Professor Hackett, of the Newton Theological Institution, has added to his claims of distinction in sacred learning by a very able Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, (published by John P. Jewett & Co., of Boston). It is much praised by the best critics. The last Bibliotheca Sacra complains that there is a decline of activity in this department, and that in theology and biblical criticism no important works are now in progress.
Mr. Melville's new novel, The Whale, will be published in a few days, simultaneously, by the Harpers and by Bentley of London.
Mr. Henry William Herbert, with the general character of whose works our readers must be familiar, will publish immediately (through Charles Scribner), The Captains of the Old World, from the Persian to the Punic Wars. The volume embraces critical sketches of Miltiades, Themistocles, Pausanias, Xenophon, Epaminondas, Alexander, and Hannibal, as compared with modern generals—not lives but strategetical accounts of their campaigns, reviewed and described according to the rules and views of modern military science—the armature and mode of fighting in all the various nations—the fields of battle, from personal observation or the best modern travels—with the modern names of ancient places, so that the routes of the armies can be followed on any ordinary map. The causes of the success or failure of this or that action are shown in a military point of view, and the characters of the men are epigrammatically contrasted with those of the men of the late French and English wars, involving incidental notices and critiques of modern fields. The work is of course spirited and well proportioned, and as Mr. Herbert is confessedly one of the best critics of ancient manners and history, it will scarcely need any reviewer's endorsement to insure for it an immediate and very great popularity.
A new edition of St. Leger, or the Threads of Life, by Mr. Kimball, has just been published by Putnam, who, we understand, has now in press a sequel to that remarkable and eminently successful novel. Mr. Kimball's abilities as a writer of tales are not as well illustrated in this performance as in several shorter stories, which will soon be collected and reissued with fit designs by Darley. In these we think he has exhibited a very unusual degree of pathos and dramatic skill, so that scarcely any compositions of their class in American literature have such a power upon the feelings or are likely to have a more permanent fame. Mr. Kimball is one of the small number among our young writers who do not disdain elaborately to finish what they choose to submit for public criticism.
A new edition of Mr. Judd's remarkable novel of Margaret has just been published, in two volumes, by Phillips & Sampson, of Boston, and the same house has nearly ready Memoirs of Sarah Margaret Fuller, in two volumes, edited by William H. Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It will probably embrace a large selection of her inedited writings.