at
men that they are, for lack of authentic anecdotes and details of their
daily life, apt to retire into myths. Such will not be the case with
Irving. The _reality_, the life-likeness of these letters, and of the
_ana_ drawn from them, will keep him, Washington Irving the New-Yorker,
alive and breathing before the world to all time. In these chapters a
vail seems lifted from what was growing obscure in our knowledge of
social life in the youth of our fathers. Our only wish, in reading, is
for more of it. But the life gathers interest as it proceeds. From
America it extends to Europe, and we meet the names of Humboldt, De
Stael, Allston, Vanderlyn, Mrs. Siddons, as among his associates even in
early youth. So through Home Again and in Europe Again there is a
constant succession of personal experience and wide opportunity to know
the world. Did our limits permit, we would gladly cite largely from
these pages, for it is long since the press has given to the world a
book so richly quotable. But the best service we can render the reader
is to refer him to the work itself, which is as well worth reading as
any thing that its illustrious subject ever wrote, since in it we have
most admirably reflected Irving himself; the best loved of our writers,
and the man who did more, so far as intellectual effort is concerned, to
honor our country than any American who ever lived.

BEAUTIES SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCKY. With a Portrait.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

We are not sure that this is not the very first book of other than
pictorial beauties which we ever regarded with patience. Books of
literary 'beauties' are like musical matinees--the first act of one
opera--the grand dying-scene from another--all very pretty, but not on
the whole satisfactory, or entitling one to claim from it alone any real
knowledge of the original whole. Yet this volume we have found
fascinating, have flitted from page to page, backwards and forwards, [it
is a great advantage in a book of 'unconnections' that one may
_conscientiously_ skip about,] and concluded by thanking in our heart
the judicious Eclectic, whoever he may be--who mosaicked these bits into
an enduring picture of De Quincey-ism. For really in it, by virtue of
selection, collection, and recollection, we have given an authentic
cabinet of specimens more directly suggestive of the course and
soul-idioms of the author than many minds would gather from reading
_all_ th