(1.) ITALY IN TRANSITION: Public Scenes and Private Opinions in the Spring of 1860; Illustrated by Official Documents from the Papal Archives of the Revolted Legations. By William Arthur, A. M., Author of "A Mission to Mysore," "The Successful Merchant," "The Tongue of Fire," etc. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York. 12mo. Pp. 429. For sale by Rickey, Mallory & Co., Cincinnati.—At this moment all eyes are turned upon Italy, and the unfolding of events there are watched with intense interest. Nothing could be more opportune than the publication of this book"Italy in Transition." It is the production of a careful observer, a penetrating analyst, and a graphic writer. The political changes that have recently transpired in Lombardy and Tuscany and the causes that led to them, and also the moral condition and capability of a people just struggling to free themselves from the yoke of ecclesiastical and political despotism, are delineated with beauty and power. Mr. Arthur's great work is "The Tongue of Fire." But this will rather add to than detract from his enviable reputation as a writer.

(2.) CHAPTERS ON WIVES. By Mrs. Ellis, Author of "Mothers of Great Men." 12mo. Pp. 358. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York. For sale by Rickey, Mallory & Co., Cincinnati.-This is a very good book, but not one of remarkable power. It is, however, quite readable, its stories attractive, and the "wives" that challenge our commendation in them, such as will make happy homes.

(3.) A COMMONPLACE BOOK: Designed to Assist Students, Professional Men, and General Readers in Treasuring up Knowledge for Future Use. Arranged by Rev. James Porter, D. D., with an Introduction by Rev. Wm. Price, A. M. Published by Carlton & Porter, New York. The plan of this work is simple and convenient. Every young person of literary tastes and pursuits should have a commonplace book by them. In adaptation and practical utility we know of none that can compare with this.

(4.) THE MISSIONARY IN MANY LANDS. By Erwin House, A. M. 12mo. 393 pp. 80 cents. New York: Carlton & Porter.-We have already noticed this book. It contains narratives of some of the most thrilling scenes in missionary life and history. We are glad to know that it is meeting an excellent sale.

(5.) DR. SPRAGUE'S DISCOURSE BEFORE THE ALUMNI OF YALE COLLEGE.-The theme of this discourse is "Our Triennial Catalogue," and the discussion is partly historical, partly biographical, but throughout it is enriched by pertinent philosophic disquisition and embellished with chaste and beautiful rhetoric. Our thanks are due to the author for a copy.

(6.) MODERN PHILOLOGY: its History, Discoveries, and Influence. With Maps, Tabular Views, and an Index. By Benjamin W. Dwight. 356 pp. 8vo. New

York: A. S. Barnes & Co.-In the mechanical getting up of this book the publishers have spared neither pains nor expense. The book itself supplies a want which students in philology have long felt. It will both tend to increase the interest in this department of learning and to furnish the means for its gratification. It is fitted not only for general reading, but also for study and recitation, in schools and colleges, like any of our best school histories, and will be held in high account for historical, philosophical, linguistic, and even rhetorical purposes.

(7.) MANUAL OF GEOLOGY: Designed for the Use of Colleges and Academies. By Ebenezer Emmons. 12mo. 297 pp. Illustrated. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.One advantage of this book is, that its illustrations are mainly derived from the geological facts of our by the author was judicious. In each chapter treatown country. In another respect the plan followed ing upon the systems of rocks, he has given a general history of the period to which they belong.

(8.) BLACKWOOD, for September, contains A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert Peel; The Romance of Agostini-Part I; Great Wits, Mad Wits; King Arthur and his Round Table; The Struggle at Mellazzo; The Tower of London; Norman Sinclair; An Autobiography-Part VIII.

Republished by L. Scott & Co., New York city. Price, $3. For Blackwood and one of the Reviews, $5. The four Reviews and Blackwood, $10.

