with the Poets_. A more elegantly printed book was never
produced; and it is illustrated with fifty engravings designed and drawn
on wood by Birket Foster; engraved by Henry Vizetelly, and printed in
tints in a way to render most effective the artist's tasteful,
characteristic, and very able drawings. The volume is, as it were, a
casket, in which are enshrined all the gems which could be dug out of
the rich mines of English poetry; and when we say that the first
division treats of Carols from the Anglo-Norman period to the time of
the Reformation; that these are followed by Christmas Poems of the
Elizabethan period, by Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and their great
cotemporaries; that to these succeed Herrick's Poems, and so on, till we
have the Christmas verses of our own century, by Southey, Wordsworth,
Scott, Shelley, Tennyson, &c., we have done more than all our praise
could do, to prove that a fitter present to one who loves poetry could
not be found than _Christmas with the Poets_.

While if it be a _little_ lover of poetry--mind, not one who little
loves poetry, but one who listens with delight to those beloved ditties
of the olden times, which as we know charmed Shakspeare's
childhood,--learn that an English lady, with the hand and taste of an
artist, guided and refined by that purest and holiest of feelings, a
mother's love, has illustrated those dear old songs in a way to delight
all children; and at the same time charm the most refined. The
_Illustrated Ditties of the Olden Time_ is in sooth a delightful volume,
and if a love of the beautiful be as closely connected with a love of
the moral as wise heads tell us, we know no more agreeable way of early
inculcating morality than by circulating this splendid edition of our
time-honoured Nursery Rhymes.

But we fancy the taste of some of our readers may not yet have been hit
upon. Let them try _The Story of Jack and the Giants, illustrated by
Richard Doyle_; and {524} they will find this wondrous story rendered
still more attractive by some thirty drawings, from the pencil of one
of the most imaginative artists of the day, and whose artistic spirit
seems to have revelled with delight as he pourtrayed the heroic
achievements of "the valiant Cornish man."

We will now turn to those works which are of a somewhat graver class;
and we will begin with Miss Drury's able and well-written story,
entitled _Eastbury_, in which the heavy trials of Beatrice Eustace,
mitigated and