lumes; and then we shall set before our readers in deserved detail, the beauty and value of the work.

THOSE American readers-and it appears they are many- - who welcomed 'The Preacher and the King,' from the French of L. BUNGENER, will not be slow in securing a perusal of 'The Priest and the Huguenot, or Persecution in the Age of Louis XV.,' by the same author, and issued by the same publishers, Messrs. GOULD AND LINCOLN, BOSton. The author, a minister of the Reformed Church of Geneva, informs the translator that his works have been conceived upon the plan of exhibiting, in a series, the principal religious aspects of France, from the age of LOUIS XIV., to the close of the last century. The third of the series, now ready for publication, will be 'VOLTAIRE, and his Times,' and the last, 'JULIAN, or the End of a Century.'

LET us hope that much good may ensue, both to ministers and their congregations, from a work translated from the French of A. VINET, D.D., by Rev. THOMAS H. SKINNER, D.D., the American editor. It is entitled 'Homiletics, or the Theory of Preaching, and is published by the new and enterprising house of IVISON AND PHINNEY, Fultonstreet. Both the author and translator have felt the necessity of modifying preaching, so as to suit it to the character of the age; and the present work, it is believed by the latter, 'will be regarded universally as in the first rank of scholarship, learning, intellectual affluence and power, grace and beauty, and order and perfection of execution.' 'De Veres' Comparative Philology,' published by PUTNAM, states briefly, in a popular manner, and with a view to give rather suggestive than complete information, what comparative Philology is, and what it has done. It is a carefully-reasoned and philosophically-illustrated work, and must prove a valuable aid to the philological student. A HANDSOME Volume, containing Letters and Miscellanies in Prose, Rhyme, and BlankVerse,' by LOUISE ELEMJAY, (L. M. J.,') has been sent us by the publishers, Messrs. MOORE, ANDERSON, WILSTACH AND KEYS, Cincinnati. In the absence of an adequate opportunity to judge, we can only infer its merit from the public demand for it. The present is the second edition. The authoress is a lady of the South.

THROUGH the kindness of the American publishers, BANGS, BROTHERS, in Park-Row, we are in receipt of several new and valuable publications, from the popular press of BoпN, London, of whose cheap and valuable libraries we have heretofore spoken, at different times in these pages. A valuable work from the London press of INGRAM, COOKE AND COMPANY, entitled 'English Forests and Forest-Trees,' opens our present list of foreign books. It is historical, legendary, and descriptive, and is embellished with numerous illustrations. We should think it would supply an important desideratum to the American landscape-gardener, and be a useful adjunct to gentlemen of taste and wealth, who would ornament their grounds in the most picturesque and diversified manner. Moreover, it is filled with very pleasant and various reading, independent of its incidental artistical information.

'Norway and its Scenery,' from the press of Box, is an extremely interesting as well as valuable book. It comprises the 'Journal of a Tour' by EDWARD PRICE, Esq., with many additions, and constitutes beside a hand-book for tourists, with hints to anglers and sportsmen. It is edited and compiled by THOMAS FORESTER, Esq., A.M., author of 'Norway in 1848-9,' etc. The minute description given of that wild, wonderful, and sublime northern region is replete with deep interest. We could wish that the engravings, which are sufficiently numerous, had been in better keeping with the fine paper and luxurious typography of the book.

THE last two volumes of DE QUINCEY'S Works, published in an excellent form by Messrs. TICKNOR, REED AND FIELDS, Boston, contain his 'Essays on Philosophical Writers and other Men of Letters,' embracing Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON, MACKINTOSH, KANT, in his miscellaneous essays, HERDER, RICHTER, with his 'Analects,' LESSING, BENTLEY, and PARR. All these reviews have acquired a wide and well-deserved repute.

WE have 'posted up' a few of our books, and brought up our leeway' a little, in the foregoing record; but some twenty works, among them several already popular productions, and four or five by personal friends and correspondents, must 'bide their time' until another issue. When we have caught up' with the publishers, we shall endeavor to keep up' with them.

BURIED in sleep a thousand fathoms deep, or in semi-lucent reveries deeper still, I had rolled on in the Eilwagon for leagues, when we were all aroused by the rattling wheels which announced our entry in the streets of BRUGG. Sweet opal of a town by day! but now opaque and inscrutable to my vainly-widening eyes. The lanterns flit noiselessly by, suspended from invisible hands. There is a rattling of chains as the ready-harnessed horses are brought forth and hitched to our lumbering land-ark.

