Of Mr. James Bailey, and the blasphemous rant and fustian and crude speculation which make up his poem of "Festus," which has had such extraordinary popularity among our transcendentalists, and which Shakspeare Hudson so excellently well reviewed in the Whig Review a year or two ago, we think a correspondent of The Tribune speaks justly in the following extract from a letter dated at Nottingham, in England:
"Apropos of Nottingham, I have seen Bailey, the author of 'Festus.' His father is proprietor of the Nottingham Mercury, and the editorial department rests with him. He is a heavy, thick set sort of man; of a stature below the middle size; complexion dark; and, in years about eight and thirty. His physiognomy would be clownish in expression, if his eyes did not redeem his other features. He spoke of 'Festus,' and of its fame in America, of which he seemed very proud. In England, it has only reached the third edition, while eight or nine have been published in the States. You know my opinion of the work. It is as far from being a great poem as the Thames, compared with the Mississippi or the Ohio, is from being a great river. Anxiously, anxiously have I sought one striking original idea in the whole poem (appalling in its length), but to no purpose. The transcendental literature of Germany absorbs all that, at first glance, arrests the attention. Without learning, imagination, or the attraction of a beautiful metre (like that of Tennyson's 'Princess'), I am at a loss to know what has given this poem its notoriety. Not its daring speculation, surely, for it is but a timid compromise between Orthodoxy and Universalism."
H. F. Clinton has published in London the concluding volume of his Fasti Romani: the civil and literary chronology of Rome and Constantinople from the death of Augustus to the death of Heraclius. The first volume, containing the chronological tables, was published in 1845, and formed a continuation of the Fasti Hellenici, by the same author. It came down to the death of Justin II., a. d. 578. The present volume continues the tables from the latter date to the death of Heraclius, a. d. 641; but the greater part of it consists of a series of learned dissertations on various points connected with the civil and literary history of the Roman and Byzantine empires.
Captain J. D. Cunningham, author of the "History of the Sikhs," who was dismissed from his political situation at Bhopal, by orders of the Court of Directors, for having published an official correspondence, without the permission of his immediate superiors, has been recalled to public employment by the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie having just appointed him general superintending engineer in the north-western provinces.
Mr. Hepworth Dixon, author of "Howard and the Prison-World of Europe," has published in London a Life of William Penn, which will be republished immediately by Lea & Blanchard of Philadelphia.
The Literary Women of England were never so active as now. Mrs. Crowe has commenced in The Palladium magazine a new novel entitled Estelle Silvestre. Miss Anne G. Greene has published the third volume of her Lives of the Princesses of England; Mrs. David Ogilvy, Traditions of Tuscany; Mrs. Gordon, Musgrave, a Story of Gilsland Spa; Maria de la Vaye, Eugenie, the Young Laundress of the Bastille; Mrs. Norton, a new poem; the author of "Olivia," Sir Philip Hetherington; Mrs. Ward, Helen Charteris, or Sayings and Doings in a Cathedral Town; Mrs. Hubbach, niece of the celebrated Miss Austen, The Wife's Sister, or the Forbidden Marriage; Mrs. Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, forming the conclusion of her series illustrating Sacred and Legendary Art; the authoress of "Mary Powell" has commenced in Sharpe's Magazine a new work of the same description, under the title of The Household of Sir Thomas More.