CURRENT LITERATURE.
Tales front "Blackwood." New Series. 12 vols. (Blackwood and Sons.)—For short tales, we do not know a livelier series than this, republished from Blackwood's Magazine. Now and then we come upon one which has little but good-spirits to recommend it,—almost all have that, and it is a capital thing in a short tale, though not enough in itself to make a good tale ; but usually there is a good deal more than good-spirits in these tales of Blackwood,—either something of real knowledge of life, or of unusually vivid imagination, or of exciting experience (for some of these are stories of true adventure), or of ingenious analysis, or of graphic and picturesque description. If you want to be idle, and not to be idle too long,—not to enter on a novel,—we hardly know a better way of attaining your end than to take up one of these twelve volumes.
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