(9.) AUNT GRACE'S LIBRARY, just issued by Carlton & Porter, contains ten volumes done up in beautiful style, with a box. Price, $1. These books are for "little folks who want to be good." They are a choice little set. 1. City of Palms; 2. Gennette; 3. Stories About the Bible; 4. Little Anna; 5. Happy Christians; 6. Mary Anna and Nina; 7. Old Merritt; 8. Our Birthday Trip; 9. Little Boarding-School Girls; 10. Clara and her Cousins.

(10.) METHODIST ALMANAC, for 1861.-This indispensable family companion has already come to hand. In additio. to the usual calendar matter, it is richly stored with Church and general statistics.

(11.) DAISY Downs is a new Sunday school issue of 306 pages, 16mo.

(12.) GERALD KOPT, the Foundling, is a story from the history of the Czar Peter. 18mo. 161 pp.

(13.) GLEN MORRIS STORIES.-To this popular series of juvenile books Jessie Carlton has been added. It is the "story of a girl who fought with Little Impulse, the wizzard, and conquered him." 16mo. 251 pp. 60 cents. New York: Howe & Ferry. For sale at the Western Book Concern.

(14.) A TREASURY OF SCRIPTURE STORIES. Beautifully Illustrated with Colored Plates from Original Designs by the First American Artists. New York: Shel

is as evidently manifest as that of the keen observer and faithful chronicler. Interspersed among the records of passing events are found now ethnological notes upon the people, and again physico-geographical notices of the country; here remarks upon the popular hatred of the priests, and there reflections upon the use and abuse--as well as its disuse of the pulpit in strictly Roman Catholic countries. With the political movements of the Italians Mr. Arthur most heartily sympathizes, and seems to entertain a strong confidence that the wonderful events now transpiring among them will result in great and permanent good.

Does the world's history present another such a chapter as must be that of Italy for the years 1859 and 1860? A people downtrodden and priest-ridden for twelve successive centuries, till the rest of mankind had come to look upon them as incapable of any thing better; a nation which has been treated as a pawn among European diplomatists, or as a residuary estate to be parceled out among indigent princes, suddenly arises, with all the vigor, hope, and discretion of the most cultivated and elevated, to claim their rights and to demonstrate their capacity for self-government. In this great drama, the personal actors especially command our attention and awaken our sympathies. We admire the lofty dignity of the people's king, Victor Emanuel, who seems to have been raised up by Providence to collect together the Iong-broken and scattered Italian host-moving calmly forward, incited by an ambition at once lofty and unselfish, to the accomplishment of his present mission. We see Cavour, calm, lofty, far-seeing, and devoutly patriotic, demonstrating the continuity of the race of pure patriots to our own times. But what terms can characterize that wonderful man who leads the liberating hosts, and at whose coming the rusty chains of dynastic and ecclesiastical slavery crumble into dust, and disinthralled millions rise up to bless his advent-GARIBALDI? Is he a Tamerlane, a Genghis Khan, a Tell, a Wallace, a Gustavus Adolphus, a Washington? for certainly he displays the characterIstics of each and all of them. But it is yet too soon to assign to him his appropriate niche; for in proportion as the ascent is brilliant is the descent difficult and dangerous. At present we can only characterize him as the prince of filibusters, and hope with trembling that the luster that now surrounds his name may never be tarnished, and that he may speedily achieve the emancipation of his country, and then die. Mr. Frederic Law Olmsted, well known as a home traveler, and author of two valuable volumes relatIng respectively to the "Seaboard Slave States" and to "Texas"-he has also given to the public a volume of great worth, his "Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England"-has recently contributed another installment to the general, but too scanty, fund of information respecting the social and domestic life of the south: a volume-recently published by Mason Brothers-entitled, "A Journey in the Back Country." The route of the journey described in this volume lay along the up-country and mountain range from the east bank of the Mississippi, to Richmond, in Virginia. The people among whom he moved, and whose character and modes of

