which consists in depreciating the duties of common life in order to
exalt the claims of a kind of spiritualized sensuality and poetic
self-importance, he instinctively avoids. The thirteen shrewd,
suggestive, and practical essays which compose the present volume are
transcripts of his own experience and meditations, and teem with facts
and observations such as might be expected from the clear insight of a
man who has mingled with his fellow-men, and who is curiously critical
of the non-romantic phenomena of their daily life. The essays on the Art
of Putting Things, on Petty Malignity and Petty Trickery, on Tidiness,
on Nervous Fears, on Hurry and Leisure, on Work and Play, on Dulness,
and on Growing Old, are full of fresh and delicate perceptions of the
ordinary facts of human experience. His best and brightest remarks
surprise us with the unexpectedness of homely common sense, as flashed
on a world of organized illusions. The entire absence of rhetoric in the
author's mode of "putting things" adds to its effectiveness. He attempts
to reveal the common,--one of the rarest of revelations; and shows what
heroic qualities are needed to overcome the superficial circumstances
of our life, and transmute them into occasions for that humble, obscure
heroism which God alone apprehends and rewards. The freedom of the
writer from all the stereotyped phraseology of sanctity in doing this
work, and his innocent sympathy with everything cheerful, pleasurable,
and lovable in Nature and human nature, only add to the power of his
teachings. These "Recreations" of the "Parson" will, to the generality
of readers, produce more beneficent results than could have been
produced, had he given us his most carefully prepared sermons,--for they
connect religion with life. Nobody can read the volume without feeling
the moral and religious purpose which underlies its graceful and genial
exhibition of human character and manners. The common objection to
clergymen is, that they are ignorant of the world. No sagacious reader
of the present book can doubt that this parson, at least, is an
exception to the general rule; for he palpably knows more of the world
than most men who have made it a special study.

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Afloat and Ashore. By J. Fenimore Cooper. Illustrated by Darley. New
York. W.A. Townsend & Co. 12mo. pp. 549. $1.50.

Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe. B