CURRENT LITERATURE.
The leading serial attraction in Scribner's Magazine is, of course, the Thackeray correspondent*, to more than one of the monthly instalments of which we have already had occasion to allude. There is a Carlylian ring about this passage taken from a letter written in
1850 I went to see —, that friend of my youth whom I used to think twenty years ago the most fascinating, accomplished, witty, and delightful of men. I found an old man in a room smelling of brandy- and-water at 5 o'clock at —, quite the same man that I remember, only grown coarser and stale somehow, like a piece of goods that has been hanging up in a shop-window. He has had fifteen years of a vulgar wife, mach solitude, very much brandy-and-water I should think, and a depressing profession." The illustrations of "Napoleon and hie Times" are good ; but why did the author not reproduce some of Haydon's inimitable sketches of Napoleon, especially when at St. Helena P We have pleasant glimpses of old New York in " A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago," and the writer of "French Traits the Social Instinct," shows a certain amount of insight into French national character. Of the non-continued stories, "A Great Patience," a powerful, cab-sarcastic story of a remarkable revenge, is the beet. We do not remember to have seen the name of the author—Edward 'remota Stevenson—in print before. This is an excellent number of a magazine that is now conducted with much spirit.
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