“High Life in New York” represents a class of publications which has, of late, in many ways, been set before the public with too great liberality.  The sole object seems to be to exhibit the “Yankee” character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—­otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness.  Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee.  An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, to interfere very seriously with certain conventionalities of the metropolis.  He overthrows, by his indomitable will, a great many social follies.  He eats soup with a knife and fork; wears no more than one shirt a week; forces his way into ladies’ chambers at unseemly hours, to cure them of timidity; and introduces sundry other reforms, all of which are recorded as evidences of glorious independence and a true nobility of spirit.  Sometimes he goes farther,—­farther than we care to follow him.  It would be easy to show wherein he is offensive, not to say disgusting; but we are not so disposed.  It is not considered necessary for the traveller who has dragged his way over a muddy road to prove the nastiness of his pilgrimage by imparting the stain to our carpets.

In this book, as in most of its class, the Yankee dialect is employed throughout, the author evidently believing that bad spelling and bad grammar are the legitimate sources of New England humor.  This shows that he mistakes means for ends,—­just as one who supposes that Mr. Merryman, in the circus, must, of necessity, be funny, because he wears the motley and his nose is painted red.  The Yankee dialect is Mr. Jonathan Slick’s principal element of wit; his second is the onion.  The book is redolent of onions.  That odorous vegetable breathes from every page.  A woman weeps, and onions are invoked to lend aromatic fragrance to a stale comparison.  In one place, onions and education are woven together by some extraordinary rhetorical machinery; in another, religion is glorified through the medium of the onion; until at last the narrative seems to resolve itself into a nauseating nightmare, such as might torture the brain of some unhappy dreamer in a bed of onions.

Why such works are ever written at all, it is difficult to imagine; but how it is, that, when written, they find publishers, is inconceivable.

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Great Auction-Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia.  New York:  Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society.

This little pamphlet, reprinted from the columns of the “New York Tribune,” possesses a double interest.  It furnishes the best and most minute description of an auction-sale of slaves that has ever been published; and it admirably illustrates the enterprise and prompt energy which often distinguish the journalism of America above that of any other country.