uthor and editor show a very intimate
acquaintance with the life and customs and speech of an inexplicable
people. But here the value of their book ends; and we imagine that the
earlier Simpson, who contributed the greater part of it in articles to
Blackwood's Magazine, scarcely supposed himself to be writing anything
more than sketches of the Scotch Gypsies whom he found in the different
shires, and of the Continental and English Gypsies of whom he had read.
The later Simpson thought it, as we have seen, a history of the Gypsies,
and he has furnished it with an Introduction and a Disquisition of
amusingly pompous and inconsequent nature. His subject has been too much
for him, and his mental vision, disordered by too ardent contemplation
of Gypsies, reproduces them wherever he turns his thought. If he values
any one of his illusions above the rest,--for they all seem equally
pleasant to him,--it is his persuasion that John Bunyan was a Gypsy. "He
was a tinker," says our editor. "And who were the tinkers?" "Why,
Gypsies, without a doubt," answers the reader, and makes no struggle to
escape the conclusion thus skilfully sprung upon him. Will it be
credited that the inventor of this theory was denied admittance to the
columns of the religious newspapers in this country, on the flimsy
pretext that the editors could not afford the space for a disquisition
on John Bunyan's Gypsy origin?

The comparison of the Gypsy language in this book with a dialect of the
Hindostanee is interesting and useful, and the accounts of Gypsy habits
and usages are novel and curious; and otherwise the work is a mass of
rather entertaining rubbish.

_Eros. A Series of connected Poems._ By LORENZO SOMERVILLE, London:
Truebner & Co.

_Patriotic Poems._ By FRANCIS DE HAES JANVIER. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott & Co.

_The Contest: a Poem._ By G. P. CARR. Chicago: P. L. Hanscom.

_Poems._ By ANNIE E. CLARK. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly
bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its
hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.

"Dove vai, povera foglia frale?"

To oblivion, by the briefest route, we think; and we find a pensive
satisfaction in speculating upon the incidents of the journey. Shall any
one challenge the wanderers in their flight, and seek to stay them?
Shall they all reach an utter forgetfulness, an