publication, this torrent of orders, so artificially raised and dammed, is let loose all at once, and glorified by the disingenuous brag that so many Thousand Copies were sold in a week. This again tends to make all the outsiders believe in the book, and again the orders come in. "Thus it appears that the writers and publishers of books are leagued in a great company, who for their own selfish ends are cramming all sorts of trash into the public mouth, only provided that the foolish purchaser will pay for it. They do not hesitate to break down whatever of healthy tone remains in the American mind, or to degrade still further its already sufficiently low standard of morals. The sole and single desideratum is money. "And the equally disgraceful complementary truth must be stated; that the nation is not honest enough nor intelligent enough to choose between the good and the bad; even to that extent that a certain percentage of the claims of the advertisements, of overwhelming demand, are actually true. "For these evils, perhaps there is no remedy. It may be that men of pure hearts and high aspirations must stand still and see their country-men and country-women go sliding down the gutter into which the authors and " the trade" have been decoying them. One is almost tempted to invoke the majestic interference of the law; to wish that the publication of a useless or ill-written book might be made a high misdemeanor against the State, and that a smart fine and imprisonment should be meted out to all concerned. That a Board of Censors should be appointed from among the facile principes of American literature, who should have heavy salaries, and much honor, as entrusted with the charge of the American intellect and morals; and who should make thorough prelibation of all compositions intended for publication, and give the exclusive authorization of such publication; any book published without it to subject the parties to condign punishment under the law." Our pamphleteering friend goes on to vary and amplify his statements and arguments in a manner much too spicy for our use. Yet no honest man can deny that there is a very large share of truth in what he says. He is quixotic, of course, and impracticable. As for his Board of Censors and his legislation, we might as well have the Czar imported at once, with his knout in his pocket. We cannot legislate against Balderdash. Nor is he wiser in his invectives against advertisements. People who fight against windmills have ever been overthrown, from Don Quixote downwards. Suppose advertisements do offer unreliable statements? The more brazen-faced the humbug, the more danger to the brain-pan of him who runs his head against it. He who begins thus, would soon be found absorbed in the useful task of strenuously refuting those popular legends which one may descry on fences and sidewalks, and which put forth the groundless claim that "We all use Sniddicker's Liver Pills and Worm Syrup." Yet there is a body of doctrine, a Corpus Juris, a system of ethics concerned about literature. We may properly venture a few suggestions towards it, although it may be long before any theory of Literary Ethics shall be established and recognized. "Thought is free," ever since the days of Caliban, that down-trodden man and brother. By the way, has any one investigated the morals of the relations between the foreign Prospero and his native subjects? Is not the Tempest the Epic of "Sam?" Speech is free, also, in our Democratic country, at least to any man who fears neither enmity nor contempt, and who seeks neither office nor influence. Perhaps we have as much free speech as heart could wish. For literary utterances, properly so called, we have. Yet it does by no means follow that every man has a right, by fair means or foul, with indiscriminate unscrupulosity, to gather other people's dollars for his words, or to waste their time in the examination of them. Consider the "poets of America"--that vast and undistinguishable throng. How many men and women are there who might write prose, both true and good; but who will aspire to rise into that high imaginative sphere, the bright poet-kingdom of the Vates, and who thereupon only utter nonsense. They can talk fair common sense; but they endeavor, with frantic efforts, to chant in the choir of the poets; but their effusions compare with the songs of the "bards sublime," as the nauseous contortions and gibberings of a high-tragedy rage, with the still and awful fire, the great waves of divine inspiration, and the mighty utterances, of the older and the later prophets. It is in vain to assert the Democracy of Genius. and to claim that because "all men are born free and equal," in some sense, that therefore they are free of the poets' guild, and equal in songful power. They may as well claim that they each have as much property as anybody. How useless! We know, because we see with our own eyes, that they have it not. If it has descended to them, or if they have earned it, they have it, and they are acknowledged to have it. Possession and use are the only evidence. Assertion is needless with them, and without them. So of the crowd of rhymers in the land. If the heritage of power has descended upon them, or if intense labor has lifted them to the possession of it, be it so. But if not, why will they so baselessly assert it? And there is a word which needs to be said to all authors, poets or prosemen. If the Author opens before the eye of his readers, old or young, the present strength or the future hope of our nation, a volume of extenuations of lying or cheating-if he or (shameful even to think of!) she opens before those