sion to the mountain region of Virginia. She for their quarterings, if indeed they had not been comexpects to visit the Peaks of Otter, the Natural pelled to adopt the old device of "two posts upright, one Bridge, and other objects of interest in their vi- beam transverse, a rope pendant and a rascal on the end cinity before wending her way Northward to take her departure for home. Considered merely as a pretty book, clothed in purple and fine linen, and making a brave appeal to the eye with all beautiful devices, we have seen nothing better, this many a day, than the little volume before us. As a designer in colors after the manner of the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages, Mr. Mapleson has no compeer in this country. Indeed he is the only one whose designs are respectable. The rest attempt the thing but to produce the tawdriest of all the tinselled embellishments that ever set off a Philadelphia magazine. We have something to say, however, of this book as to the object it has in view. That object is in general nothing less than to revive among us the obsolete science of the Herald's College, and in particular to teach those new-fledged aristos of New York, who have amassed fortunes by lotteries or patent-medicines, how to mount armorial bearings on the panels of their carriages without violating the rules of emblazonry. We do not exactly see how they are to avoid trenching on one well-known principle which Mr. Mapleson mentions. We allude to that which forbids the employment of metal on metal or color on color. It seems to us that argent and or, when displayed in their escutcheons, must be based either upon the gold and silver they can command, or upon the native brass of their characters, and that gules and azure must repose upon the gaudy colors in which they flaunt upon Broadway. Mr. Mapleson will certainly do good service if he prevents the use of bad Latin by way of motto, though, to speak in technical phrase, the bearings, in nine cases out of ten, must be exhibited in a shield of pretence." Mr. Mapleson gives us, in a sort of appendix, the arms of sixty-five subscribers to his volume. Among these we find the usual quantity of sheep, griffins, lions, rampant and couchant, boar's heads and peacocks, the first and last of which devices have a peculiar significance as applied to the wearers, and we are favored also with some Latin mottoes, of somewhat equivocal meaning, if our translation of one of them-Retinens vestigia fama, holding on to the tattered remnant of a reputation-be considered fair, and a specimen of the set. Now we do not mean to say that Mr. Mapleson's subscribers are not entitled justly to their coats, but we do intend to express the opinion. in decided terms, that the assumption of such frippery in America is the offspring of that vilest and most despicable social relation with which any country was ever afflicted-a moneyed aristocracy. And we are thoroughly convinced that if those fine people who affect heraldic supporters had kept an honest account with their ancestry, they might have had candle-ends and lapstones on't " We are, by no means, disposed to rebuke that just and generous pride a man may feel in an honorable lineage, if it lead him to be wary, lest he commit any act by which that lineage may sustain smutch or blemish. And if there be force enough in a motto, encircling the arms of his family, (always supposing the family bore them,) to guard him from disgrace, we would have it engraved on his plate, paraded on his coach, and framed as a picture in the hall of his dwelling. A life of usefulness might, perhaps, entitle him to have it elevated on a hatchment at his funeral, and sculptured on his tomb. But the empty honors of family, without the supporters of virtue and industry, can never lift a man above contempt. The French novelist, our modern Alexander the Great, it is well known, is a asked an aristocratic coxcomb of him one day. "My mulatto. "From whom do you deduce your descent?" family, Monsieur," said Dumas, "began where yours has ended-in an ape." The poet-laureate of England has expressed our own sentiments in one of the finest of his ballads, with two or three snatches from which, we have done. He sings Lady Clara Vere de Vere, I know you proud to bear your name, Your pride is yet no mate for mine, Too proud to care from whence I came. You thought to break, for your sweet sake, A heart that dotes on truer charms; A simple maiden in her flower Is worth a hundred coats of arms. Lady Clara Vere de Vere, From yon blue heaven above us bent, The grand old gardener and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent; Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good, Kind hearts are more than coronets And gentle faith than Norman blood. LONDON LABOR and the London Poor. By HENRY MAYHEW. Nos. 1 to 7. New York: Harper & Brothers. 