23 MAY 1863, Page 23

Memoirs of Remarkable Misers. By Cyrus Redding, Author of "A

History of Wines," &c. Two vols. (Skeet).—With all our wide ex- perience of trumpery books to fall back upon, we cannot at this moment recollect ever having met with a less valuable work than that now before us. It is the merest farrago of monotonous and uninteresting stories, selected without discrimination, related without effect, and heaped together without oven the slightest attempt at methodical arrange- ment. And, besides this, Mr. Redding writes in a style so uniformly slipshod and careless that, when at last we find him quoting a passage from what he calls "Johnson's Valpone," we are really at a loss to know whether the double-barrelled blander is to be attributed to negligence or to sheer ignorance. We cannot but express our sincere regret that Mr. Redding should have wasted his own time in writing, and ours in reading, this remarkably unprofitable work.