orality--the England of 'all the rights of man,'
where there are more paupers and more miseries than in any other land on
earth, and where there is accordingly the most social tyranny of any
country.

'Ay, only give me work,
And then you need not fear
That I shall snare his worship's hare,
Or kill his grace's deer.'

'Where savage laws begrudge
The pauper babe its breath,
And doom a wife to a widow's life
Before her partner's death.'

When England shall have turned aside the reproach of this poem, it will
be time for her to abuse America as 'uncivilized.'

AGNES OF SORRENTO, By Mrs. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1862.

If there be, at the present day, an ungrateful task for an intelligent
reader or a conscientious reviewer, it is to be obliged to deal with a
work whose whole compass is merely that of a second-rate romance
inspired by rococo sentimentalism. We regret to speak thus of a book by
so eminent a writer as Mrs. Stowe; but when any one at this time
undertakes to build up a novel out of such material as cloisters, monks,
and nuns, Beato Angelico and frankincense, cavaliers and Savonarola,
with the occasional 'purple patch' of a rhyming Latin hymn--in short,
when we see the long-exhausted melo-dramatic style, which was years ago
thoroughly quizzed in 'Firmilian,' revived in the year 1862 in a work of
fiction, we can not refrain from expressing sorrow that a public can
still be found to welcome such a bouquet of faded and tattered
artificial flowers. There is something, indeed, almost painfully amusing
in the liberal use of perfectly exhausted and thoroughly hackneyed
elements of popular romance which appear in every page of _Agnes of
Sorrento_. A writer has said of the heroine, that 'she is one of those
ethereal females, only encountered in romance, who dwell on the brink of
exaltation, and never eat bread and butter without seeming to fly in the
face of Divine Providence.' But this feebly expresses the worn-out
ornamental piety of the work. It would require but very little
alteration to become one of the most intensely amusing books of the age.

SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE INSURANCE COMMISSIONERS OF THE
COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.

An interesting collection of documents, which will be read or examined
with great pleasure by all who devote their attention to the rapidly
maturing science of insurance, a science which perhaps combines in