living he observed, were mostly of that almost unknown, though numerically-important class, "poor white folks." The information given by Mr. Olmsted is of a kind hitherto possessed only scantily, and yet quite essential to an intelligent estimate of southern society and institutions. The question of slavery in its various aspects is before the American people and the whole world, and it must be met, considered, and decided. It can not be evaded, however unwelcome it may be, and the wish to evade it argues either the want of moral courage or a guilty consciousness of the badness of the cause. That much has been said and done unwisely by both parties to the questions at issue, may be confessed, without acknowledging that the controversy is an equallybalanced one. The great want of the subject is a thorough and comprehensive acquaintance with the facts of the moral, social, and economical condition of the slave states, ascertained by competent observation and presented in an intelligent and truthful form. Stories of southern life, as given by novelists or only casual observers, often disqualified by their position to render an impartial verdict, are utterly unreliable, and therefore worse than worthless. The southern character, of which we hear so much, is not that of the great body of the people of those states, and even as to the few to whom it especially applies-the great planters and other wealthy slaveholders-it is at best a bedizened caricature. I am fully of the opinion that there is, among the better educated portion of the free states, less correct knowledge of the real condition of society in the slave states than that of the chief countries of Europe. Only persons of the wealthy planting class go abroad as the representatives of their several localities, and when a stranger goes among them, the same class receives and entertains him-not neglecting to so present things to his observation as to occasion the best possible prejudice against the "peculiar institution." Mr. Olmsted adopted the only sure method to obtain reliable information on the subjects of his inquiry. He went among the people-the poor and the rich, the dwellers in the open country as well as those in towns and cities; he ate at their tables and lodged in their houses, conversed with the learned and the unlearned, the nabob and the slave, but not to quarrel with the one as a tyrant, nor to incite the other to run away or kill his master; and he has simply taken notes of his own observations, which are here published for the common good. All parties are his debtors for what he has so done toward illustrating this dark subject. His books are wholly unobjectionable in their style and temper. The writer does not present himself as a partisan, nor are his discussions given in the form of special pleadings in favor of an assumed conclusion; yet he confronts his facts without blinking and advances to their legitimate determinations without misgivings. Differing thus widely from such productions as Helper's "Impending Crisis," the influence of these volumes must be not less certainly hostile to the whole system of slavery, and like that work these volumes demonstrate especially the blighting effects of that system upon the unenslaved portions of community.

Life in the Desert"-Mason Brothers-is the

English title of a translation of Les Mysteres du Desert, a work issued in Paris last year, written by Col. Du Couret, who was also known during his journeying by his Moslem cognomen, Hadji Abd' el-Hamid Bey. This traveler and author performed the journey, the account of which makes up this volume, during the decade between 1840 and 1850, residing most of that time in the least frequented parts of the great Arabian Desert-an Arab among the Arabs, and, for the time, a faithful and punctilious worshiper of the Prophet. The French are confessed to be better adapted to write a certain kind of books of foreign travels than the English, on account of the greater flexibility of their temper, by virtue of which they readily conform themselves to whatever condition they are found in, and appreciate whatever of good that condition may afford. It is quite evident that Col. Du Couret is an extreme case even of his own class. Impelled by an almost insane thirst for adventure, and especially longing to explore those parts of the world least known to Europeans, he stuck at nothing that seemed requisite to his purpose. Desiring to traverse the deserts of Arabia he professed the faith of Islam, and visiting Mecca touched the black stone of the Kâaba, and so gained the title of a Hadji, having already obtained from Ali Pashaw the rank and title of Bey, or Colonel. The book-written with great simplicity and directness of narrationabounds with adventures, escapes, and strange stories of natural curiosities and social observances. The title chosen by the author-"The Mysteries of the Desert "though censured by some of the French critics and discarded by the translator, seems not an inappropriate one. The whole story bears a general resemblance to the Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixotte, and Baron Munchausen class-and though marked with a kind of verisimilitude in style and method, there is still large room left for doubts and questions. But the whole scene and its circumstances are so far out of the ordinary range of thought and observation that there is but little practical interest in the question of the real or fictitious character of these statements; and whether real or imaginary they are still the same gorgeous images of the dream-land of the east, and in either case adapted to give much valuable as well as curious information.

