s been enriched
by the use of materials which were not accessible to Worcester. We are
glad to see a handsome tribute to the learning and industry of Dr.
Worcester, and an honest acknowledgment of indebtedness to his labors,
in Professor Porter's Preface. This is as it should be; and we hope that
the publishers, on both sides, acting in the same spirit, will forego
all unfriendly controversy. Let there be no new War of the Dictionaries.
The world is wide enough for both, and both are monuments of industry,
judgment, and erudition, in the highest degree creditable to American
scholarship, and unequalled by anything that has yet been done by
English philologists of the present century.

_Dramatis Personae._ By ROBERT BROWNING. Boston: Ticknor and
Fields.

The title of this new volume of poems expresses the peculiarity which we
find in everything that Mr. Browning composes. Notwithstanding the
remoteness of his moods, and the curious subtilty with which he follows
the trace of exceptional feelings, he impersonates dramatically: there
may be few such people as these choice acquaintances of his genius, but
they are persons, and not mere figures labelled with a thought. Pippa,
Guendolen, Luria, the Duchess, Bishop Blougram, Fra Lippo Lippi, are
persons, however much they may be given to episodes and reverie. You
find a great deal that is irrelevant to the thorough working-out of a
character, much that is not simply individual: Mr. Browning gets
sometimes in the way, so that you lose sight of his companion, but it
is not as Punch's master overzealously pulls the wires of his puppets.
You would not say that a man can find many such companions, but you
cannot deny that they are vividly described. Perhaps they appear in only
one or two moods, but these have individual life. They are discovered in
rare exalted or peculiar moments, but these are in costume and bathed in
color. Shutting and opening many doors, balked at one vestibule and
traversing another, suddenly you surprise the lord or mistress of the
mansion, or from some threshold you silently observe their secret
passion, which is unconscious of the daylight, and is caught in all its
frankness. You come upon people, and not upon pictures in a house.

But the pictures, too, in all Mr. Browning's interiors, seem to have
grown out of the life of the persons. He has not merely come in and hung
them up, as poor artist or upholsterer, to make a sumptuous house for
f