NEw EDITIONS. — The Great Schools of England, by Howard
Staunton (Strahan), appears in a new edition. It is revised up to the latest date, and bears every sign of being carefully done. The body of the work supplies abundant information about fifteen great schools, the nine of the first Commission, Christ's Hospital, Cheltenham, Marlborough, Remit, Wellington, and Dulwich. An appendix gives an account of the Endowed Schools. The complaint that we have to make refers to omissions rather than errors. The City of London School appears, indeed, in a short notice under the head of "London ;" but it deserves, both for its magnitude and its distinguished success, a more detailed account. We can find no mention at all of Clifton, Haileybury, or Malvern. Bat the book, however, is a very useful one as it stands. We value Mr. Staunton's facts more highly than his theories and suggestions. What can he possibly mean when he says, "at the great public schools oratorical improvization should be a prominent exercise "? Speaking af ter verycareful study ruight be useful, butimprovi- zation ! Can we imagine anything more futile and ludicrous for the nineteen out of twenty who have not the faculty of copious speech, and more injurious to the one who has ? We heartily believe in the necessity of teaching "English," but non tali auzilio. Mr. Staunton, again, may be quite right in his abhorrence of "fagging." We never knew by exper- ience what it is, and dislike the idea ; singularly enough, most people who have known it like it ; but he is utterly wrong when he says that -"Cowper's melancholy and madness may be traced to the cruelties he suffered at the hands of his schoolfellows." The causes of that madness were much deeper and more complex. A boy who stopped at West- minster till he was eighteen, who became a good scholar there, and was a fair hand at football and cricket, could not have been quite broken in spirit—McCulloch's Dictionary of Commerce and Commercial Navigation has been revised by the author's secretary and son-in-law, Mr. Hugh G. Reid (Longunans), who dates his preface the May of this year, and has evidently been careful to bring his information up to the very latest date. Mr. McCulloch's opinions on some economical subjects, on the Corn Laws, for instance, were not absolutely sound. The editor leaves the expression of them unchanged, while he disavows responsibility for them. We appreciate his motives, but do not think that he is right. A dictionary is a storehouse of facts, and everything should be given up to make it as accurate as possible. The proposition that anything like a duty on corn is bad policy may be now reckoned among facts, and should take its place accordingly. This is no serious drawback, how- ever, to the great value and utility of the work. These we shall best illustrate by quoting an amusing anecdote, which occurs in the bio- graphical notice of Mr. McCulloch. A Scotch judge (Lord Neaves) tells the story :—" He asked me once, 'Do you ever quote my Com- mercial Dictionary in court ?' I said, with emphasis, 'Never ; we never quote it, and we never mention it. Sometimes,' I said, a eel of papers comes in upon us at night upon a mercantile question that we know nothing about, and we go up to our shelves and take down the Commercial Dictionary, and find all that we want there, and next -morning we come out, to the astonishment of our clients, with better in- formation upon the subject than they have themselves ; but we never mention McCulloch's Dictionary.' And that pleased the old man, who tad been rather chilled by my first observation, better than it was easily possible to please him."--We have also received a new edition ef the Wit and Wisdom of Sydney Smith. (Longmans.)—We feel dis- posed to fill a couple of columns or so with some of these gems of fun and good sense, good enough surely to rank their author with the very drat wits of the world. Here are one or two :—" At Edinburgh, we are told by Mr. Dundee that there is no eagerness for Reform. Five minutes before Moses struck the rock, that gentleman would have said there was no eagerness for water." "Never teach false morality. How exquisitely absurd to tell a girl that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value ; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet, and if she has five grains of common sense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their just value, and that there must be something better under the bonnet than a pretty face for real happiness." "We were all assembled to look at a turtle which had been sent to the house .of a friend, when a child of the party stooped down, and began eagerly stroking the shell of the turtle. 'Why are you doing that, B-- ?' said Sydney Smith. Oh, to please the turtle!' ' Why, child, you might as well stroke the dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter.'" We have probably made a bad choice ; the reader must get the book and pick for himself.--The Early Poems and Sketches of Thomas Hood appear under the care of his daughter (Mrs. Broderip). (Moxon.)—The contents of the volume are so well known that it is needless to say anything about them, but wemay quote a passage from the preface. "These authorized editions are the only ones edited and revised by his children, and in which they have any substantial interest. The law of copyright remains in the like state of copywrong ' as when my father lived and wrote so energetically upon its shortcomings. Consequently, by the lapse of years some of his works will ere long be at the mercy of those he so aptly calls Bookaneers." Mrs. Broderip would have copyrights perpetual, we suppose. And why not? Only the family of the man who gave ten pounds for the "Paradise Lost" would be enormously rich, while the representatives of the poet would not be a whit better off than now. --George Cruikshank's Omnibus, edited by Leman Blanchard (Bell and Daldy), has also been republished.--Sermons, by the Rev. John Ker (Edmonston and Douglas), have reached a fifth edition.—We have to thank a translator resident in America, Mr. A. E. Kreiger, for versions of two of Fichte's works, the Science of Knowledge and the Science of Rights (Philadelphia, Lippincott ; London, Triibner).—Lord Macaulay's Essays have been published (Longmans) in a single volume, printed in the clear, small type which is one of the triumphs of modern art. Some- what more than eight hundred pages of a moderate size comprise the whole.—We have also to notice a new edition of A Practical Course of Military Surveying, by Captain Lendy (Atchley and Co.).
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