82 Cliff Street. Much interesting information may be gleaned from these numbers of Mr. Mayhew's work, but we confess to have been sickened by the details of wretchedness and crime which he gives with so unsparing a hand. The heart revolts from the picture, too faithfully drawn and much too elaborated in its execution. When we read such descriptions of life among the lower classes of England, we are impressed with two striking facts-the one is the impu dence of that foreign philanthropy which passes by squalid misery and the most grinding poverty at home, to ameli orate fancied suffering in other lands; the other is the anomaly presented by the towering superstructure of England's greatness based in apparent security upon foun dations that are in ruinous decay. The fabric still rears itself proudly upward, while the eye detects the dangerous and unsound condition of all its props. Painful indeed to the Christian is the account Mr. Mayhew gives us of the religious state of the London Costermongers. Nowhere is ignorance upon spiritual subjects and Society. Taken from life. By N. PARKER WILLIS. "Stick a Pin There." Second Edition. New York: Charles Scribner. 1851. so besotted or so fearful. The Indian mother who throws | HURRY-GRAPHS; or, Sketches of Scenery, Celebrities her infant into the Ganges, the Islander of the Pacific, who propitiates his fetisch with human sacrifice, the willing victim of Juggernaut, the wild worshippers of the Great Spirit by the borders of remote lakes upon our own continent, are in a state which, compared with that of the London Poor, may be considered hopeful. And let it be recollected that the class of which Mr. Mayhew's work treats. is, by no means, the lowest in the scale of London civilization. Deeps profounder still exist, into which it would be dreadful to look. Oh, excellent and pious workers in the Lord's vineyard, oh. worthy missionaries now carrying the cross into glowing lands beyond the sea, why will ye suffer these thousands of your neighbours, whom ye are first commanded to love, to remain in darkness so terrible? There is matter in Mr. Mayhew's publication for very earnest thought, and we may possibly recur to it at some future period. We do not agree with him in many of his deductions, but to express the reasons of our dissent would occupy more space than we can allow ourselves for the purpose. These Nos. are for sale by Morris & Brother. THE STONES OF VENICE. The Foundations, By JOHN Mr. Wiley has practised a deception upon us. So very beautiful is the typography of "The Stones of Venice" and so sumptuous its general appearance that we mistook it for a publication of Paternoster Row. We have never seen a fairer American volume. Indeed it is as good, as it is at all desirable to have books, and reflects the highest credit on printer, decorative artist, and binder. A lukewarm rehash of the good things and trash that have hitherto graced the Home Journal, done up in a book, with a readable look, and inscribed unto Morris the Colonel. (En passant, we fear that in writing this here, we've mistaken the soldier's man's title; if so, we should grieve and humbly ask leave to make him the amplest requital.) The book itself shows all the editor's prose, that was written by way of a leader, while strokes of the pen about prominent men also enter the olla podrida. There are letters quite odd, from down on Cape Cod and the Hudson, on board of a steamer; and facts about Poe that are useful to know, and a tribute or two to Miss Bremer; also hints upon dress, and a good deal of stress on the way to behave at the opera, whether demi-toilette, for box and parquette, or full party rig is the properer. Then the writer discusses the new omnibusses, or praises some tragedy queen; or lifts up the curtain of mirth-moving Burton, "Just to fill up the farcical scene." Now while much of the stuff is graceful enough, and free from suspicion of scandal, we doubt if the game, which we don't care to blame, is worth, as the French say, the candle. Let us hope that ere long, this nursling of song, gay, good-for-naught, versatile Willis, (who is often as clever as any that ever invoked the sad jade, Amaryllis,) will write once again, in his happier strain, some highly wrought effort of fancy, and leave to the cits, who have not his wits, the finical style of Miss Nancy. We have only to add that the work may be had, of that that long established and good house, in Richmond wellknown, and not here alone, as sellers of books-Nash & Woodhouse. THE BOOK OF ORATORY: A New Collection of Extracts in Prose, Poetry, and Dialogue, &c., &c. By EDWARD C. MARSHALL, M. A. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 200 Broadway. 1851. The class of readers to whom Mr. Ruskin's work will be likely to afford delight, is, at best, small. Few persons out of his immediate profession, feel any interest in medieval architecture, and few, even of those, will partake of the enthusiasm with which he dwells on the smallest particular A volume of just 500 pages, containing 402 selections connected with the subject. To us indeed, Mr. Ruskin from distinguished American and English orators, divines appears like an inoffensive monomaniac, as completely and poets. The book originated in the conviction on the beside himself upon this theme, as the late Mr. Dick, in part of Mr. Marshall, who has had eight years of experi David Copperfield, was, on the point of the dismembered ence as a teacher of elocution, that the selections in the head of King Charles the First. He tells us in the preface text-books, generally used in this branch, were altogether that the inability to obtain precise information at Venice, too hackneyed to be repeated with great benefit by the