A second edition is under way of the Rev. Charles Kingsley's glowing novel, Yeast, which is regarded by many as the best of all his books, dealing as it does with the rural scenes and manners which are familiar to him at first-hand.
The last announcement of a new work in the department of history or biography is that of a forthcoming Life of Admiral Blake, “based almost entirely on original documents,” by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, the biographer of John Howard and William Penn, and the delineator of London prisons. Mr. Dixon has a taste for the selection of “safe” subjects, and Robert Blake is surely one of the “safest” that could be chosen. The Nelson of the Commonwealth, without Nelson's faults and frailties.
An elegant translation of Charles Dickens's works, well got up, and well printed, is being published in Copenhagen. The first part commences with David Copperfield, from the pen of Herr Moltke.
The collected poems of D. M. Moir, the “Delta” of Blackwood, lately deceased, are announced by the Messrs. Blackwood, with a memoir by Thomas Aird. “Delta” was an amiable and benevolent surgeon, at Musselburgh, a little fishing village, a few miles east of Edinburgh, and had nothing about him of the conceit which a little literary fame generally begets in the member of a trifling provincial circle. Whether his musical and rather melancholy verses will be long remembered is doubtful; but a tolerably enduring reputation is probably secured to his Mansie Wauch, a genial portraiture of a Scottish village-original, in its way quite as racy, though not so caustic, as Galt's best works in the same line. Mr. Thomas Aird, his biographer, is the editor of a Dumfries newspaper, and himself a man of original genius. D. M. Moir, by the way, ought not to be confounded with his namesake and fellow contributor to Blackwood, George Moir, the Edinburgh advocate, a man of much greater accomplishment, the translator of Schiller's Wallenstein, and author of the Fragments from the History of John Bull, a satire on modern reform, in the manner of Dean Swift's Tale of a Tub.
The Council of King's College, London, have appointed Mr. James Stephen, son of Sergeant Stephen, author of the Commentaries, to the Professorship of English Law and Jurisprudence, vacant by the resignation of Mr. Bullock.