brazen proclamation, not unconscious of the advantage which will accrue, if our little craft, cymbula sutilis, shall seem to leave port with a clipping breeze, and to carry, in nautical phrase, a bone in her mouth.  Nevertheless, I have chosen, as being more equitable, to prepare some also sufficiently objurgatory, that readers of every taste may find a dish to their palate.  I have modelled them upon actually existing specimens, preserved in my own cabinet of natural curiosities.  One, in particular, I had copied with tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity.  Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighboring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity.  But this I have been forced to omit, from its too great length.—­H.W.]

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From the Universal Littery Universe.

Full of passages which rivet the attention of the reader....  Under a rustic garb, sentiments are conveyed which should be committed to the memory and engraven on the heart of every moral and social being....  We consider this a unique performance....  We hope to see it soon introduced into our common schools....  Mr. Wilbur has performed his duties as editor with excellent taste and judgment....  This is a vein which we hope to see successfully prosecuted....  We hail the appearance of this work as a long stride toward the formation of a purely aboriginal, indigenous, native, and American literature.  We rejoice to meet with an author national enough to break away from the slavish deference, too common among us, to English grammar and orthography....  Where all is so good, we are at a loss how to make extracts....  On the whole, we may call it a volume which no library, pretending to entire completeness, should fail to place upon its shelves.

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From the Higginbottomopolis Snapping-turtle.

A collection of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on.  The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool.  We use strong language, but should any of our readers peruse the book, (from which calamity Heaven preserve them!) they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves of Vallum-brozer, or, to use a still more expressive comparison, as the combined heads of author and editor.  The work is wretchedly got up....  We should like to know how much British gold was pocketed by this libeller of our country and her purest patriots.

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From the Oldfogrumville Mentor.