Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith’s reprints, we come to the closer question of How are they edited? Whatever the merit of the original works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by the publisher, should be accurate and scholarly.  The editing of the Homer we can heartily commend; and Dr. Rimbault, who carried the works of Overbury through the press, has done his work well; but the other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English scholarship nor to English typography.  The Introductions to some of them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity of reprinting our old authors because the art of writing correct and graceful English has been lost.  William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction to Southwell:  “There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmosphere.” (pp. xxii.-xxiii.) Again, (p. xxii.,) “He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592.”  We should like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how the objects of a mission could be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission itself.  From the many similar flowers in the Introduction to Mather’s “Providences,” by Mr. George Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a countryman,) we select the following:  “It was at this period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our pilgrim fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of men called savages, who proved more beneficent than national Christians.”  To whom or what our pilgrim fathers did succumb, and what “national Christians” are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture.  Speaking of the “Providences,” Mr. Offor says, that “they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being an implicit faith in the power of the [in-]visible world to hold visible intercourse with man:—­not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but of demons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and destroy,”—­a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid.  On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that “he was one of the first divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were considered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by deceitful juggling; that the Devil could not speak English, nor prevail with Protestants;