Some of Mr. Halliwell’s notes are useful and interesting,—­as that on “keeling the pot,” and some others,—­but a great part are utterly useless.  He thinks it necessary, for instance, to explain that “to speak pure foole, is in sense equivalent to ’I will speak like a pure fool,’”—­that “belkt up” means “belched up,”—­“aprecocks,” “apricots.”  He has notes also upon “meal-mouthed,” “luxuriousnesse,” “termagant,” “fico,” “estro,” “a nest of goblets,” which indicate either that the “general reader” is a less intelligent person in England than in America, or that Mr. Halliwell’s standard of scholarship is very low.  We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference which will explain the allusion to the “Scotch barnacle” much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus Cambrensis,—­namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court physician to Charles II.

Next month we shall examine Mr. Hazlitt’s edition of Webster.

Waverley Novels.  Household Edition.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.

This beautiful edition of Scott’s Novels will be completed in forty-eight volumes.  Thirty are already published, and the remaining eighteen will be issued at the rate of two volumes a month.  As this edition, in the union of elegance of mechanical execution with cheapness of price, is the best which has yet been published in the United States, and reflects great credit on the taste and enterprise of the publishers, its merits should be universally known.  The paper is white, the type new and clear, the illustrations excellent, the volumes of convenient size, the notes placed at the foot of the page, and the text enriched with the author’s latest corrections.  It is called the “Household Edition”; and we certainly think it would be a greater adornment, and should be considered a more indispensable necessity, than numerous articles of expensive furniture, which, in too many households, take the place of such books.

The success of this edition, which has been as great as that of most new novels, is but another illustration of the permanence of Scott’s hold on the general imagination, resulting from the instinctive sagacity with which he perceived and met its wants.  The generation of readers for which he wrote has mostly passed away; new fashions in fiction have risen, had their day, and disappeared; he has been subjected to much acute and profound criticism of a disparaging kind; and at present he has formidable rivals in a number of novelists, both eminent and popular;—­yet his fame has quietly and steadily widened with time, the “reading public” of our day is as much his public as the reading public of his own, and there has been no period since he commenced writing when there were not more persons familiar with his novels than with those of any other author.  Some novelists are more highly estimated by certain classes of minds, but no other comprehends in his popularity