eyes gaudy pictures of guilt or impurity-if he shall praise folly, or laugh the laughter of fools over a funny or a profitable wickedness, or a mean trick-then such author shoulders a burden which will one day gather a crushing weight, when responsibility for tainted souls and rotten lives shall be accumulated therein. It needs no long argument to exhibit that point. Argument would be misplaced with those who deny it. But there follows another, whose assertion may seem superfluous or useless, but which is, nevertheless, as true as the first. Literature should be cream. We have enough and to spare, of new milk and skim-milk, and buttermilk and white-oak cheese. What a mass of printed matter there is in the land! By what hundreds of tons is it yearly increased! Handbills, circulars, dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, annuals, pamphlets, books. For how many hundred years have the strongest thinkers indited the best of their thoughts on every subject within the field of human investigation-and out of it -and eft them in print! Who has read a fraction of what is already printed, and worth reading? Not the enormously omnivorous bookworm Magliabecchi; not the athletic scholarly strength of Sir William Hamilton; not the indefatigable explorer Not that we would have no good new books. We have no desire to gag any living thinker or writer, foremost or hindmost, unless some good not anti-democratic gag could be found for the hindmost! Nor do we advise any one to refrain from reading new books until he is through with the old. Not any obstruction from without do we desire to impose upon written speech; we desire no Statute for the Prevention of Trash, nor the appointment of an intellectual Excise Board of Censors. We only demand that whatever is said shall be significant of something; and of something not bad. We only appeal to the consciences of the authorial band. To them only we cry. Perhaps, indeed, we might as well cry to everybody; for who knows how many in every village in the country, and in the solitary houses too-as from Henry Thoreau's seven dollar palace in the woods -have already written to publishers; or have by them, in secret nook, piles of scratched paper, their tickets for immortality--or at the very least are meditating, altâ sub mente repôstum, what the coming years shall make known? Oh, eager friend! Have you, truly, anything to say? Be sure-quite sure; and if not, exercise the very utmost of your talent for silence. If you are not very sure that you have plenty of silver words for us, give us the golden silence which everybody has. But, if yea-and we most gladly admit that very many souls, in our bounding and superabounding American freedom, have a word to say-if yea, Give us the CREAM. There is an enormous pile of good matter to read. The thoughtful are wearied and discouraged at the mass. And oh, friend! do not superinject thereon any more of dilute value. Is it not already wretched enough to see so many who might be gathering golden crowns of thought from books of lofty beauty and truth, grubbing and scratching about among the muck below? Will you swell the turbid stream? Think, if you think at all, clearly and carefully. Speak, if you must speak, clearly and briefly. And as you have in your soul one single mustard seed of truth or selfrespect, don't buzz out before us and crynor let your publisher buzz and cry for you-Behold The Greatest Book of the Age! Unless false pretences and exaggeration are legitimate helps in selling horses, drygoods and real estate, they cannot be legitimate helps in selling books. Therefore it is right that publishers should be limited by public opinion to a fair and honorable statement of the merits of their books. Nor can a publisher be justified in issuing an unworthy publication as valuable, any more than a jockey in selling a spavined horse as sound. Lastly: The critic, by supposition, stands as an impartial judge, between the book and the reading community. His business is either to state the contents of the book, or to state the merits of the book, or (as we believe) to state both. We need not say more than that his work ought to be done honestly. He ought to read the book, and then tell what it is, and what is its value, honestly. That is all. CORRESPONDENCE.-A lady complains to us as follows: * "Perhaps mortals, and especially men, have a dispensation to be inconsistent. But Major Wherrey, who was horrified at Horripitts and grieved at the German, and nevertheless could find it in his heart to lade out strong punch to his friends, and to swig and tipple all the remainder of the bowl, in company with his anti-Teutonic sympathizer, Mr. Barnard, appears to me to transcend the allowable limits even of male aberrations. Is dancing worse than drinking? Is the dizziness of the waltz more wicked than the dizziness which our two old, masculine prudes discovered in the dregs of their liquor? Or was Major Wherrey vexed because Bessy Wacklestead and the narrator 'polked on his boots,' and was he covering his wrath in hypocrisy? My dear sir, do you propose in this tacit way to sanction, and even to recommend the everlasting and disgusting punch bowl, which reeks in the middle of Dickens' stories? It seems to me that our American writers, if they must copy, could select some better study than this. Punch and cigars are behind the age. We do not want any medieval follies in Putnam." Far be it from us to endorse punch or punch-bowls; we ingenuously confess that we have no sufficient answer to the lady's complaint. Perhaps Major Wherrey, or Tom, will put in a plea in the case. We heard an enthusiastic young Englishman