attention chiefly to the writing
of that series of educational works, known as _Peter Parley's_, which
has spread his fame over the world. The whole number of these volumes is
about sixty. Among them are treatises upon a great variety of subjects,
and they are remarkable for simplicity of style and felicity of
illustration. Mr. Goodrich has accomplished a complete and important
revolution in juvenile reading, substituting truth and nature for
grotesque fiction in the materials and processes of instruction, and
his method has been largely imitated, at home and abroad. In England
many authors and publishers have disgraced the literary profession by
works under the name of "Parley," with which he has had nothing to do,
and which have none of his wise and genial spirit.

Besides his writings under this pseudonym, Mr. Goodrich has produced
several works of a more ambitious character, which have been eminently
popular. Among them is a series entitled "The Cabinet Library,"
embracing histories, biographies, and essays in science; "Universal
Geography," in an octavo volume of one thousand pages; and a "History of
all Nations," in two large octavos, in which he has displayed such
research, analysis, and generalization, as should insure for him an
honorable rank among historians. We cannot better illustrate his
popularity than by stating the fact, that more than four hundred
thousand volumes of his various productions are now annually sold in
this country and Europe. No living writer is, therefore, as much read,
and in the United States hardly a citizen now makes his first appearance
at the polls, or a bride at the altar, to whose education he has not in
a large degree contributed. For twenty years he has preserved the
confidence of parents and teachers of every variety of condition and
opinion, by the indefectible morality and strong practical sense, which
are universally understood and approved.

Like many other eminent persons, Mr. Goodrich lets sought occasional
relaxation from the main pursuits of his life in poetry, and the volume
before us contains some forty illustrations of his abilities, as a
worshipper of the muse whose temples are most thronged, but who is most
coy and most chary of her inspiration. They have for the most part been
previously printed in "The Token," or in literary journals, but a few
are now published the first time. In typographical and pictorial
elegance the book is unique. It is an exhibition of