unity. Free institutions are to be judged by their effect when
they have had fair play, and not by what has happened in a republic
which sought to have them in an unnatural alliance with the most
detestable form of tyrannical oppression. REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England._ By Robert Carter. Boston:
Crosby & Nichols, pp. 261.

In these days, when the high price of paper makes it easy for authors to
sell by the pound what no one would take by the single copy, he is
luckiest who has made the heaviest book. Our morning newspaper nowadays
is a kind of palimpsest, and one cannot help wondering how many dead
volumes, how many hopes and disappointments, lie buried under that
surface made smooth for the Telegraph (sole author who is sure of
readers) to write upon. We seem to detect here and there a flavor of
Jones's Poem or Smith's History, something like the rhythm of the one
and the accuracy of the other. _Quot libras autore summo invenies?_ is
the question for booksellers now.

In a metaphysical sense, one is apt to find many heavy books for one
weighty one, and it is as difficult to make light reading that shall
have any nutriment in it as to make light bread. Mr. Carter has
succeeded in giving us something at once entertaining and instructive.
One who introduces us to a new pleasure close by our own doors, and
tells us how we may have a cheap vacation of open air, with fresh
experience of scenery and adventure at every turn, deserves something of
the same kind of gratitude as he who makes two blades of grass grow
where one grew before. Americans, above all other men, need to be taught
to take a vacation, and how to spend one so as to find in it the rest
which mere waste of time never gives. Mr. Carter teaches us how we may
have all the pleasure without any of the responsibilities of yachting,
and, reversing the method of our summer migration, shows us the shore
from the sea.

Hakluyt and Purchas have made us familiar with, the landscape of our
coast to the early voyagers,--with its fringe of forest to the water's
edge, its fair havens, its swarms of wild fowl, its wooded islets
tangled with grape-vines, its unknown mountains looming inland, and its
great rivers flowing out of the realm of dream; but its present aspect
is nearly as unfamiliar to us as to them. We know almost as little of
the natives as Gosnold. Mr. Carter's voyage extends from Plymouth to
Mount Desert, and he l