as to the date of erection of the façade of the Ducal palace, student. The only requisites for the compilation of such filled him-not with regret, nor even with astonishment, a volume are industry in reading, and good taste-the debut-with consternation! No doubt the amiable gentle-gree of A. M. or M. A. was certainly not necessary-but man was as deeply moved as a tourist would be to find we will say for Mr. Marshall that his specimens are very the fires of Etna extinguished or to miss Mont Blanc from respectable indeed. We are glad to see his recognition his throne among the. Alps. The revival of the old styles of building is discussed by Mr. Ruskin as the philosophers treat of the perfection of society-an antique ceiling seems to him as important a matter as the civilization a barbarous race, and his ideas of the millennial glory are doubtless associated with great cathedrals and endless colonnades, ornamented gables and graceful turrets overspreading the earth. We would not be understood, however, as wishing to detract from Mr. Ruskin's well-merited fame in the peculiar field of labour he has chosen. Though always extravagant, he is yet serving a good purpose in America, in awakening attention to a subject which certainly demands more consideration than our people have ever given it. of Southern intellect in quotations from Calhoun, Wirt, Preston, Grimke, Legaré, R. M. T. Hunter, Gaston, McDuffie, Butler, Hilliard, Prentiss, and Berrien, but we detect nevertheless, in Mr. Marshall the Yankee propensity to ignore our writers. Of John Randolph he gives but a single example Out of the line of politicians, he finds nothing in the South worth embodying in his pages. Not one syllable from a Southern divine, though we have Plumer, Fuller, Thornwell and others, whose pens have often been employed for the public benefit,—not a stanza from a Southern poet, though some of the finest gems of American song might have been gleaned from Pinckney, Wilde, Cooke, Simms,-not a scrap from the writers of Southern fiction, of whom we might mention Beverley Tucker, Kennedy and Simms again, as well worth quo- with the long established houses of New-York in issuing ting,-nothing from such humorists as Judge Longstreet important and valuable books. Hitherto their attention and the author of Major Jones's Courtship, find its way has been chiefly confined to pretty little editions of the into Mr. Marshall's museum. Yankee writers there are in poems, essays, peace orations and society Lectures of abundance, of whom we never heard before; and not to the modern Athenians, productions all cast in the same be indifferent to his own high claims, Mr. Marshall makes mould and as like each other as black-eyed peas. Their three poetical selections from himself. We have heard be- recent publications, however, have been exceedingly well fore of the Boston Mutual Adulation Society, but here is chosen, and the works of Tennyson, Motherwell, De a writer who improves upon the idea by making every Quincey and Wordsworth, in their fair typography, would man his own eulogist. We might endure his verses very figure handsomely in any library. well, perhaps, if he did not introduce other poets who write quite as badly as himself, whose effusions are given with 'damnable iteration.' But such is Yankee impudence forever, and it is ridiculous to suppose that there can be a change. J. W. Randolph has the book for sale in Richmond. YEAST: A PROBLEM. Reprinted. with Corrections and Additions, from Fraser's Magazine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff Street. 1851. The Memoir of Wordsworth is not merely a reprint of the English edition. It contains notes from the pen of Professor Henry Reed, the American editor of Wordsworth's Poems, which tend to illustrate still more clearly the text of the biographer. The plan pursued in the work is the judicious one of Lockhart and others, of allowing the subject, whenever it is practicable, to speak for himself, which is surely better than any narration by a third party, however intimately connected he may have been with the life and incidents to be pourtrayed. The present volume is full of interesting facts with regard to the composition of many of the most labored of Wordsworth's poems. Among others, the Prelude, posthumously published, is frequently spoken of Morris & Brother have the work for sale in Richmond. THE HEIR OF WAST-WAYLAND. A Tale. By MARY HOWITT New York: D. Appleton & Co. 200 Broadway. 1851. Same work published by Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff street. The title of this book suggests fermentation, and the author's design appears to be little else. There are without doubt many powerful passages in it that are not unworthy of Alton Locke, but we do not see that the reflections of the writer are likely to produce anything but discontent. Until the Rev. Mr. Kingsley can hint at some more excellent remedy for the evils that afflict English society than the doctrines of association, it seems to us that his books-wildly eloquent and full of a rugged poetry as they are-had been better in manuscript than in type. He seems to be carried away, at times, by the fury of his own rapt state, quite beyond the bounds of reason, and exhibits" the contortions of the sibyl without her inWhatever may