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and Webster; and Chapman's translation of Homer. The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the "Magnalia" of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham's comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters" are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of footnotes to the works of better men-but, with the exception of "The Fair and Happy Milkmaid," they are dull enough to have pleased James the First; his "Wife" is a cento of far-fetched conceits, here a tenth, and there a pen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney's game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower not without suspicion of royal complicity. The "Piers Ploughman" is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright's former edition. It would have been very well to have re-published the "Fair Virtue" and "Shepherd's Hunting" of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his "Hymns and Songs," whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as pen-l-reading for incorrigible poasters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:-

"Rottenness my bones possess't; Trembling fear possessed me; I that tremblous day might rest; For, when his approaches be Onward to the people made, His strong troops will them invade."

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David and puts into his mouth such punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Compla5nt" makes that rashest and shortest spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude, that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and widespreading metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be sincere in their company,—to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs,—nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul—that open toward the sun's rising, is to confound piety with dullness, and the music of heaven with its sickening monotone from the apothecary's drawer. The "Enchiridion" of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the "Emblems," and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,—nor a matter of heartbreak if it were so. Of the dramatic works of Marston it is enough to say that they are truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor worth the paper they blot. He seems to have been doomed worthy of republication because he was the contemporary of true poets; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy his plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one. The Bosner of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith's shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast placer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry.

Having now run cursorily though the series of Mr. Smith's reprints, we come to the closer question of How are they edited? Whatever the merit of the original works,