is “better than Ellsler”; and pretty Mrs. John Wood, the lively soubrette of the Boston Theatre, “possesses many of the rarest requisites of a great actress”!  But these are inanities which an inexperienced and half-taught girl might possibly utter in a familiar letter.  Not so, we trust, as to the belief expressed by Belle Brittan, in puffing “Jim Parton’s, Fanny Fern’s Jim’s,” Life of Burr,—­“more charming than a novel,” because, as she implies, of the successful libertinism of its hero,—­when she says, speaking in the name of the maidens of America, “We all, I suppose, must fall, like our first parents, when the hour of our temptation comes”!

We should not have given the space we have bestowed on this worthless book, had it not been made the occasion of newspaper puffs innumerable, recommending it to the public as something worthy of their time and money.  It is one of the worst signs of our time that a false good-nature or imperfect taste should lead respectable papers to give currency to books destitute of all merit, by the application to them of stereotyped phrases of commendation.  These letters, without a grace of style, without a flash of wit, without a genial ray of humor, deformed by coarse breeding, vulgar self-conceit, and ignorant assumption, are bepraised as if they were fresh from the mint of genius, and bore the image and superscription of Madame de Sevigne or Lady Mary Wortley!  This evil must be cured, or the daily press may find that it will cure itself.

We know nothing of the author of this book, excepting what he has here shown us of himself.  He may be capable of better things, and when they come before us, we shall rejoice to do them justice.  But we advise him, first of all, to discard his disguise, which becomes him as ill as the gown of Mrs. Ford’s “maid’s aunt, the fat woman of Brentford,” did Sir John Falstaff.  Or, if he will persist in playing the part of a woman, let him bear in mind that to be unmanly is not necessarily to be womanly, and that it does not follow that one writes like a lady because he does not write like a gentleman.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of Drawing.  Designed as a Text-book for the Mechanic, Architect, Engineer, and Surveyor.  Comprising Geometrical Projection, Mechanical, Architectural, and Topographical Drawing, Perspective, and Isometry.  Edited by W.E.  WORTHEN.  New York:  D. Appleton & Co. 1857.

Mr. Worthen has given us in this book a most judicious and complete compilation of the best works on the various branches of “practical” drawing,—­having, with real thoughtfulness and knowledge of what was needed in a handbook, condensed all the most important rules and directions to be found in the works of MM.  Le Brun and Armengaud on geometrical and mechanical drawing, Ferguson and Garbett on architectural, and Williams, Gillespie, Smith, and Frome, on topographical drawing.

It includes a very full chapter of geometrical definitions, a complete and minute description of all the implements of mechanical drawing, and solutions of all the useful problems of geometrical drawing,—­a part of the work especially needed by practical mechanics, and hitherto to be found, so far as we know, only in the form of results in the pocket-books of tables, or in the lengthy and elaborate treatises of the heavy cyclopaedias, or works specially devoted to the topic.