Mr. Parton begins his book with a new kind of genealogy, and one suited to our Western hemisphere, where men are valued more for what they themselves are than for what their grandfathers were,—­for making than for wearing an illustrious name.  He shows that Jackson came of a good stock,—­pious, tenacious of opinion and purpose, and brave,—­the Scotch-Irish.  He then tells us how young Jackson imbibed his fierce patriotism, riding as a boy-trooper, and wellnigh dying a prisoner, during the last years of the Revolutionary War.  He lets us see his hero cock-fighting, horse-racing, bad-whiskey-drinking, studying law, and fighting by turns, leaving behind him somewhat dubious but on the whole favorable memories, yet somehow getting on, till he is appointed District-Attorney among the wolves, wildcats, and redskins of Tennessee.  The story of his emigration thither and his early life there is wonderfully picturesque, and told by Mr. Parton with the spirit which only sympathy can give.

A great part of the material is wholly new, and we are at last enabled to get at the real Jackson, and to gain something like an adequate and consistent conception, of him.  We are particularly glad to learn the truth about Mrs. Jackson, after so many years of slander and misunderstanding, and to find something really touching and noble, instead of ludicrous, in the grim General’s devotion to his first and only love.  We get also for the first time an understandable account of the Battle of New Orleans, made up with praiseworthy impartiality from the accounts of both sides.  Nor is it only here that the author gives us new light.  He enables us to judge fairly of the sad story of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and throws a great deal of light on many points of our political history which much needed honest illumination.  The book is of especial interest at the present time, as it contains the best narrative we have ever seen of the Nullification troubles of 1832.  Mr. Parton not only shows a decided talent for biography, but his work is characterized by a thoroughness of research and honesty of purpose that make it, on the whole, the best life yet written of any of our public men.

Poems.  By ROSE TERRY.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1861. pp. 231.

We forget who it was that once charitably christened one of his volumes “Prose by a Poet,” in order that the public might be put on their guard as to the difference between it and the others,—­inexperienced critics are so apt to make mistakes!  The example seems to us worth following, and, were this dangerous frankness made a point of honor in title-pages, we should be able at a glance to distinguish the books that must be bought from those that may be read.  We should then see advertised “The Ten-Inch Bore, or Sermons by Rev. Canon So-and-so,”—­“Essays to do Good, by a Victim of Original Sin,”—­“Poems by a Proser,”—­“Political Economy, by a Bankrupt,” and the like.  We should know, at least, what we had to expect.