Mr. Macauley has at length completed two more volumes of his History of England, and they will be published the coming autumn by Longmans.
The Poems of Edith May, from the press of E. H. Butler of Philadelphia, will be one of the most beautiful of the illustrated books of the season. Mr. Butler is an artist in book-making, and he has never published anything more elegant. The lady who writes under the pseudonym of "Edith May" is a genuine poet, and the volume will be popular.
William Ware, one of those delightful authors whose names are always uttered by appreciating readers in tones of affection, has just published (Phillips, Sampson, & Co., of Boston,) Sketches of European Capitals. The work includes his views of Ancient Rome, St. Peters and the Vatican, Florence, Naples, the Italians of Middle Italy, and London, and in his preface he tells us that "the volume comes into existence, like so many others now-a-days, as a convenient way of disposing of matter previously used in the form of lectures;" and adds, modestly, "It is a volume of light reading for the summer roadside, and though, like the flowers of that season, perishing with them, one may be permitted to hope that, like some of them, at least it may exhale a not unpleasing fragrance while it lasts." Such a fate awaits no book by the author of Probus and Zenobia, of whom this performance is by no means unworthy.
The Harpers have in press Drayton, a Tale of American Life, in which is traced the career of a young American from the workshop to places of trust and honor; and a friend, who has read the manuscript, speaks in warm terms of the frequent beauty of the style, the warmth of the coloring, the animation of the narrative, and the general progress and development of the story. The author is Thomas H. Shreve, for the last ten or twelve years one of the editors of the Louisville Daily Journal, and for twenty years well and most favorably known by frequent and elegant contributions to western literature. Drayton, we are advised, is not one of those easy pieces of writing which are known as very hard reading, but has engaged the attention of the author, at periods of comparative leisure, for several years past. Within a few months it has been entirely recast and rewritten; and, if our correspondent be not very partial in his judgment of the merits of the work, the public will find in its patriotic and democratic pages a mine of poetry and fine reflection.
A few words more of American Reviews. The subject is important; a great periodical in which the best intelligence of the country shall have expression, is necessary, for many purposes, and never was more necessary than now. The Princeton Review, the Christian Review, the Biblical Repository, the Bibliotheca Sacra, the Methodist Quarterly Review, the Church Review, Brownson's Quarterly Review, and several others, are in large degrees devoted to particular religious interests, and though for the most part conducted with much learning and discretion, do not altogether serve the purpose for which an American Review of Literature and Affairs is demanded. The North American, as we have before intimated, has no character; it occasionally has good articles, but it has no principles; it is sectional, which is pardonable, but displays neither the knowledge nor the tact necessary to a sectional organ. The mineral riches of our lake region, plans for connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific, the Cuban question, our relations with other republics, the extraordinary phenomena of Mormonism, the efforts of certain American women to unsex themselves, and numerous other subjects of present interest in this country, have been amply discussed in British and other European Reviews during the last year, but not one of them has been mentioned in the work to which, from its pretentions, readers would naturally look for its most masterly exposition. It may be said that the North American is devoted to philosophy, learning, and literature rather than to affairs: we have heard this defence, even in the face of its elaborate papers on Hungary and Austria; but let us see how it occupies such a ground: the bright and especial intellectual boast and glory of New England is Jonathan Edwards, of whom Dr. Chalmers says that he was "the greatest of theologians," Sir James Mackintosh that "in power of subtle argument he was perhaps unmatched, certainly was unsurpassed among men," Dugald Stewart that "he cannot be answered," and Robert Hall that he was the "mightiest of mankind:" such a character was undoubtedly worthy of its criticism, but in the half century of its existence the North American has never once noticed him! We have an illustration much more pertinent, especially in as far as the present editor of the Review is concerned: The late Hartley Coleridge was a man of peculiar and very interesting qualities, and it may be admitted that he possessed considerable genius; but a pretence that his life was as remarkable or that his abilities as displayed in his writings were as eminent as those of Edgar A. Poe, who died about the same time, would be simply ridiculous; yet we believe every quarterly and nearly every monthly Review published in Great Britain has had its article on Hartley Coleridge, while even the name of Edgar A. Poe has never appeared in our self-styled "great national journal." And Maria Brooks, admitted by Southey, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Fitz Greene Halleck, and many other masters of literary art, to have been the greatest poet of her sex who ever wrote in any language or in any age, though she was born and educated in the shadow of the college in which more than one of the editors of the North American have been professors, was never once honored with its recognition.
We do not know that it will strike others so, but it seems to us that John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Hugh S. Legaré, R. H. Wilde, J. J. Audubon, Mathew L. Davis, Albert Gallatin, Henry Inman, Chancellor Kent, Dr. Judson, Dr. Jarvis, Dr. Morton, Dr. Troost, M. M. Noah, Mrs. Osgood, and many other Americans who have recently completed variously illustrious lives, and so come before the world for a final judgment, are subjects quite as deserving and appropriate for the North American Review, as those which it has been accustomed to pick up in the byways of the literary world abroad; and we cannot understand why the facts connected with our own development and destiny, facts which engross and baffle the attention of the profoundest thinkers in the older nations, should give place in the only Review we possess, to such foreign, antiquated, and altogether unimportant topics as continually occupy its pages.