But however impracticable Cattaneo may be, and however mistaken and extravagant his political views, he is a man of such vigor of mind, that a journal conducted by him becomes, from the fact of his connection with it, one of the important organs of Italian thought.  We trust that the “Politecnico” will find subscribers among those in our country who desire to keep up their knowledge of Italian affairs at a time of such extraordinary interest as the present.

Elsie Venner.  A Romance of Destiny.  By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 2 vols.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1861.

English literature numbers among its more or less distinguished authors a goodly number of physicians.  Sir Thomas Browne was, perhaps, the last of the great writers of English prose whose mind and style were impregnated with imagination.  He wrote poetry without meaning it, as many of his brother doctors have meant to write poetry without doing it, in the classic style of

  “Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!”

Garth’s “Dispensary” was long ago as fairly buried as any of his patients; and Armstrong’s “Health” enjoys the dreary immortality of being preserved in the collections, like one of those queer things they show you in a glass jar at the anatomical museums.  Arbuthnot, a truly genial humorist, has hardly had justice done him.  People laugh over his fun in the “Memoirs of Scriblerus,” and are commonly satisfied to think it Pope’s.  Smollett insured his literary life in “Humphrey Clinker”; and we suppose his Continuation of Hume is still one of the pills which ingenuous youth is expected to gulp before it is strong enough to resist.  Goldsmith’s fame has steadily gained; and so has that of Keats, whom we may also fairly reckon in our list, though he remained harmless, having never taken a degree.  On the whole, the proportion of doctors who have positively succeeded in our literature is a large one, and we have now another very marked and beautiful case in Dr. Holmes.  Since Arbuthnot, the profession has produced no such wit; since Goldsmith, no author so successful.

Five years ago it would have been only Dr. Holmes’s intimate friends that would have considered the remarkable success he has achieved not only possible, but probable.  They knew, that, if the fitting opportunity should only come, he would soon show how much stuff he had in him,—­sterner stuff, too, than the world had supposed,—­stuff not merely to show off the iris of a brilliant reputation, but to block out into the foundations of an enduring fame.  It seems an odd thing to say that Dr. Holmes had suffered by having given proof of too much wit; but it is undoubtedly true.  People in general have a great respect for those who scare them or make them cry, but are apt to weigh lightly one who amuses them.  They like to be tickled, but they would hardly take the advice of their tickler on any question they thought serious.  We have our doubts whether the majority of those who