into conceit--not to have
discouraged him into slovenliness. Like a real artist Mr. Hawthorne gives
out no slightly planned nor carelessly finished literary handiwork."

-------------------------------------

Among the list of passengers who perished by fire on board the Amazon
steamer, we find the name of Mr. ELIOT WARBURTON, the author of "The
Crescent and the Cross," a book of Eastern travel--"Prince Rupert and the
Cavaliers"--and the novels "Reginald Hastings" and "Darien." Mr. Warburton,
says a correspondent of the _Times_, had been deputed by the Atlantic and
Pacific Junction Company to come to a friendly understanding with the
tribes of Indians who inhabit the Isthmus of Darien: it was also his
intention to make himself perfectly acquainted with every part of those
districts, and with whatever referred to their topography, climate, and
resources. "To _Darien_, with the date of 1852 upon its title-page," says
the _London Examiner_, "the fate of its author will communicate a
melancholy interest. The theme of the book is a fine one. Its fault
consists chiefly in the fact that the writer was not born to be a
novelist. Yet, full as it is of eloquent writing, and enlivened as it is
with that light of true genius, which raises even the waste work of a good
writer above the common twaddle of a circulating library, _Darien_ may,
for its own sake, and apart from all external interest, claim many
readers. External interest, however, attaches to the book in a most
peculiar manner. Superstitious men--perhaps also some men not
superstitious--might say that there was a strange shadow of the future cast
upon its writer's mind. It did not fall strictly within the limits of a
tale of the Scotch colonization of Darien, to relate perils by sea; yet
again and again are such perils recurred to in these volumes, and the
terrible imagination of a _ship on fire_ is twice repeated in them."

-------------------------------------

M. THIERS, ALEXANDRE DUMAS, VICTOR HUGO, several newspaper editors, and
other literary men of France, are now at Brussels. Thiers is said to b