describe Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, the South African ramrod-Nimrod. Said he, "If you could only see what a noble arm he has !" We became affected with secret grief. For, on careful reflection, we could not remember to have heard any American exult or admire at the physical strength or manly beauty of any other American, except the eulogist were a farmer, a mechanic, a boxing-master or a boy in a gymnasium. Thinking further, we failed to recollect that any of our leading intellects, this side of the Atlantic, have been enthroned in notably noble bodies. John Neal is, or was, we believe, athletic and active, and skillful at manly exercise. Theodore D. Weld, at one time well known as an energetic anti-slavery lecturer, was, until injured by an accident, one of the most herculean men in the United States. The incident, although it has been told before, will bear repeating, as an instance of great endurance. Mr. Weld was travelling in Ohio, during the winter, when, either by the upsetting of a coach, or by the stumbling of his horse, he was thrown, at midnight, into a torrent of ice, snow and water, of unknown depth and width. Down this he floated, swimming at right angles to the stream, and shouting for aid, until at last, but not before his bands were too helpless to permit him to climb, he reached a tree, by whose branches he just held his chin above water during an hour and a half, until help came. When taken out he was stiff and nearly senseless, and only recovered after a long and severe illness. Very few men would have been able to breast such an ice-flood, or to stir a muscle, or even whisper, after fifteen minutes immersion. But neither of these can be ranked among our leading writers. Over the water, people are stronger. Christopher North was one of the best wrestlers, boxers, runners and leapers in Great Britain. William Cobbett was as strong as a bull. Wordsworth was as good a walker as any man in England. Sir William Hamilton has been a man of most remarkable physical strength. Walter Scott was an uncommonly vigorous walker and rider. Lord Byron's powers of physical exertion and endurance are well known, although, like Sir Walter Scott, he was slightly deformed in one foot. Now there is a great truth in the old heroic notion of pride in physical strength and beauty. There is a positive and actual pleasure in the mere quiet consciousness of possessing a strong arm, a strong leg and a powerful chest. What man would not take pride in being able to outrun the fleetest, just as Achilles did? Who does not revel in Scott's descriptions of the massive strength of Richard the Lion Hearted, whether he batters down the postern of Torquilstone, or cleaves the steel mace-handle in Saladin's tent? And, aside from any such instinctive pleasure as this, physical strength is the basis of intellectual strength. Of two men of the same mental calibre and cultivation, he also who can hold a fifty-six at arm's length, who can run a mile at the top of his speed without getting out of breath, who can row a boat fifty miles in eight hours, can write more and better prose or poetry than his slender soft-meated compeer, to whom the grasshopper is a burden-who would almost be consumed by the breath of a "great Burlybumbo" of the Anakim, from the mountains of East Tennessee, as one would blow away a "daddy-long-legs." We would by no means have every literary man worship Hercules Fisticuff, and make a prize-fighter of himself. But we wish our band of American authors weighed more, on an average, than they do, and every man could shoulder his barrel of flour if he has one-and march off, expeditus. LITERATURE. AMERICAN-Wolfert's Roost, by WASHINGTON IRVING, is a collection of short tales and sketches, published uniformly with the complete edition of his works. Wolfert's Roost was the old name of the author's residence, on the banks of the Hudson; and the first portion of the book consists of chronicles relating to the old house and its neighborhood. The gems of the book are the powerful narrative of The Grand Prior of Minorca, and the delightful dreamy descriptions in "The Adelantado of the Seven Cities," and in the chronicles of the Roost. We transcribe a single passage from the history of the wars of the sachem of Sing Sing. The feud of this sachem, with a certain wizard chief of the neighborhood, having been related, its result is thus told : "Suffice it is to say that the wizard chieftain was at length victorious, though his victory is attributed, in Indian tradition, to a great medicine, or charm,by which he laid the sachem of Sing Sing, and his warriors asleep among the rocks and recesses of the valley, where they remain asleep to the present day, with their bows and war-clubs beside them. This was the origin of that potent and drowsy spell which still prevails over the valley of the Pocantico, and which has gained it the well-merited appellation of Sleepy Hollow. Often, in secluded and quiet parts of that valley, where the stream is overhung by dark woods and rocks, the ploughman, on some calm and sunny day, as he shouts to his oxen, is surprised at hearing faint shouts from the hill-sides in reply; being, it is said, the spell-bound warriors, who half start from their rocky couches and grasp their weapons, but sink to sleep again." In this musical and delicious description is the subject for a truly American picture, as striking as Kaulbach's "Hunnenschlacht", and abundantly more beautiful. Wolfert's Roost well maintains its author's fame. It is marked by the delicate purity of style, the quiet humor, the beautiful imagination, the lucid narrative, and the spirited