all about from Burke’s Landed Gentry, and that he was born in 1809, and that he married Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet.  He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where among his contemporaries and friends were the present poet-laureate and Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon.  The London Catalogue names three works as by Mr. FitzGerald.  These, as we find from inspection of the works themselves, are as follows:  1. Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth, 1851 (it reached a second edition, increased by an Appendix, in 1855); 2. Polonius:  A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances, 1852; 3. Six Dramas of Calderon, 1853.  These dramas are translations, in prose and verse, of The Painter of his Own Dishonor, Keep your Own Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a Blow, The Mayor of Zalamea, and Beware of Smooth Water.  In none of these volumes, however, except the last is there any indication of its authorship but there Mr. FitzGerald’s name is given in full.  The date of his metrical translation of Salaman and Absal, from the Persian, we are not at this moment, able to specify.  Add, as printed by him, but not published, two other small volumes of translations—­one, of the Agamemnon of AEschylus; and the other, of two of Calderon’s plays, Life is a Dream and The Wonderful Magician.  Finally, we have to mention an unprinted verse-translation, The Bird Parliament, from the Persian Mantiq-ut-tair by Attar.  Mr. Allibone knows nothing of Mr. FitzGerald, and he is similarly passed over in silence by the compiler of Men of the Time. Everything that he has produced is uniformly distinguished by marked ability; and, such being the case, his indifference to fame, in this age of ambition for literary celebrity, is a phenomenon which deserves to be emphasized.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. 
  By Walter Besant, M.A. 
  Boston:  Roberts Brothers.

Had Mr. Besant given us definitions of “humor” and “humorist,” we might possibly not have been satisfied with them, but they would at least have enabled us to understand what sense he attaches to the words, and what principle determined him in selecting the writers embraced in his category.  In the first page of his book he speaks of humor as “a branch” of satire; in the second he identifies French satire as the “esprit gaulois;” in the third he tells us that “the French type for satire and humor has preserved one uniform character from generation to generation;” and in his last page he claims superiority for the French over the English humorists, on the ground that “Rabelais has a finer wit than Swift,” that “we have no political satire so good as the Satyre Menipee,” “no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux,” “no