NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC.
Long and anxiously has the reading public been looking for Mr. Layard's account of his further discoveries in Nineveh and Babylon. That account has at length appeared in one large octavo volume, under the title of Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Desert, being the result of a Second Expedition undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum, by Austen H. Layard, M.P., and is enriched with maps, plans, and woodcut illustrations, to the extent of some hundreds. And on examining it we find that the vast amount of new light which Mr. Layard's discoveries in the wide and hitherto untilled field of Assyrian antiquities had already thrown on Sacred History, is increased to a great extent by those further researches, of which the details are now given to the public. With his ready powers of observation, and his talent for graphic description, Mr. Layard's book, as a mere volume of travels over a country of such interest, would well repay perusal: but when we find in addition, as we do in every page and line, fresh and startling illustration of the truth of Holy Writ—when we have put before us such pictures of what Nineveh and Babylon must have been, and find, as we do, men distinguished in every branch of learning lending their assistance to turn Mr. Layard's discoveries to the best account, we feel we cannot be too loud in our praises of Mr. Layard's zeal, energy, and judgment, or too grateful to Mr. Murray for giving us at once the results which those qualities have enabled Mr. Layard to gain for us, in so cheap, complete, yet fully embellished a form.
The blockade of Mainz was not a bad day for the already world-renowned story of Reynard the Fox, since that led Göthe to dress the old fable up again in his musical hexameters, and so give it new popularity. From Göthe's version a very able and spirited English paraphrase is now in the course of publication. We say paraphrase, because the author of Reynard the Fox, after the German version of Göthe, with illustrations by J. Wolf, takes as his motto the very significant but appropriate description which Göthe gave of his own work, "Zwischen Uebersetzung und Umarbeitung schwebend." However, the version is a very pleasant one, and the illustrations are characteristic and in good taste.
An Antiquarian Photographic Club, for the exchange among its members of photographs of objects of antiquarian interest, on the principle of the Antiquarian Etching Club, is in the course of formation.
Books Received.—The Family Shakspeare, in which nothing is added to the original Text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a Family, by T. Bowdler, Vol. V., containing Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.—The new volume of Bohn's Standard Library contains the eighth and concluding volume of the History of the Christian Church, as published by Neander. The publisher holds out a prospect of a translation of the posthumous volume compiled from Neander's Papers by Dr. Schneider, and with it of a general index to the whole work.—The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon, including his Dignity and Advancement of Learning, in Nine Books, and his Novum Organum, or Precepts for the Interpretation of Nature, by Joseph Devey, M.A., forms the new volume of Bohn's Scientific Library.