The following works, all of which have promising titles, will soon be published by J. S. Redfield: Men of the Times in 1852, comprising biographical sketches of all the celebrated men of the present day; Characters in the Gospels, by Rev. E. H. Chapin; Tales and Traditions of Hungary, by Theresa Pulzky; The Comedy of Love, and the History of the Eighteenth Century, by Arsene Houssaye; Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers; The Cavaliers of England, and The Knights of the Olden Time, or the Chivalry of England, France and Spain, by Henry W. Herbert; Lectures and Miscellanies, by Henry James; and Isa: a Pilgrimage, by Caroline Chesebro.
The Westminster Review says of Alice Carey, whose Clovernook we noticed favorably in the last International, that "no American woman can be compared to her for genius;" the Paris Débats refers to her as a poet of the rank of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in England; the literary critic of The Tribune (the learned and accomplished Ripley whose judgment in such a matter is beyond appeal) prefers her Clovernook to Miss Mitford's Our Village, or Professor Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.
Mr. Daniel S. Curtiss has availed himself well of large opportunities for personal observation, in his volume just published under the title of Western Portraiture, and Emigrant's Guide, a description of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, with remarks on Minnesota and other territories. It is the most judicious and valuable book of the kind we have seen.
Herr Freund, the Philologist, is in London, engaged in constructing a German-English and English-German dictionary upon his new system; and Professor Smith, the learned editor of the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, announces a dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, the articles to be written by the principal contributors to his previous works.
The Christmas Books of the present season in England have not been very remarkable. Mr. Dickens, in an extra number of his Household Words, printed What Christmas is to Everybody; and we have from Wilkie Collins, A New Christmas Story; by the author of "The Ogilvies," Alice Learmont, a Fairy Tale of Love; by the author of "The Maiden Aunt," a pleasant little book entitled The Use of Sunshine.
Under the title of Excerpta de P. Ovidii Nastonis, Blanchard & Lea of Philadelphia have published a series of selections from a poet whose works, for obvious reasons, are not read entire in the schools. The extracts present some of the most beautiful parts of this graceful and versatile poet.
THE FINE ARTS
The American Art Unions have not been successful in the last year, unless an exception may be made in regard to that of New England, at Boston. The American, at New-York, deferred indefinitely its annual distribution of pictures, on account of the small number of its subscriptions; and the Pennsylvanian, at Philadelphia, by a recent fire in that city has lost its admirably-engraved plates of Huntington's pictures from the Pilgrim's Progress, the last of which was just completed and placed in the hands of the printer. It will make no distribution.