Palmer's books.
They have a true poetic value, and instruct as much as they entertain.
While he is telling us a San Francisco story, the truth of the
accessories and the skill with which they are grouped bring the
California of 1849 before us with unmatched vividness. We have been
getting knowledge and learning a deep moral without suspecting it, as if
by our own observation and experience. In the same way "Asirvadam the
Brahmin" is a prose poem that lets us into the secret of the Indian
revolt. It is seldom that we meet with volumes of more real power than
these, or whose force is so artistically masked under ease and
playfulness. We prefer the "Old" part of the book to the "New." It seems
to us to show a better style of handling. There is something of
melodrama in the style of the California stories,--a flavor of blue
lights and burnt cork. At the same time, we must admit that there is a
melodramatic taint in our American life:--witness the Sickles vulgarity.
Young America is _b'hoyish_ rather than boyish, and perhaps the "New"
may be all the truer to Nature for what we dislike in it.

"The New and the Old" is fittingly dedicated to the Autocrat of all the
Breakfast-Tables, than whom no man has done more to demonstrate that wit
and mirth are not incompatible with seriousness of purpose and
incisiveness of thought.

* * * * *

_Napoleonic Ideas_. By Prince NAPOLEON LOUIS BONAPARTE. Translated by
JAMES A. DORR. New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1859.

This publication has at least that merit which is one of the first in
literature,--it is timely. Though we look upon the Emperor of the French
as a kind of imperial Jonathan Wild, it does not the less concern us to
make a true estimate of his intellectual capacity. Nothing is more
unwise than to assume that a man's brain must be limited because his
moral sense is small; yet no mistake is more common. Napoleon the Third
may play an important part in History, though by no possibility an
heroic one. In reading this little volume, one cannot fail to be struck
with the presence of mind and the absence of heart of which it gives
evidence. It is the advertisement of a charlatan, whose sole inheritance
is the right to manufacture the Napoleonic pill, and we read with
unavoidable distrust the vouchers of its wonderful efficacy. We do not
fancy the Bonapartist grape-cure, nor believe in it.

Mr. Dorr's translation is excellent. He understands Fren