on the Ghetto, the Markets, and Summer in the City, are all of them delightful and new.  They really teach us something, while the learning, we are sorry to say, does nothing of the kind.  Several of these chapters our readers will remember enjoying in the “Atlantic.”  They are good for those who have been in Italy, for those who are going thither, and, above all, for those who must stay at home.  They contain the most cheerful and picturesque descriptions of Italian life and scenery we have ever met with.  And we cannot be too thankful to Mr. Story that he leaves a theme so poetical in itself to be poetical, without any officious help from himself, and that, though an artist, he does not enter on any of those disquisitions which would have made Sir Joshua shift his trumpet.  On the whole, we are inclined to forgive him the polyglot lumber of his chapter on the Evil Eye in consideration of the scenery and galleries which he has spared us.  We think we see symptoms that the Nature-mania which began with Rousseau is on the decline, and that men and their ways are getting into fashion again as worth study.  The good time is perhaps coming when some gallant fellow will out with it that he hates mountains, and will be greeted with a shout of delight from his emancipated brethren.

Mr. Story is a person of very remarkable endowments.  An accomplished musician and poet, (we ought to have said before how remarkably good the translations in these volumes are,) a skilful draughtsman, the author of reputable law-books, he would seem to have been in danger of verifying the old saw, had he not proved himself so eminently a master in sculpture.  We think the country is deeply indebted to Mr. Story for having won so complete a triumph at the London World’s Fair with his Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl, at a time when English statesmen and newspapers were assuring the world that America was relapsing into barbarism.  Those statues, if we may trust the unvarying witness of judicious persons, are conceived and executed in a style altogether above the stone-cutting level of the day, and give proof of real imaginative power.  Mr. Story’s genius and culture, with the fresh spur of so marked a success, will, we are sure, produce other works to his own honor and that of his country.  For we feel that we have a country still,—­feel it the more deeply for our suffering, and our hope deferred,—­and out of the darkness of to-day we have still faith to see a fairer America rising, a higher ideal of freedom, to warm the soul of the artist and nerve the arm of the soldier.

Hand-Book of Universal Literature. From the Latest and Best Authorities.  By MRS. ANNE C.L.  BOTTA.  A New Edition. 12mo.  Boston:  Ticknor and Fields. 1862.