The following passage from a letter written recently by Leigh Hunt will excite much sympathy and regret:—"I have not been out of my house (by medical advice) for these two months; for a considerable time past, I have not been able to visit my nearest connections, even by day; and last year I was not able to indulge myself with a sight of what all the world were seeing, though for the greater part of its existence I was living not a mile from the spot. To complete this piece of confidence, into which your making me of so much importance to myself has led me, and not leave my friends with a more serious impression of the state of my health than I can help, I have reason to believe that the coming spring will be more gracious to me than the last; and many are the apparent overthrows from which I have recovered in the course of my life. But age warns me that I must take no more liberties with times and seasons."
Lady Morgan has addressed a letter to one of the auditors of the Benevolent Society of St. Patrick, proposing that a monument to Moore should be raised in the poet's native city. She says: "The name of Ireland's greatest poet suggests an idea which perhaps is already more ably anticipated, that some monumental testimony to his honor should be raised in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin; for Westminster might well deny such a distinction to the Irish bard as was refused to the remains of England's greatest poet since the time of Shakspeare and Milton—Byron. Nowhere could the monument of Moore be more appropriately placed than near that of Swift."
Thomas Hicks, the artist, exhibits this year at the National Academy, a full-length portrait of ex-Governor Fish, which is the picture of the exhibition. Mr. Hicks is the first of our artists. In just conception—splendor of color—vigor and accuracy of drawing—poetic imagination and living reality of impression, he has no master this side the sea.
A portion of Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays has been translated and published in Paris, by M. Emile Montegut. An interesting review of this volume has appeared in the Pays. The writer says that, "by a strange anomaly, in the classic land of daring and of novelty, all literary productions bear the same evidences of imitation; all are more or less remarkable for their close adherence to the style of some foreign model." Then he declares Cooper to be a disciple of Walter Scott, but at the same time, much more American than Washington Irving, who is the faithful copier of Robertson and Addison.
M. de Bacourt, one of the executors of the late Prince de Talleyrand, has written a letter to the public journals stating that frauds similar to those lately discovered in England relative to Shelley's letters, have been attempted in France with letters falsely stated to have been written by the late prince. "I have in my possession at present," says M. de Bacourt, "a certain number of those letters, imitating exceedingly well the writing of the deceased Prince—but which have been declared by the persons intimate with the deceased, such as M. Guizot, the Duke de Broglie, Count Molé, Duke Pasquier, &c., to be forgeries."