ling of devotion. Addison and
Congreve were both prosperous men in a wordly point of view,
and they were therefore introduced with a survey of that
golden age, when an epithalamium on some noble marriage, or
an ode to William III., was rewarded out of the public purse
to an extent that made the poet comfortable for life.
Congreve's first literary achievements earned for him,
through the patronage of Lord Halifax, places in the
commission for licensing hackney-coaches, in the
Custom-house, and in the Pipe-office. 'Alas!' said Mr.
Thackeray, 'there are no Pipe-offices now; the public have
smoked all the pipes!"

* * * * *

THEODORE S. FAY--of whom the literary world has heard nothing for a long
time--has in the press of the Appletons, a poem, entitled _Ulric, or the
Voices_. Mr. Fay wrote good verses twenty years ago, and we shall see
whether he has lost his art.

* * * * *

MR. HART, of Philadelphia, has lately published, in a very handsome
style, several handbooks in the mechanic arts, which are much commended.
Among them are _The Manufacture of Steel_, by Frederick Overman; _The
Practical Dyer's Guide_; the _American Cotton Spinner's Guide_, and the
London _Year Book of Facts_.

* * * * *

We are soon to have a new book from THOMAS CARLYLE--a _Memoir of the
late John Sterling_, the "Archaeus" of _Blackwood_, and the author of
some of the finest compositions in recent English literature. Sterling,
it is known to his friends, from a devout believer became a skeptic, and
then a deist, pantheist, or perhaps an atheist, and finally, having done
all that he saw to do, deliberately shut himself up to die--wrote to his
friends what time he should leave the world, and on the very day, as if
by a mere volition, went to his place. All this is concealed or passed
over very lightly by Archdeacon Hare, his biographer, and Carlyle
therefore determines that the world shall have his friend's true
history. Among Sterling's most intimate correspondents was Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and even Carlyle cannot write his life, we suspect, without
having access to the extraordinary series of letters the poet sent to
his American friend--letters, we have reason to believe, that will
command a greater fame for him than all his published works have won,
letters that almost any man might die to be th