Mr. Olmsted’s qualifications as a traveller are so remarkable that we cannot help wishing that he would make a journey through New England and make us as thoroughly acquainted with its internal condition as we ought to be.  We believe there is no book of the kind since that of President Dwight, and that gives us little of the sort of information we desire.  It is an insight into the manners, modes of life, and ways of thinking that is of value; and Mr. Olmsted, who goes about, like Chaucer’s Somner,

  “Ever inquiring upon everything,”

is just the person to supply a great want in our literature.  We know less of the domestic habits of a large part of our population than of those of the Saxons in the time of Alfred.  But for a few glimpses which we get from Dunton, Madam Knight, the Rev. Jacob Bailey, and the Proceedings of Synods, we should be little better acquainted with the New Englanders of the century following the Restoration than with the primitive Aryans.  Bailey’s account of his voyage to England is the best contemporary testimony to the truth of Smollett’s pictures of sea-life that we ever met with, and we cannot sufficiently regret that the whole of his journal during his college-life was not published.  Mr. Olmsted would be sure of a grateful recognition from posterity, if he would do for New England what he has done for the South.  We might not be flattered by his report, but we could not fail to be benefited by it.  It would, perhaps, lead to the establishment of home missions among the Bad-Bread and Foul-Air tribes, who make more wretched captives for life and kill more children than the French and Indians together ever dreamed of.

Sketches of Parisian Life.  The Greatness and Decline of Cesar Birotteau.  From the French of HONORE DE BALZAC.  Translated by O.W.  WIGHT and F.B.  GOODRICH.  New York:  Rudd & Carleton, 130 Grand Street. 1860. pp. 387.

We are very glad to see this beginning of a translation of Balzac, or de Balzac, as he chose to christen himself.  Without intending an exact parallel, he might be called the Fielding of French Literature,—­intensely masculine, an artist who works outward from an informing idea, a satirist whose humor will not let him despise human nature even while he exposes its weaknesses.  The story of Caesar Birotteau is well-chosen as an usher to the rest, for it is eminently characteristic, though it does not show the higher imaginative qualities of the author.  It is one of the severest tests of genius to draw an ordinary character so humanly that we learn to love and respect it in spite of a thorough familiarity with its faults and absurdities.  In this respect Balzac’s “Birotteau” is a masterpiece.  The translation, as far as we have had time to look into it, seems a very easy, spirited, and knowing one.  The translators have overcome the difficulties of slang with great skill, rendering by equivalent vulgarisms which give the spirit where the letter would be unintelligible.  We object, however, to a phrase like “vest-pocket,” where we find it in the narrative, and not in the mouth of one of the personages.  It is tailor’s English, which is as bad as peddler’s French.  But this is a trifle where there is so much to commend in essentials, and we hope the translators will be encouraged to go on in a work so excellently begun.