Leslie’s passage through the world was of that equal temper which is happiest for the man and unhappiest for the biographer.  With no dramatic surprises of fortune, and no great sorrows, his life had scarce any other alternation than that it went round with the earth through night and day, and would have been tame but for his necessary labor in an art which he loved wisely and with the untumultuous sentiment of an after-honey-moon constancy.  We should say that his leading characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper.  In the conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant.  Leslie, we think, was more at home with Addison than with Cervantes.

His autobiographical reminiscences are very entertaining, especially that part of them which describes a voyage home to America, varied by a winter in Portugal, during the early part of his life.  The Scotch captain, who, with his scanty merchant-crew, beats off a Bordeaux privateer, and then, crippled and half-sinking, clears for action with what he supposes to be a French frigate, but which turns out to be English, is a personage whose acquaintance it is pleasant to make.  The sketches of life in Lisbon, too, are very lively, and the picture of the decayed Portuguese nobleman’s family, for whose pride of birth an imaginary dinner-table was set every day in the parlor with the remains of the hereditary napery and plate, the numerous covers hiding nothing but the naked truth, while their common humanity, squatting on the floor in the kitchen, fished its scanty meal from an earthen pot with pewter spoons, is pathetically humorous and would have delighted Caleb Balderstone.  In after-life, Leslie’s profession made him acquainted with some of the best London life of his time, and the volume is full of agreeable anecdotes of Scott, Irving, Turner, Rogers, Wilkie, and many more.  It contains also several letters of Irving, of no special interest, and some from a sort of Lesmahago of a room-mate of Leslie’s, named Peter Powell, so queer, individual, and shrewd, that we are sorry not to have more of them and their writer.  Altogether the book is one of the pleasantest we have lately met with.

The Old Battle-Ground.  By J.T.  TROWBRIDGE, Author of “Father Brighthopes,” “Neighbor Jackwood,” etc.  New York:  Sheldon & Company. 1860. pp. 276.

Mr. Trowbridge’s previous works have made him known to a large circle of appreciating readers as a writer of originality and promise.  His “Father Brighthopes” we have never read, but we have heard it spoken of as one of the most wholesome children’s books ever published in America, and our knowledge of the author makes us ready to believe the favorable opinion a just one.  Parts of “Neighbor Jackwood” we read with sincere relish and admiration; they showed