We do not always agree with Mr. Copeland; we dissent especially from his prejudice against the noble horsechestnut-tree, with its grand thunder-cloud of foliage, its bee-haunted cones of bloom, and its polished fruit so uselessly useful to children,—­Bushy Park is answer enough on that score; but we cordially appreciate his taste and ability.  His book will justify a warm commendation.  It is laid out on true principles of landscape-farming.  The stiff and square economical details are relieved by passages of great beauty and picturesqueness.  The cockney who owns a snoring-privilege in the suburbs will be stimulated to a sense of latent beauty in clouds and fields; and the farmer who looks on the cosmic forces as mere motive-power for the wheels of his money-mill will find the truth of the proverb, that more water runs over the dam than the miller wots of, and learn that Nature is as lavish of Beauty as she is frugal in Use.  Even to the editor, whose only fields are those of literature, and whose only leaves grow from a composing-stick, the advent of a book like this is refreshing.  It enables him to lay out with a judicious economy the gardens attached to his Spanish manor-houses, and to do his farming without risk of loss, in the most charming way of all, (especially in July weather,)—­by proxy.  Without leaving our study, we have already raised some astonishing prize-vegetables, and our fat cattle have been approvingly mentioned in the committee’s report.  We have found an afternoon’s reading in Mr. Copeland’s book almost as good as owning that “place in the country” which almost all men dream of as an ideal to be realized whenever their visionary ship comes in.

* * * * *

High Life in New York.  By JONATHAN SLICK.  Philadelphia:  Peterson & Brothers.

The advantages of a favorable introduction are very obvious.  A person who enters society fortified with eulogistic letters, giving assurance of his trustworthiness, so far as respectability and good behavior are concerned, is tolerably sure of a comfortable reception.  But if, unable to sustain the character his credentials ascribe to him, he immediately begin to display bad manners, ignorance, and folly, he not only forfeits the position to which he has gained accidental access, but also brings discredit upon his too hasty indorser.

In literature it is not different.  The collection of printed matter which appears under the title of “High Life in New York” is accompanied by a note, signed by the publishers, who are naturally supposed to know something of the real value of the works they issue, in which “editors are forewarned that it is a volume which, for downright drollery and hearty humor, has never had its equal in the productions of any American pen,” and are otherwise admonished in various ways calculated to inspire lofty expectations, and to fill the mind with exalted visions of coming joy.  But when it appears, on examination, that the book is as utterly unworthy of these elaborate commendations as any book can possibly be,—­that it is from beginning to end nothing but a dead level of stagnant verbiage, a desolate waste of dreary platitude,—­the reader cannot but regard the publishers’ ardent expressions of approbation as going quite beyond the license allowable in preliminary puffs.