description, which have so long charmed Mr. IRVING'S multitudinous readers. is delightful, among the crowd of "popular" works the undistinguishable throng of books with little character and less merit, which daily appear, to recognize this work of a master, and of a master faithful to his fame and to the proper literary integrity of the true author. It -The Coquette: or the History of Eliza Wharton, originally written by Mrs HANNAH FOSTER; and now edited with. a preface, by Mrs. JANE E. LOCKE, is quite interesting as a specimen of a style of composition now antiquated, but which, at its first appearance, attracted, perhaps, almost as much attention as that of the Waverley Novels. The story is founded upon actual facts, well known in Connecticut and Massachusetts at the time of their occurrence, and is full of melancholy interest. Eliza Wharton, a young lady of uncommon beauty of person and intellectual capacity and attractiveness, is sought in marriage by a young clergyman; but his sober wooing is disturbed and frustrated by the brilliant conversation of Major Sandford, an officer, who ultimately ruins his victim, and at the same time destroys the peace of his own life. It is told in a series of letters passing among the characters of the book, after the manner of Richardson; and, although written in the precise and formal style of New England, three-quarters of a century ago, the story is developed with considerable skill. Miranda Elliot; Or the Voice of the Spirit. By S. H. M. This is a very confused story of Southern life. It commences as if intended to be a biography of Miranda Elliot; but as the narrative progresses, a mingled crowd of characters is promiscuously introduced, and disconnected incidents heaped together in so miscellaneous a style as to break up the connection and intelligibility of the whole. There are incidents enough and people enough in the book to furnish several stories. If the writer had been careful to select one clear and precise thread of narration, and to move steadily on with that, Miranda Elliot would have been a respectable novel. -The Bells: A Collection of Chimes. By T. B. A. The enterprise of most modern poets is a mysterious gift. While reading their verses we ask, How could he publish? How could he expect to be sold or to be read? The poet or his friends must, we believe, usually expect to secure the publisher against loss on his investment. Consciousness of unappreciable genius must usually be the consolation of the author, in view of the unsold edition, and the "little bill." Yet the tuneful band daily deploys before the public, each undismayed by the fate of his front rank man, as indefatigably as those migratory caterpillars which perish by millions, yet never halt while alive, in crossing fire or water on their line of march. The little volume above named, is scarcely to be exccpted from our rule. If, indeed, in this hurrying, every-day, money-making life of the United States, the author can be supposed to command leisure for the deep study and deeper thought which only can form a poet, we might hope much from the beauty of many of his conceptions, and the clear and unitary character of the impression usually left by each poem. But without the expenditure of such thought and study, his productions will be very much too crude and rugged to command praise or popularity. The following stanzas may serve for a specimen of the less pretentious and more truthful portions of the book. THE TWO CITIES. ""Twas dusk, and from my window "And faintly, very faintly, I heard the ceasing din; And like the dusk without me, There was a dusk within. "And thoughts with eager footsteps, Dim thoughts of joy and pain, Filled all the streets and by-ways of The city in my brain. "A passing light, and holy, Like that which softly falls "Fell down upon the towers of The thought, though possibly unconsciously suggested by Longfellow, as, indeed, many of the thoughts and expressions in the book seem to have been, is a very poetical and beautiful one, and so far very sweetly presented We omit the other verses, which, indeed, do not succeed in adequately completing the analogy between the cities of outer and inner life-of men in life and thoughts in the mind. -The Sons of the Sires, by an American, professes to give a history, not only of the rise and progress, but likewise of the destiny, of the "American party;" together with which is given an answer to Hon. H. A. Wise's letter upon the Know-Nothings. At least two different hands have been engaged in the work. The first two chapters are introductory, and pompously and foolishly written. The style of the remainder is better; but the work will not elevate the reputation of Know-Nothing literature; which seems generally by some fatality to be flashy, pretentious, and vapid in narration, and sophistical and silly in argument. The main portion of the work is an exposition of the necessity for an 66 American Party," and a justification of its secret means and illiberal ends. The calibre of its logic may be calculated from the fact that a leading point made is, that the success of the Know-Nothings is a proof of the honesty and necessity of their enterprise. This is the Jesuitical dogma that "the end justifies the means," and identifies the principles of this new secret tyranny, with those of the old Jesuitical secret tyranny which furnishes almost all the capital for the denunciations and machinations of " Sam." Thus the argument is a stultification of the reasoner; and if it were not, it is based upon a false assumption. The "American party" has been terribly beaten in the most important of its undertakings; and the |