But it is not merely or chiefly as being among the cleverest and liveliest of modern light literature that we value Dr. Palmer’s books.  They have a true poetic value, and instruct as much as they entertain.  While he is telling us a San Francisco story, the truth of the accessories and the skill with which they are grouped bring the California of 1849 before us with unmatched vividness.  We have been getting knowledge and learning a deep moral without suspecting it, as if by our own observation and experience.  In the same way “Asirvadam the Brahmin” is a prose poem that lets us into the secret of the Indian revolt.  It is seldom that we meet with volumes of more real power than these, or whose force is so artistically masked under ease and playfulness.  We prefer the “Old” part of the book to the “New.”  It seems to us to show a better style of handling.  There is something of melodrama in the style of the California stories,—­a flavor of blue lights and burnt cork.  At the same time, we must admit that there is a melodramatic taint in our American life:—­witness the Sickles vulgarity.  Young America is b’hoyish rather than boyish, and perhaps the “New” may be all the truer to Nature for what we dislike in it.

“The New and the Old” is fittingly dedicated to the Autocrat of all the Breakfast-Tables, than whom no man has done more to demonstrate that wit and mirth are not incompatible with seriousness of purpose and incisiveness of thought.

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Napoleonic Ideas.  By Prince NAPOLEON LOUIS BONAPARTE.  Translated by JAMES A. DORR.  New York:  D. Appleton & Company. 1859.

This publication has at least that merit which is one of the first in literature,—­it is timely.  Though we look upon the Emperor of the French as a kind of imperial Jonathan Wild, it does not the less concern us to make a true estimate of his intellectual capacity.  Nothing is more unwise than to assume that a man’s brain must be limited because his moral sense is small; yet no mistake is more common.  Napoleon the Third may play an important part in History, though by no possibility an heroic one.  In reading this little volume, one cannot fail to be struck with the presence of mind and the absence of heart of which it gives evidence.  It is the advertisement of a charlatan, whose sole inheritance is the right to manufacture the Napoleonic pill, and we read with unavoidable distrust the vouchers of its wonderful efficacy.  We do not fancy the Bonapartist grape-cure, nor believe in it.

Mr. Dorr’s translation is excellent.  He understands French, and is able to do it into English elegantly and accurately without any trace of foreign idiom.  This is no easy thing; for our general experience has been that translators read French like Englishmen and write English like Frenchmen.

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Country Life.  By R. MORRIS COPELAND.  Boston:  John P. Jewett & Company. 1859.