matter.  Such an idea is simply ridiculous, and will be tolerated only by the ignorant, the feeble-minded, or the insane.  Still, the “knockings” are sufficiently mysterious, and if unexposed, sufficiently fruitful of evil, to be legitimate subjects of investigation, and he who under such circumstances is so careful of his dignity as to disregard the subject altogether, is as much mistaken as the gravest buffoon of the circus.  We reviewed a week or two ago “The Phantom World,” just republished by Mr. Hart; the Appletons have recently printed an original work which we believe has considerable merit, entitled “Credulity and Superstition;” and Mr. Redfield has in press and nearly ready, an edition of “The Night Side of Nature,” by Miss Crowe, author of “Susan Hopley.”  This we believe is the cleverest performance upon ghosts and ghost-seers that has appeared in English since the days of Richard Glanvill; and with the others, it will be of service in checking the progress of the pitiable superstition which has been readily accepted by a large class of people, so peculiarly constituted that they could not help rejecting the Christian religion for its “unreasonableness and incredibility!”

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“Some Honest Opinions upon Authors, Books, and other subjects,” is the title of a new volume by the late Edgar A. Poe, which Mr. Redfield will publish during the Fall.  It will embrace besides several of the author’s most elaborate aesthetical essays, those caustic personalities and criticisms from his pen which, during several years, attracted so much attention in our literary world.  Among his subjects are Bryant, Cooper, Pauldings, Hawthorne, Willis, Longfellow, Verplanck, Bush, Anthon, Hoffman, Cornelius Mathews, Henry B. Hirst, Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. Lewis, Margaret Fuller, Miss Sedgwick, and many more of this country, beside Macaulay, Bulwer, Dickens, Horne, Miss Barrett, and some dozen others of England.

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Mr. Dudley Bean occupies the first two sheets of the last Knickerbocker with a very erudite and picturesque description of the attack upon Ticonderoga by the grand army under Lords Amherst and Howe, in “the old French War.”  Mr. Bean is an accomplished merchant, of literary abilities and a taste for antiquarian research, and he is probably better informed than any other person living upon the history and topography of all the country for many miles about Lake George, which is the most classical region of the United States.  He has treated the chief points of this history in many interesting papers which he has within a few years contributed to the journals, and we have promise of a couple of octavos, embracing the whole subject, from his pen, at an early day.  We know of nothing in the literature of our local and particular history that is more pleasing than the specimens of his quality in this way which have fallen under our notice.