We are soon to have a new book from Thomas Carlyle—a Memoir of the late John Sterling, the "Archæus" of Blackwood, and the author of some of the finest compositions in recent English literature. Sterling, it is known to his friends, from a devout believer became a skeptic, and then a deist, pantheist, or perhaps an atheist, and finally, having done all that he saw to do, deliberately shut himself up to die—wrote to his friends what time he should leave the world, and on the very day, as if by a mere volition, went to his place. All this is concealed or passed over very lightly by Archdeacon Hare, his biographer, and Carlyle therefore determines that the world shall have his friend's true history. Among Sterling's most intimate correspondents was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Carlyle cannot write his life, we suspect, without having access to the extraordinary series of letters the poet sent to his American friend—letters, we have reason to believe, that will command a greater fame for him than all his published works have won, letters that almost any man might die to be the author of.
The most noticeable event connected with literature in this country is an arrangement entered into between a New-York publisher and Thomas H. Benton, for the publication of the Historical Memoirs of the Life and Times of that eminent person. Mr. Benton is now about sixty-eight years of age, and for half a century he has been an active participant in affairs. He was thirty years a senator from Missouri, to which state he removed some time before its admission to the Union. His name has been connected with many great measures, and very few have exercised a more powerful influence upon our institutions or policy. The increase of his strength, as well as the increase of his fame, has been gradual but regular. He has been from his youth a student. To every question which has arrested his attention he has brought all the forces of his understanding, and what he has acquired by incessant and painful labor he has to an astonishing degree retained after the occasions which made it necessary have passed. At a period much beyond the noon of other men, he was still rising. He was of the age at which Cicero achieved his highest triumphs, before he displayed the fullness and the perfection of his powers, in several of the remarkable debates which have had relation to our empire on the Pacific. With his extraordinary experience, his faithful and particular memory, and wisdom which is master of his temper, he is perhaps before every man of his time in the requisites for such an undertaking as that which has occupied his leisure for many years, and the chief portion of his time since he ceased to be a senator. His work will probably make some five large octavo volumes, and it may be believed that in fame, authority, and length of life, it will equal the immortal production of Clarendon.
A new Life of Mr. Jefferson is soon to be published by Mr. Randall, who has been honorably distinguished in his connection with the government of this state. The work will embrace a very interesting sketch of the private life of Mr. Jefferson, by Mr. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the statesman's grandson and executor. Whatever we may think of the abilities or the special services of Mr. Jefferson, we are of that large number who regard his principles as altogether erroneous and injurious, and his character with little respect. The time is coming in which his history must be written, not by a maker of books, but by a philosophical statesman. Every year the materials are becoming more accessible. The writings of Adams and Hamilton, now in course of publication, are important contributions to them. The looked-for correspondence of Madison will serve largely for the same end; but Mr. Jefferson's life cannot be thoroughly understood until the collection of his papers in the possession of the government is carefully and intelligibly studied. The four volumes of his letters printed by Mr. Randolph, embrace but about eight hundred, but there were sold to the government by his executor the enormous number at forty-two thousand letters and other documents, of which nearly sixteen thousand were written or signed by Mr. Jefferson himself. A large proportion of these papers are doubtless most important for the illustration of contemporary French and American biography, but the whole of them should be read by whoever attempts to write the history of the apostle of the radical democracy in the United States.
A Memoir with a selection of the unpublished writings of the late Margaret Fuller, Countess d'Ossoli, is announced as in preparation by her friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing. The letters of Margaret Fuller to the Tribune, would fill a large volume, and we hope they will be reprinted with the collection of her private correspondence and inedited essays. And some of her later critical writings for the Tribune, in which the fame of more than one favorite of certain coteries was assailed—will her editors have courage to reproduce them? Pray you, gentlemen, consider that you propose bringing Margaret Fuller herself from the sea, to speak again to us in her own language; if the figure you present speak not as she spoke—all that she would speak, regardless of your regards—it will not be believed that you have commission for what you undertake.
The Rev. Frederick Ogilby, of Philadelphia, has in preparation a Memoir with selections from the Writings of the late Rev. John D. Ogilby, D.D., whose death at Paris was recently mentioned in these pages, and of whose life and character we have received an eloquent portraiture in the address delivered at his funeral by Bishop Doane.