... THESE sketches of Australian life and scenery have been taken in the flourishing colony of Victoria. Their chief interest is as reminiscences of its rapid progress in the last quarter of a century, and of the changes that time has wrought in the conditions of colonial society. The anonymous author professes to have had some literary experience, although he has let it rust through a long ...

... LORD MACAULAY.' [FIRST NOTICE.] THE two volumes in which Mr. Trevelyan has given us the life of his celebrated uncle possess one great merit: they are an honest attempt at genuine biography. When we consider the boundless field for disquisi- tion, both political and literary, which is offered by the life of such a man, and the strong temptation to expatiate in it which must be felt by the ...

... THE OERA LINDA BOOK * Is it more difficult to believe, asks Mr. Sandbach with some triumph;. that a clever woman became a lawgiver at Athens than that a goddess. sprang, full grown and armed, from the head of Jupiter? One is a little astounded by such a question as this. It would seem: to imply that Mr. Sandbach has been in the habit of meeting. people who believe in Jupiter, and who ...

... . MUSICAL DICTIONARY. * DR. STAINER and Mr. Barrett, in a well-considered preface, point out some of the difficulties which must of necessity attend the compilation of a musical dictionary. There is a danger on the one hand of incom- pleteness; on the other, if everything relating to music be included in the volume, of positive unwieldiness. Everything is connected with every- thing else; and ...

... THE performances at the Royal Italian Opera follow without resembling one another. So extensive is the repertory, so numerous the company, that each night for the first ten or twelve weeks of the season might have its own particular representation allotted to it without the same work being given more than once. Doubtless the forty-six or forty-eight operas, more or less ready for presentation, ...

... POUSHKIN'S DRAMA TIC SKETCHES. LYvRic poets would be scarcely human if, instead of confining themselves - to the exercise of their own special faculty, they did not from time to time write plays. Accordingly Byron in England, Alfred de Musset in Fiance, and Poushkin in Russia, all published dramas of which the fate, as. connected with the stage, was different in each country. Our managers ...

... FORSYTH'S SLA VONIC PROVINCES. THE mass of people know so little of the lands of which Mr. Forsyth hasp undertaken to sketch the history that anything which can lead them to, know a little more is so far a gain. The telegrams, and even the letters, from newspaper correspondents in some respects make things worse. They assume a degree of knowledge, especially of geography, which hardly any- ...

... The Law relating to Public Health and Local Government, as contained in the Public Health Act, i875, and other statutes; with an Introduction, Notes, and Appendices. By Gerald A. R. Fitzgerald, M.A. (Stevens and Sons.) New legislation of any magnitude is nowadays hardly considered complete till its results are published in a separate and annotated form by some member of the legal profession, ...

... THE DRAMA IN NE W YORK. NEW YOREK, JlldrC/ IS. THE history of the drama in New York has been one of constant migration, and there have been within the memory of people still living no fewer than three different stages of development in as many different parts of the city. Old playgoers remember when the headquarters of the drama was in the lower part of the city, now entirely given up to ...