The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon, Esq. With Notes by the Rev. H. H. Milman. A New Edition, to which is added a Complete Index of the Whole Work. In six volumes. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co. Vols. 1 & 2.
This is a cheap reprint of the latest and best edition of Gibbon, and when completed will place one of the greatest historical productions in the world within the reach of the most limited means—the price of the whole not amounting to four dollars. Milman’s edition is in some degree founded upon Guizot’s French edition, and includes the principal notes of the latter. Both Milman and Guizot have gone carefully over Gibbon’s authorities, and while they have thus been enabled to correct his misrepresentations, they have also added much which he overlooked, or which has been brought to light since the period in which the history was written. Of the book itself, it may be said, that in the combination of vast erudition with philosophic thought, it is the object of emulous despair to all succeeding historians. The subject is the greatest within the range of historical composition, and Gibbon has so nearly exhausted it that even a philosophical historian like Guizot is contented to be but an annotator when he approaches it. The general reader, after many repeated perusals of the work, continually returns to it for the depth and acuteness of its reflections, the richness and weight of its style, and that masterly irony, sapping a solemn creed with “solemn sneer,” which, though sometimes an expression of the author’s moral deficiencies, and in a few instances disgracefully disingenuous, is still a weapon which makes falsehood and prejudice wither when it merely gleams, and perish when it strikes.
A Few Thoughts for a Young Man. A Lecture, delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. By Horace Mann. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields.
The author of this eloquent lecture is known principally for his great services to the cause of popular education—a cause which he has adopted with his whole soul, and into which he has thrown whatever of fire there is in his blood and of intelligence there is in his brain. The present address flames with the peculiar characteristics of his genius—vehement, rapid, and epigrammatic in style, large, generous, independent and original in thought. We disagree with some of the positions he has assumed, but we know of few books which contain, in so small a space, so much to breathe energy and aspiration into the souls of young men as this warm gush of blended thought and knowledge, from a soul eminently energetic and aspiring itself.
The Modern Housewife. By Alexis Soyer. Edited by an American Housekeeper. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
This book we can commend to all ladies who are, or hope to be, housewifes. It simplifies the whole art of cooking, and has a receipt for every dish which the Heliogabalus imagination of man has conceived. It has been edited, seemingly with great care, by some gentleman amateur of the table, and contains directions for the food equally of rich and poor, the dyspeptic and the ostrich stomach.
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D. D. LLD. By his Son-in-Law, the Rev. William Hanna, LLD. New York: Harper & Brothers. 3 vols. 12mo.