So this is BRUGG already; we got in at Zurich. LORD, how I must have slept ad interim! And oh! how like the sensation of the robe of Nessus it is to wake in an Eilwagon after these alternating hours of rest and unrest, with uncomfortable clothes clinging greedily to your unanointed skin; your unwashed eye-lids struggling open to transmit a cloudy ray of consciousness to your unrefreshed soul! But whoop! there goes the howling horn of the yellow-breasted postillion. To my truckle-bed,' as Mercutio says. What man hath once done, that can he do again.

Vive la Diligence! in all countries and under all nomenclature. It is by the diligence you travel; by rail-road you merely arrive. But in beholding these monstrous oblong cars as they peregrinate over the pave and astound pedestrians with their thunder, every one, were he the sturdiest of conservatives, must be convinced that institutions do progress, and at no mean rate, even in the slowest of countries.

What an institution it is! How admirable in its appointments! How accurate and excellent its administration; its system of powers, of checks, of balances!

First, there is the conductor; so called in the language of messagerie, because he conducts nothing at all; a kind of roi faneant, to whom pertain the responsibility and badges of empire, while the reins of government are relinquished to the custody of a vizier. Indeed, regard ing the diligence as his proper realm, the grave charge of absentee-ism

is frequently to be laid at the conductor's door; for having, as already stated, absolutely nothing to conduct, he passes a great portion of his administration in aerial exercises, or in the pursuit of fair frailty and tobacco-pipes on the road. In all the practices of vaulting ambition, it must be allowed that the squirrel and kangaroo are both clumsy animals, compared with this chief magistrate of a diligence. He runs upon the wheels as Napthali over the unbending corn: now in at a window now beneath the vehicle; and now leaping phlegmatically to the summit of the remotest trunk aloft- an attitude of almost twenty feet above the level of the highway—to the exquisite jeopardy of neck and limb, and to the certain destruction of his pipe.

Then comes the blue-shirted driver, in whose existence there are two equally-alternating epochs, that during which his pipe is in his mouth; and that during which his pipe is in his cap.

It is the POSTILLION who gives life to the locomotion. The prancing, the breaks, the bounds, the oaths, the drinks, the crackings of whips and jokes, the poetry of the diligence, in fine, are all his deed. In all countries of the continent it is his principal privilege at each relay to dismount and arouse the somniferous passenger by yelling in his ear, Gentlemen, forget not the postillion, if you please!' Some of the most successful cases of getting' kicked to the ancient Henry' on record have had their origin in this same abused prerogative.

The Swiss postillion is noted for a shorter pipe and a longer whip than the rest of his profession. He also is known to make his demand for pourboire with even more frequency, perhaps on account of the rarefaction of his climate and its influence. An ingenious traveller of a scientific turn once established a two-fold method, through which the rate of motion, and the distance from place to place, may be accurately estimated by a series of very simple observations upon the postillion's movements. As follows:

The rate of motion may be readily calculated by counting the oscillations of his elbows, which flop with a regular movement to and fro on the postillion's flanks, comparing, at the same time, the beatings of your pulse, which may be assumed to mark seventy-two pulsations a minute. The distance may be arrived at with equal simplicity by noting how often you are called upon for pourboire, reducing the intervals to leagues or miles. With the queue of the postillion we have at present nothing to do.

8 TAGE CHARACTERS.

ALL farther speculations upon the diligence were suddenly arrested as we drew up at -; but I forget the name, and have not the map to consult. It is an unmentionable little town (Swissishly speaking) famous for its galette—a kind of indigestible cake, no doubt highly recommended by the local physicians. Here most of our party laid in a supply of drinkables and comestibles enough to provision a yacht for a long voyage, neglecting neither of those delicate and savory viands of travelling-diet, paté de fois gras and cheese. In the days of which I write there were wars, or rather rumors of wars; and at this post a large band of Gendarmerie was kept employed in the martial tactics of overhauling passports.

Gendarmerie! glorious branch of military service, ever drenched in the beer of the country where ye serve! whose minds are never molested; whose sleep is never invaded, save by the clatter of the diligence as it rolls past this station, or by the neighing of the matutinal horse who clamors for his first repast! Gendarme! I see you now, fin fellow, inclining with respectful leer over my greasy passport, by the wan light of a lantern at the magic hour of night. Politeness is to you what courage was to Ney-your nature-my gallant friend, for as such shall I ever regard you.

