Lectures and Speeches. By Elihu Burritt. (Sampson Low and Co.)
—We have every wish to be respectful to Mr. Burritt, who has done hie beet to help more than one good cause, has laboured earnestly for freedom, education, and peace, but this volume tries our patience sorely. Mr. Burritt seems to have printed pretty much without selection the contents of his portfolio. It is not easy to imagine how a man who must have moved about enough to have some knowledge of the world should have reprinted from some local paper what he calls "Reception Speeches," a collection of talk more or less sonorous and empty which was uttered on the occasion of a visit to his native town. Here is a passage which reminds one very forcibly of the great Twamley, in- ventor of the fiat-iron. It is the outpouring of a gentleman whose name, were not the place New Britain, Connecticut, United States, we should imagine to be fictitious, Mr. Royal Robins. "Gentleman, your village, adorned by art and enriched by mechanical ingenuity and manufacturing enterprise, will be still more distinguished hereafter as the place where Smalley preached ; where E. Burritt was born and reared, and laid the foundation of the immense stores of his erudition ; where his scarcely less able brother, E. H. Burritt, mapped out the heavens; and where a scholar, whom delicacy forbids me to name, is spending, in his native place, the evening of his days in classic retirement and useful studies." We wonder who this scholar may be ; can it by any possibility have been Mr. Royal Robins himself? The natives of New Britain devoted themselves to glorifying Mr. E. Burritt ; Mr. E. Burritt devotes himself to glorifying the nineteenth century, and belauds it till we are disposed to prefer the most brutal and benighted age known to history. He lectures, for instance, on "Benevolent Associations of the Day," and bids us congratulate ourselves on our superiority to the "ages of Pericles and Augustus," because "Demosthenes never presided at the anniversary of a benevolent society, nor Cicero at a public meeting convened in behalf of some depressed class of the Roman people." He might have added that they never sat at the board of a bubble insurance company, or made money by "bearing" the shares of railways which they governed. Mr. Burritt has some force of language, and no lack of illustration ; he can talk sensibly when ho is not bent on talking " talL" It is much to be regretted that he did not call in some judicious friend to prune a volume which, had it been judiciously curtailed, might have added to the writer's fame, which, as it stands, cannot fail to excite abundant ridicule.
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