The literary reputation of Hugh Swinton Legaré rests almost exclusively on the two-volume edition of essays and miscellaneous writings collected by his sister, Mary Legaré Bullen, after her brother's death in 1843. Sixteen of the essays (all those collected in volume two) had first appeared between 1828 and 1832, during the brief lifetime of the Southern Review, one of the most ambitious of the journals published in the antebellum South. Legaré had been the moving force behind its founding and became also its most frequent contributor. Another three essays, collected in volume one of Writings, had made their first appearance in the New York Review between 1839 and 1841. The remainder of that volume is a miscellany consisting of a personal diary, not intended for publication, that Legaré kept while serving from May 1832 to August 1836 as the first chargé d'affaires from the United States to the newly independent...