1 OCTOBER 1864, Page 24

Legendary Tales of the Ancient Britons, Rehearsed from the Early

Chronicles. By Louisa L. J. Menzies. (John Russell Smith.)—The matter of these beautiful old stories is to be found in "Geoffrey of Monmouth," and though not history they certainly deserve to be better known than they are. The mythology of our own land, if inferior in beauty to that of Greece, has charms for us which a foreign literature can never have, and the authoress presents it in a most agreeable form. Her style is excellent, quite unaffected and simple, and yet with an archaic word or two every here and there, so as to remind us that we are not in the region of prose or of civilization.