The best evidence of the utility of the passport, and of the fidelity of its description to the owner, is the embarrassment which the Gendarme experiences on attempting to restore to each one his papers. Like Sganarelle among the doctors, he is utterly distracted in the forest of all kinds of hair, in the anomalous collection of 'medium noses' and 'moderate chins.' He usually commences by allotting blonde to black, Roman to pug; and invariably concludes by inviting each gentleman to help himself to his own. On the present occasion, a solemn smile stole from beneath the moustaches and lit up the lantern-jaws of a haggard old huzzar as he found himself in possession of a handsome Frenchman's document, while the latter gave rise to a low blasphemous noise as he was presented with the word-portrait of an ugly Austrian. This incident reminds me that, contrary to all literary etiquette, I. have neglected to introduce my compagnons de voyage to my reader. My apology, honored friend, is that (beyond a slight after-dinner study, 'twixt sleep and waking, while the others were in a similar disposition) I have hardly become acquainted myself. As we are once more in motion, I look around again by the rays of two lamps fitfully struggling through the dense atmosphere of tobacco-smoke, and proceed to examine their appearance.

An angler for oddities can light upon no stream or pond of human life which yields him subjects more readily than a public conveyance on the continent. Here they are to be found as in a fish-trunk, collected and waiting to be caught-Saxon, Thor, Hun, and Gaul are grouped together.

Precisely; just as I left them. There was the old Prussian, sitting immobile as if hewn out of granite, and enveloped in the concentric wreaths of smoke which gushed with elephantine respiration in and out of his lips, whence depended his heavy meerschaum. Beneath the unimaginable stolidity of his countenance protruded the massive double and triple chin, like the ponderous slabs beneath an Egyptian portal.

There reclined the Frenchman with his cordon, still slumbering; or every time he awoke it was to murmur quelle triste vie! and to compose himself on the other side. There, too, sat the tall meditative Pole, starch in uniform, wrapped in silence and smoke, his coat flaunting with as many colors and decorations as a flag-ship. But the militaire who could no doubt repose soundly upon a shakedown, had hardly succeeded in closing his eyes in our slow wagon.

Immediately opposite was slouched a Germanic individual endowed with a description of ugliness not of this world. Most mortals we meet with are at least of the earth, earthy,' in their ill-looks, but his seemed

to belong to the sea. There was something weird and formidably incongruous in his ill-assorted lineaments. It was as if, when fishing far from land and ordinary life, one should suddenly discover at the end of his line a monster of the deep whose preternatural aspect and contortions fill him with dismay. Years of acquaintance might fail to assure you that he was invested with every-day humanity. No familiarity could accustom, no philosophy could reconcile one to the abandoned woe and wildness of his face. A professional ghost-seer would hesitate long before venturing alone in the dark with this incarnate nightmare. The writer's pen, even now, recoils from the unwholesome and unavailing effort of embodying with description such elements of frightfulness as lay disordered in his visage. True, I might possibly sketch the surface of his countenance, which some unheard-of disease had embroidered as elaborately as could any Feejee cosmetic; true it is, that I might convey an idea of his nose by likening it to a coarse Roman Mosaic of a shapeless ruin; or of his eyes, by describing the black poop-port-holes of a mouldering wreck, with the rusty muzzles of the displaced cannon peeping piratically through; this much may be possible, but Mr. Catlin himself, the painter of the ugliest Indians in creation, would have broken ignobly down had he attempted a complete portrait. Indeed, I fear it seemed as if those very features, horrid though they were, had actually broken down with frailty in their hopeless office of giving expression to the more than Mokanna horrors which yet lurked behind in all their native deformity.

A loquacious Englishman is too notable a personage to pass over. Confound him! there was he, too, prating on in the same mood, tense, and person. Like most loquacious Angles, he talked sumptuously: he lied, he spread, he engrossed. A great capital I, was the constant text of his discourses. If ever he desisted for a moment, it was only to produce an immense repeater, which he took care to make strike at least every half hour, much to the annoyance of Each cessaevery body. tion of his croaking voice was the simultaneous signal for the repeater, which at such times would give forth a prophetic sound. Sometimes, after putting it up and pulling it forth afresh half a dozen times, he would stoop and examine it as curiously as if about to dive into a new system of logarithms; anon, applying a lorgnon beneath the supernal bone of his left eye, he would incline his corresponding ear into the nicest contiguity with the closed case. No doubt its lame tickings

discoursed to his charmed soul music more sweet than the softest mandolin.

At such times, the Frenchman would rouse and shake as though ''t were fit the spell should break of this protracted dream.' The need of repose which had shut the lids of his drooping blue eyes, gradually widened the black circles around them. With a renewed sigh and reflection upon the triste vie which so oppressed him, he occasionally passed around a wicker-covered pocket-pistol of a brighter and more palpable essence than the all-pervading pipe-clouds, being a remarkably sound cognac. Nemine contradicente.