oyal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural
and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an
antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only
a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be
driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart
of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial
rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by means of a
demand adapted to the always abundant supply.

We should like Mr. Allibone's book better, if it were more exclusively a
dictionary of names, facts, editions, and dates, and allowed less
space (or none at all) to opinions. The contemporaneous judgments of
individual critics upon writers of original power are commonly of little
value, and are absolutely worthless when an author's fame has struck its
roots down into the kindly soil of national or European appreciation,
when his work has won that "perfect witness of all-judging Jove" which
cannot be begged or bought. When the criticism is anonymous, (as are
many of those cited by Mr. Allibone,) it has not even the reflected
interest, as a measure of the critic himself, which we find sometimes
in the incapacity of a strong nature to appreciate a great one, as in
Johnson's opinion of Milton, for instance,--or of a delicate mind to
comprehend an imaginative one, as in Addison's of Bunyan. In the article
"Carlyle," for example, (by the way, John A. Carlyle is omitted,) we
should have been better content, if Mr. Allibone (instead of letting us
know what "Blackwood's Magazine" thinks of a writer who, whatever his
faults of style, has probably influenced the thought of his generation
more than any other man) had given us the date of the first publication
of "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," and had mentioned that the
original collection of the "Miscellanies" was made in America. (This
last we have since found alluded to under "De Quincey.") Sometimes the
editor himself intrudes remarks which are quite out of keeping with the
character of such a work. We will give an instance which caught our
eye in turning over the leaves. After giving the title of "The Rare
Trauailes" of Job Hortop, Mr. Allibone adds, "We trust that in the
home-relation of his 'Rare Trauails among wilde and sauage people' the
_raconteur_ did not yield to the temptation of 'pulling the long bow,'
for the purpose of increasing the amazement of his wo