NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC.
Before proceeding to notice any of the books which we have received this week, we will call the attention of the publishing world to two important works which we know to be now wanting a publisher, namely, I. A Syriac-English Lexicon to the New Testament and Book of Psalms, arranged alphabetically, with the derivatives referred to their proper roots, and a companion of the principal words in the cognate languages; and II. A Syriac-English Grammar, translated and abridged from Hoffman's larger work.
Samuel Pepys is the dearest old gossip that ever lived; and every new edition of his incomparable Diary will serve but to increase his reputation as the especial chronicler of his age. Every page of it abounds not only in curious indications of the tone and feelings of the times, and the character of the writer, but also in most graphic illustrations of the social condition of the country. It is this that renders it a work which calls for much careful editing and illustrative annotation, and consequently gives to every succeeding edition new value. Well pleased are we, therefore, to receive from Lord Braybrooke a fourth edition, revised and corrected, of the Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys. and well pleased to offer our testimony to the great care with which its noble editor has executed his duties. Thanks to his good judgment, and to the great assistance which he acknowledges to have received from Messrs. Holmes, Peter Cunningham, Yeowell, &c., his fourth edition is by far the best which has yet appeared, and is the one which must hereafter be referred to as the standard one. The Index, too, has been revised and enlarged, which adds no little to the value of the book.
Mr. Murray has broken fresh ground in his British Classics by the publication of the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with Notes and Preface by Dean Milman and M. Guizot, and edited, with Notes, by Dr. Smith. If the publisher showed good tact in selecting Mr. P. Cunningham for editor of Goldsmith, he has shown no less in entrusting the editing of his new Gibbon to Dr. Smith, whose various Dictionaries point him out as peculiarly fitted for such a task. In such well practised hands, therefore, there can be little doubt as to the mode in which the labour of editing will be conducted; and a very slight glance at the getting up of this first volume will serve to prove that, for a library edition of Gibbon, while this is the cheapest it will be also the handsomest ever offered to the public.
Books Received.—Macaulay's Critical and Historical Essays, People's Edition, Part I. The first issue of an edition of these admirable Essays, which will, when completed, cost only Seven Shillings! Can cheapness go much lower?—Adventures in the Wilds of North America, by Charles Lanman, edited by C. R. Wild, forming Parts LV. and LVI. of Longman's Traveller's Library. These adventures, partly piscatorial, are of sufficient interest to justify their publication even without the imprimatur, which they have received, of so good a critic as Washington Irving.—Darling's Cyclopædia Bibliographica, Part XVII., extends from Andrew Rivet to William Shepheard.