an industrious and skilful specialist,
who is more able with his microscope than with his pen, and more at
home with the latter in telling us what he has seen than in writing
a general treatise on so vast a subject as Physiology.

_Lettres de Silvio Pellico_, recueillies et mises en ordre, par
M. GUILLAUME STEFANI. Traduites et precedees d'une Introduction, par
M. ANTOINE DE LATOUR. Paris: 1857. pp. liii, 493. 8 vo.

Silvio Pellico is one of the most touching ghosts that glide through
the chambers of the memory. Even the rod of the pedagogue and the
imprisonment of the school-room (for it has been the misfortune of
"Le mie Prigioni" to be doomed to serve as a "class-book" to
beginners in modern languages) have proved unable to diminish the
sympathy felt for the Spielberg prisoner.

This volume will increase his pure fame. It will be read with
painful interest. It will do more for Italian independence
than all the ravings of revolutionary manifestoes and all the
poignard-strokes of political assassins which can be written or given
from now till doomsday. No one can read it without a swelling heart
and a tear-filled eye, for it discloses involuntarily and indirectly
the unspeakable unhappiness of Italy. Here are the sad accounts of
some loved friend or admired countryman snatched away to prison, or
hurried into exile, for a letter written, or a visit paid, or an
intemperate speech uttered; while no preparation is made for the
long departure, and papers, even the most familiar and prized, are
seized and never restored. Another page presents the exile's
struggles for daily bread, his privations, his longings for the
Italian sun and sky and soil, for the native land; another, the
earnest prayer from jail-walls for the Bible, for books upon our
Saviour's sufferings (nothing less than voices from heaven can
breathe comfort in Austrian dungeons!) Then the moving letters
written from one prisoner's family to another's (yesterday
unacquainted, to-day near kinsmen in the bonds of sorrow) to sustain
each other in the common afflictions, craving with avidity the least
intelligence from the living tombs of tyranny, sharing with generous
alacrity all their tidings. How musically endearing Italian
diminutives fall upon the ear employed in this office! Here we have
Pellico's own letters to his parents to calm their natural grief,
filled with pious concealment of his own mental and bodily torment,
with encouragements to hope an e