Sir James Stephen, whose brilliant contributions to the Edinburgh Review are familiar through Mr. Hart's Philadelphia edition, has nearly ready Lectures on the History of France, and The History of France, compiled, translated and abridged from the works of De Sismondi, and of other recent French authors, and illustrated with historical maps and chronological and other tables.
J. S. Buckingham, the author of fifty volumes of Travels, (of which eight large octavos are about our own unfortunate country,) has at length succeeded in his long contest with the East India Company for indemnification for his losses as an oriental journalist. The bill before parliament for restitution has been withdrawn, the court of directors and the government having agreed to settle upon him a pension of four hundred pounds per annum.
We perceive that the British government has bestowed a pension of five hundred dollars a year on Mrs. Jameson. We think of no Englishwoman who is more deserving of such distinction. Mrs. Jameson has spent a pretty long life in the most judicious exercise of her literary abilities, and as a critic of art she is unquestionably superior to any woman who has ever written on the subject. One of her most popular works, the Beauties of the Court of Charles the Second, will be issued in a splendid edition, with all the original portraits, in a few weeks, by the Appletons of this city.
Sir William Hamilton has published Critical Discussions in Philosophy, Literature, and Education with University Reform, chiefly from the Edinburgh Review, but now corrected, vindicated, and enlarged.
Several new books of Travels have lately appeared or are in press in London. Among them are Eight Years in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, from 1842 to 1850, by F. A. Neale, late of the Consular service; A Naturalist's Sojourn in America, by P. H. Gosse; a Journal of a Boat Voyage through Rupert's Land, and along the Central Arctic Coasts of America, in Search of the Discovery Ships under command of Sir John Franklin, with an Appendix on the Physical Geography of North America, by Sir John Richardson, C. B., F. R. S., &c.; the Personal Narrative of an Englishman Domesticated in Abyssinia, by Mansfield Parkins; Contrasts of Foreign and English Society, or, records and recollections of a residence in various parts of the Continent and of England, by Mrs. Austin; Narrative of Travels to Nineveh, in 1850, by Hon. Frederick Walpole, R. N. author of "Four Years in the Pacific;" Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines, in 1848-50, by Robert MacMicking; Recollections of a Ramble from Sidney to Southampton, via Panama, the West Indies, the United States, and Niagara, (anonymous.)