It is now more than two years since I read Mr. Thomas Witlam Atkinson's "Oriental and Western Siberia," of which I think I about that time gave your readers some account-a work that at first attracted less attention than it deserved, but has been steadily growing in the public favor till the present, and now it is confessed to be of the small number of books of travels that possesses a permanent value and a perpetual interest. It is also known to the readers of that work that its author spent no less than seven years exploring the vast wastes of Asiatic Russia, of which only a small part is there recorded. The announcement of a new volume, Travels in the Amoor Regions, just now issued by the Harpers, containing a second installment of the story, could not fail, therefore, to awaken a lively interest with all such. This whole region has hitherto been as completely shut out from the exploration of Europeans as either Arabia Deserta or the interior of Africa, till

quite recently it has been brought within the range of European diplomacy and commerce, through the powerful intervention of Russia, and so opened to the enlightened inspection of European and American travelers. Mr. Atkinson possesses some highly-valuable qualities, fitting him both clearly to observe and graphically to delineate his observations. He found congenial employment and recreations in the wild life of the Siberian mountains and forests, and in the dreamy and interminable wastes of the Asiatic steppes, with their wandering, nomadic people-their plains, and lakes, and volcanic rock-peaks-their mirages and sandstorms. He also had the requisite knowledge of nature and of the relations of things, by which to profit by his own observations. He is at once an enthusiast in his appreciation of the grand, the beautiful, and the curious, and yet the most calculating utilitarian could not more rigidly estimate the practical capabilities of the regions over which he traveled. As a writer he has the singular ability to illustrate his subjects without coloring them, and by simple word-sketching to bring his scenes directly to the reader's imagination in clear and lively conceptions. It is the triumph of the descriptive art to so present its subjects that without exaggerations or false coloring they become agreeable and attractiveand in that this writer especially excels. The region of the Amoor is annually becoming more and more a point of interest to the civilized world, and such books as this must at once increase that interest and also gratify the rational curiosity which is felt in relation to it. If any judge my commendations to be too emphatic, let him read for himself, and then, if he will, let him charge me with extravagance.

But of all the world Africa is becoming the paradise of travelers. Long years ago it was the seene of the wanderings and explorations of a host of them-Bruce, Denham, Clapperton, Mungo Park, and the Landers, to name only a few; but it remained for our own times to send out the greatest number of explorers and to gather the richest harvest from that field. Of Barth, Livingstone, Anderson, and Gordon Cummings-the African Nimrod-the reading publie are sufficiently informed, for by their writings large portions of the interior of that dark continent have been laid open. But that mine is not yet exhausted, and another richly-freighted argosy is just now bring- } ing us its treasures. "The Lake Regions of Central Africa, a Picture of Exploration. By Richard F. Burton," is the title of a large octavo volume, much resembling its older brother, Dr. Livingstone's, just now published by Harper & Brothers. We have all of us in our school-boy days-and a later generation of school-boys have done the same thing-looked upon the map of the African continent, and read with a kind of dreamy wonder the significant words “unexplored deserts" sweeping over a large portion of its interior, its yellow surface unbroken by indications of either artificial objects or physical features, except where the famous "Mountains of the Moon" diversify the picture, and in some cases a large inland lake is thrust in by way of variety. The locations of both the mountains and the lake seem to have been chiefly arbitrary, nor could any tell why they were assumed to exist; but the map needed}

them, and so they were allowed to remain unquestioned. But as the old Portuguese mariners, more than six hundred years ago, lifted the southern rim of the heavens from the shoulders of Atlas, and removed the horizon far away to the southward, so the travelers of the present age are dispersing the gray mists that have hitherto vailed the interior regions of Africa, and transforming its dream-land into merely mundane lands and waters, earth and sky. The age of mysteries is passing away forever; hereafter imagination, abandoning the earth to rigid reality, must create its own worlds, and exercise itself among unsubstantial forms.

