o advanced students.

Hamilton is also admirable in statement. Confusion, vacillation,
obscurity, uncertainty, are as foreign to his style as to his mind. He
is almost rigid in his precision. Every word has its meaning, and
every idea its stern, sure, decisive statement. His masterly powers
of analysis, of reasoning, of generalization, are always adequately
exhibited by a corresponding mastery of expression. The study of such a
volume as the present is itself an education in statement and logic; and
that it will be studied by thousands, in the colleges and out of the
colleges of the country, we cannot but hope.

_Allibone's Dictionary of Authors._ Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson,
1858. Vol. I. pp. 1005.

Leigh Hunt, in one of his Essays, speaks of the wishful thrill with
which, in looking over an index, he wondered if ever his name would
appear under the letter H in the reversed order (Hunt, Leigh) peculiar
to that useful and too much neglected field of literary achievement. In
Mr. Allibone's Dictionary he would see his wish more than satisfied; for
if he turn up "Hunt, Leigh," he will find a reference to "Hunt, James
Henry Leigh," and under that head a list of his works, more complete,
perhaps, than he himself could easily have drawn up.

In glancing along the leaves of a collection like this, one's heart is
touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in a
graveyard. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist
who made a great stir in his day, how many a once rising genius, how
many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone
immortality of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams,
the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an
impartial and generous posterity;--and then read "Smith J.(ohn?)
1713-1784(?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epic Poem in Twelve Books,
1740, 4to. _See Lowndes._" The time of his own death less certain than
that of his poem, which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,--and the only
posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable Lowndes! Well,
even a bibliographic indemnity for contemporary neglect, to have so
much as your title-page read after it is a century old, and to enjoy a
posthumous public of one, is better than nothing.

A volume like Mr. Allibone's--so largely a hospital for incurable
forgottenhoods--is better than any course of philosophy to the young
author. Let him reckon how many o