be thought of Mary Howitt in the Peospiration." If his shafts at the game-laws are less dex-ple's Journal, or serving with runaway negroes on antiterously sped than those of Sidney Sinith, they are still slavery committees at Exeter Hall-however much we well-directed and shot from a strong bow. The ballad of the "Merry brown hares" is a nervous composition and correspondence with Frederick Douglas or prompts her to may question the taste which betrays her into a friendly presents images that are ghastly enough for any Chartist write red-republican songs-it is certain that she does one thing very well, and that is the telling of pleasant stories. She seems indeed to have two sides to her character-the one coarse, unfeminine and to us most unprepossessing, the other all gentleness and fair-speaking and generous deeds. The "Heir of Wast-Wayland" is a cleverly told story of the intrigues of a certain set of people to get wrongfully hold of property and what subsequently happened to them, with a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments at the close. Both these editions are well printed. to fume over. We are not among those who expect to see a great government overthrown by every new ebullition of disquiet in the form of a novel, but assuredly the works of such writers as this reverend reformer will not be without their effect upon the popular mind of England. We have great admiration for the stately edifice of the English constitution, but we confess when we look at the present condition! of the kingdom, we are reminded of those fair villages that lie on the smiling slopes of Vesuvius, which may be overwhelmed at any time by the embers of that internal fire that mantles and surges forever within the recesses of the mountain. The fierce and glowing lava of Chartism, though not yet thrown out from the social crater, yet manifests its fearful incandescence, now and then, by ag itatious of the earth upon which the great constitutional fabric stands. We trust that some means may be effectual in quenching the flame, before it spouts ruin and destruction around. "Yeast," as we have already hinted, will well repay perusal. It is for sale by Morris & Brother. MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Poet-Laureate, 1851. They may be obtained of Morris & Brother. The publishers of this volume are entering the lists after with interest. MORRIS & BROTHER. Booksellers and Stationers, No. 97 Main Street, Richmond, Va. MISCELLANEOUS, MEDICAL, LAW, THEOLOGICAL, CLASSICAL AND Blank Books of every description, constantly on hand and manufactured to order; Commercial Blanks of every description, such as Notes, Drafts. Bills of Lading, Bonds, &c., &c. Letter, Note, and Foolscap paper; Music and Musical Instruments; Sole agents for Worcester's Piano-Fortes. All New Books received as soon as published. Prompt attention will be given to all orders. ANOTHER NEW NOTE UPON WORCESTER'S PIANOS. From the New York Evening Post, April 12th, 1851. WORCESTER'S PIANOS.-A country correspondent writes in a postscript to his letter: "I am glad to see in the papers frequent notices of the Piano-Fortes of Mr. H. Worcester of your city. I have had one for a year and it gives us great satisfaction. A musical gentleman who heard it in my parlor last summer, said immediately, that must be one of Worcester's, for no one makes a Piano-Forte like him.'" The following editorial notice is copied from "Saroni's Musical Times," New York, March 8th, 1851 "SPLENDID PIANO FORTE.-We have seen at the Factory of H. Worcester, Third Avenue, a square Piano-Forte, (price $1,000,) which, in point of excellence of tone and ornament of case, surpasses any thing we have ever seen. We would gladly give a description of it, but knowing that a single glance at the instrument will convey a better idea of it than one half of Webster's Dictionary, we invite our friends to go to the factory, where Mr. Worcester, the gentlemanly proprietor, will no doubt be glad to exhibit the instrument to them." The plainer and less costly descriptions of PIANOS manufactured by WORCESTER, are warranted to be equal in tone, touch and durability to the more elaborately carved and elegantly finished instruments, described in the above notice. Magnificently wrought instruments, beautifully inlaid, ranging in price from $600 to $1,000, will be ordered for any customer, and warranted to give satisfaction. We have in store an assortment ranging in price from $225 to $350, finished in beautiful rosewood cases, in the latest and most fashionable styles; to which we invite the attention of Professors, amateurs, and the public. MORRIS & BROTHER, Worcester's sole Agents, and dealers in Books and Stationery. For Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Old Point, STEAMBOAT AUGUSTA, CAPT. WM. C. SMITH. On Monday, the 3nd of June, this favorite and comfortable steamer resumed her place on the Port Walthall Line, having undergone a thorough repair, and been newly painted and fitted up. The cars, running in connection with her, will leave the Richmond and Petersburg Depot at 5 o'clock, A. M., on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Returning, the AUGUSTA will leave Norfolk on the alternate days, viz: Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, at 54 o'clock, A. M. |