The Wishing-Cap Papers. By Leigh Hunt. (Boston, U.S.: Leo and
Sherrard.)—These papers are, we are told, "now first collected." Some of them certainly we fancy ourselves to have seen before, and this was not certainly in the journals and reviews in which they originally appeared. Anyhow, we are very much obliged, not without a certain feeling of shame, to the American publisher who has given us a very agreeable and readable volume, full of good things, such as Leigh Hunt knew well how to write, which ought never to have lain buried in the forgetfulness of old magazines and newspapers. Some things read. oddly enough. Is there any body now-a-days who looks upon the statue of Charles I. as "an insulting rebuke " to constitutional freedom, or thinks that the soldiers, as Leigh Hunt thought about forty years ago, are suffered to stand sentinel at museums and theatres, in contradic- tion to the spirit of English liberty "? In fact, we like the essayist best when he gets furthest away from politics and religion, for he never could be just,—and it must be allowed that he had no little pro- vocation—to a Tory or a priest. Is it possible, for instance, for a sane man to have believed that Bossuet had a mistress? On art and literature he is always delightful. We could wish that the editor had always told. us from what quarters the papers have been collected. His part of the work, indeed, is not always well done. A little care, for instance,. might have made him avoid so absurd a blunder as talking of "the Bishop of Atterbury."
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