These first-fruits of the great general of the war show the difference between him and the long-time pet of the nation, McClellan.  The latter could not move an inch without supplies as numerous and superfluous as those of a summer sauntering lady at a watering-place.  Grant does not wait for Foote’s gunboats to cooeperate at Donelson, but begins the fight the instant he reaches the fort.  When the boats are disabled and retire, he does not wait for them to refit and return; nor when the enemy fails to rout him, does he rest on his well-earned laurels till reinforcements arrive, but turns upon them instantly and drives them with headlong fury from their spoils and defences.  There is no Antietam or Williamshurg procrastinating.  That very afternoon his exhausted troops storm the fort, and the night beholds him the master of the outer works, and with his guns raking the innermost fortifications.  This heroic treatment of the disease of Rebellion, with all its loss, results in far less fatality than the rose-water generalship of the Peninsula, as the statistics of the Eastern and Western armies will show.

The peculiar qualities of General Grant, as seen in these battles, are coolness, readiness, and confidence.  He is not embarrassed by reverses.  He seems the rather to court them.  He prefers to take arms against a sea of troubles.  He thinks little of rations, ambulances, Sanitary, and, we fear, Christian Commissions, but much of victory.  These creature and spiritual comforts are all well enough in their place, but they do not take batteries and redoubts.  McClellan is the pet of his soldiers, Grant the pride of his.  McClellan cares for their bodies, Grant for their fame.  McClellan kills by kindness, Grant by courage.

This battle-book for boys will hold no unimportant place in the war-library of the times.  Its style is usually as limpid as the camp-brooks by which much of it was written.  In the heat of the contest it becomes a succession of short, sharp sentences, as if the musketry rang in the writer’s brain and moulded and winged his thoughts.  It is calm in the midst of its intensity, and thus happily illustrates by its popularity that self-control of the nation so well expressed by Hawthorne,—­that our movements are as cool and collected, if as noisy, as that of a thousand gentlemen in a hall quietly rising at the same moment from their chairs.  The battle-grounds of Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga, all of which he saw, or by subsequent study of the field has made his own, and descriptions of which are promised in a companion-volume, will find no truer nor worthier chronicler.

A Compendious History of English Literature, and of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest.  With Numerous Specimens. By GEORGE L. CRAIK, LL.D., Professor of History and of English Literature in Queen’s College, Belfast. 2 vols. 8vo.  New York:  Charles Scribner.