enlarged in subsequent editions, and that more copious extracts will be given from those letters, to the humblest of which the writer invariably communicates an indefinable fascination.  In them, as in his regular ‘writings,’ we find the simplest incident narrated always without exaggeration—­always as briefly as possible, yet told so quaintly and humorously withal, that we wonder at the piquancy which it assumes.  It is the trouble with great men that they are, for lack of authentic anecdotes and details of their daily life, apt to retire into myths.  Such will not be the case with Irving.  The reality, the life-likeness of these letters, and of the ana drawn from them, will keep him, Washington Irving the New-Yorker, alive and breathing before the world to all time.  In these chapters a vail seems lifted from what was growing obscure in our knowledge of social life in the youth of our fathers.  Our only wish, in reading, is for more of it.  But the life gathers interest as it proceeds.  From America it extends to Europe, and we meet the names of Humboldt, De Stael, Allston, Vanderlyn, Mrs. Siddons, as among his associates even in early youth.  So through Home Again and in Europe Again there is a constant succession of personal experience and wide opportunity to know the world.  Did our limits permit, we would gladly cite largely from these pages, for it is long since the press has given to the world a book so richly quotable.  But the best service we can render the reader is to refer him to the work itself, which is as well worth reading as any thing that its illustrious subject ever wrote, since in it we have most admirably reflected Irving himself; the best loved of our writers, and the man who did more, so far as intellectual effort is concerned, to honor our country than any American who ever lived.

BEAUTIES SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCKY.  With a Portrait. 
    Boston:  Ticknor and Fields.

We are not sure that this is not the very first book of other than pictorial beauties which we ever regarded with patience.  Books of literary ‘beauties’ are like musical matinees—­the first act of one opera—­the grand dying-scene from another—­all very pretty, but not on the whole satisfactory, or entitling one to claim from it alone any real knowledge of the original whole.  Yet this volume we have found fascinating, have flitted from page to page, backwards and forwards, [it is a great advantage in a book of ‘unconnections’ that one may conscientiously skip about,] and concluded by thanking in our heart the judicious Eclectic, whoever he may be—­who mosaicked these bits into an enduring picture of De Quincey-ism.  For really in it, by virtue of selection, collection, and recollection, we have given an authentic cabinet of specimens more directly suggestive of the course and soul-idioms of the author than many minds would gather from reading all that he ever wrote.  Only one thing seems needed—­the great original commentary or essay on De Quincey, which these Beauties would most happily illustrate.  It seems to rise shadowy before us—­a sort of dead-letter ghost of a glorious book which craves life and has it not.  We trust that our suggestion may induce some admirer of the Opium-Eater to have prepared an interleaved copy of these Beauties, and perfect the suggestion.