In the summer of 1857 Captain Burton, of the British East India army, set out from the Zinzebar Islands to explore the regions of Africa that lie to the southward of the sources of the Nile-the usually-designated locale of the "Mountains of the Moon." Seven months of hard but very slow traveling brought him with his caravan of attendants to the place where, according to the maps, the mountains should have been found, but which he had no expectation of finding, and there at a distance of nearly six hundred miles in a direct line from the eastern coast, he at length came to the long-sought lake, of which his guides had told him-the Tanganyika, or "Meeting-Place of Waters," an inland sea of pure fresh water of an area between those of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The book which records these explorations is all alive with stirring and thrilling pictures of scenes and events, of horrors and wonders, rendered attractive by the beauties and grandeur of nature, and repulsive by the filthiness and falseness of its human subjects. It is written in a lively and brilliant style, abounding at once in glowing descriptions and accurate scientific details.

I have thus far written of books of travel that are-faits accomplès. I will now write of what is yet only in prospect. About the time when Captain Burton was setting out from the eastern coast to explore the "land of the moon," another adventurer, Du Chaillu, from the western coast was looking eastward toward the same vast field. That they did not meet and shake hands upon the interior highlands of the great continent was their ill luck, though both of them found abundant occupation in what they met with, and each, returning by the way he went out, lives to recount his adventures to their wondering readers. Du Chaillu's book is still unpublishedonly "in preparation," but I happen to know that the materials brought home by this traveler are both rich and abundant. His attention was directed chiefly to the department of zoology, for which he had both the zeal and the knowledge requisite to make his opportunities practically available. He had special penchant for "gorillas," the vilest because the most striking caricatures of the human form found in the whole animal kingdom, against whom he made a war of conquest, and, as the result, has brought off a whole museum of "specimens." Six entirely new quadrupeds and more than a hundred species of birds are among the scientific results of his explorations; some important facts in geography were determined by him, as well as large additions made to the sum of our knowledge of the people and productions of

intertropical Africa. Of personal adventures and narratives of the passing events of the journey, any needed amount may be supplied. The work is really in course of preparation, under the direction of an altogether competent literary gentleman, and in due time a 66 sensation" book may be expected.

While on this subject, and by way of finishing it, I may just mention a new book announced by Ticknor & Fields "Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labors During Eighteen Years' Residence in Eastern Africa," by Dr. J. Lewis Krapt. The scene of Dr. Lewis's labors and researches is sufficiently remote from those described by other recent writers, while his opportunities for extensive and accurate observation have been such as to entitle his remarks to very great consideration. But as I have not seen the book I can give no certain account as to what it is or what it contains. So much for the season's harvest in a single department of literature; truly, "of making many books there is no end, and [as to many of them] much reading is a weariness;" and if all other departments should prove equally prolific, "I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Happily there is no law to compel any one to read the whole of them, and this immunity not improbably operates as an incentive to read the more.

It is not always agreeable to our vanity to find out just what is thought by others of ourselves or our productions. The story of Mercury in the shop of the seller of statuary has its moral in the wise man's injunction against overhearing the words of one's servant. But quite recently I met with a marked piece of literary praise, direct and significant, but wholly undesigned. I had occasion not long since to write something about the tribes of Mount Lebanon in connection with an account of the late terrible massacres; but when it appeared in print I was not a little chagrined at a single typographical error, by which one word was substituted for another, and the sense of the sentence destroyed. Presently afterward I met with an article on the same subject in one of our respectable periodicals, into which several of my paragraphs were handsomely dovetailed, and among them the one containing the printer's blunder that had so annoyed me, said blunder still standing out as boldly as though it meant something. Now, that, Mr. Editor, is, to my notion, the most emphatic kind of commendation. To hear one's wisdom quoted with deference is true praise, but to find one's nonsense mistaken for wisdom is the strongest kind of flattery. Once before in my lifetime I received a similar flattery, but that I somewhat doubted whether the evident moral obliquity of its giver ought not to impeach his æsthetic judgment. A photograph of a not specially-beautiful face which you have sometimes looked upon was suspended, among others properly framed, in the artist's gallery, to be gazed at and admired (?) by the visitors, and thence, like Ganymede or Helen, it was borne away by some rapt admirer, whose taste for the time quite overcame his sense of moral duty. Some said it might have been taken for the sake of the setting, but that I set down to the account of an unbecoming jealousy!