composition to tell us plainly what has happened to him.  The moment the working-man gets a pen into his hand, he is, as it were, possessed.  He is no longer himself.  He has not the courage to come out naked and show himself in all his grime and strength.  The instant that he conceives the idea of putting himself on paper he borrows somebody else’s clothes, and, instead of a free, manly figure, we have a wretched scarecrow in a coat too small or too large for him,—­generally the latter.  For it is a curious fact, that the more uneducated a man is,—­in which condition his ordinary language must of necessity be proportionately idiomatic,—­the greater pains he takes, when he has formed the resolution of composing, to be splendid and expansive in his style.  He racks his brains until he rummages out imperfect memories of the turgid paragraphs of cheap newspapers and novels which he has some time or other read, and forthwith struts off with all the finest feathers in the dictionary rustling about him.

Mr. John Brown, the hero of the Autobiography before us, is no exception to this unhappy rule.  The son of a butcher, he became in boyhood a sheep-driver, was then apprenticed to a shoemaker, got into trouble and a prison, enlisted as a soldier, deserted, turned strolling player, shipped on board a man-of-war, tried again to desert, was flogged at the gratings, beheld Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, was discharged from the navy, consorted with thieves and prize-fighters, appeared on the London stage with success, married and starved, became the pet of the Cambridge students, whom he assisted in amateur theatricals, started a stage-coach line to London and failed, set up a billiard-room, got into innumerable street-fights and always came off conqueror, was elected town-councillor of Cambridge and made a fortune, which it is to be hoped he is now enjoying.

Here was material for a book.  From the glimpses of his personnel which we occasionally catch through all Mr. Brown’s splendid writing, we should say that he was a man of a strong, hearty nature, full of indomitable energy, and possessed with a truly Saxon predilection for the use of his fists.  The number of physical contests in which he was chief actor renders his volume almost epical in character.  Invulnerable as Achilles and quarrelsome as Hector, he strides over the bodies of innumerable foes.  If some of his friends, the Seniors, at Cambridge, would only put his adventures into Greek verse, he might descend to posterity in sounding hexameters with the sons of Telamon and Thetis.

The plain narrative portions of Mr. Brown’s volume possess much real interest.  His adventures with the strolling players, the insight he gives us into the life of a journeyman shoemaker, and his reminiscences of his friends, the Jew old-clothes-men, the pick-pockets, and the prize-fighters, are so many steaks cut warm from the living world, and are good, substantial food for thought.  But he seldom forgets himself long,