invaluable or worthless by the addition of your autograph! for your dice (as the Abbe Galiani said of Nature’s) are always loaded, and you may make your book the heir of Memory in two ways,—­by contriving to get the fire of genius into it, or to get it into the fire by the hands of the hangman.  Milton’s “Areopagitica” is an example of one method, and the “Philostratus” of Blount (who pillaged the “Areopagitica”) of the other.  And yet, again, how perverse is human nature! how more perverse is literary taste!  There is a large class of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable.  Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by means of a demand adapted to the always abundant supply.

We should like Mr. Allibone’s book better, if it were more exclusively a dictionary of names, facts, editions, and dates, and allowed less space (or none at all) to opinions.  The contemporaneous judgments of individual critics upon writers of original power are commonly of little value, and are absolutely worthless when an author’s fame has struck its roots down into the kindly soil of national or European appreciation, when his work has won that “perfect witness of all-judging Jove” which cannot be begged or bought.  When the criticism is anonymous, (as are many of those cited by Mr. Allibone,) it has not even the reflected interest, as a measure of the critic himself, which we find sometimes in the incapacity of a strong nature to appreciate a great one, as in Johnson’s opinion of Milton, for instance,—­or of a delicate mind to comprehend an imaginative one, as in Addison’s of Bunyan.  In the article “Carlyle,” for example, (by the way, John A. Carlyle is omitted,) we should have been better content, if Mr. Allibone (instead of letting us know what “Blackwood’s Magazine” thinks of a writer who, whatever his faults of style, has probably influenced the thought of his generation more than any other man) had given us the date of the first publication of “Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,” and had mentioned that the original collection of the “Miscellanies” was made in America. (This last we have since found alluded to under “De Quincey.”) Sometimes the editor himself intrudes remarks which are quite out of keeping with the character of such a work.  We will give an instance which caught our eye in turning over the leaves.  After giving the title of “The Rare Trauailes” of Job Hortop, Mr. Allibone adds, “We trust that in the home-relation of his ‘Rare Trauails among wilde and sauage people’