It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series.  A choice of old authors should be a florilegium, and not a botanist’s hortus siccus, to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer.  The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the “Library.”  We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR.  The volumes already published are:  Increase Mather’s “Remarkable Providences”; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the “Visions” of Piers Ploughman; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the “Hymns and Songs” and the “Hallelujah” of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden’s “Table-talk”; the “Enchiridion” of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston and Webster; and Chapman’s translation of Homer.  The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the “Magnalia” of his book-suffocated son.  Cunningham’s comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson.  Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters” are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of footnotes to the works of better men,—­but, with the exception of “The Fair and Happy Milkmaid,” they are dull enough to have pleased James the First; his “Wife” is a cento of far-fetched conceits,—­here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney’s game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity.  The “Piers Ploughman” is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright’s former edition.  It would have been very well to have republished the “Fair Virtue,” and “Shepherd’s Hunting” of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his “Hymns and Songs,” whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetasters.  If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would.  Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:—­

  “Rottenness my bones possest;
  Trembling fear possessed me;
  I that troublous day might rest: 
  For, when his approaches be
  Onward to the people made,
  His strong troops will them invade.”