CURRENT LITERATURE.
The English Rhetorical Review. Edited by the Rev. M. Creighton. (Longman.)—Nothing can be more readable than this new Quarterly Review. There is not a second-rate paper in it, while the exhaustive sketch of the " German Schools of History," by Lord Acton, and the account of the failure to form a Whig Ministry in 1845, which threw power into the hands of Sir R. Peel, are direct contributions to our historic knowledge. The latter paper, indeed, which must be by Earl Grey, will be indispensable to the future historian of the period. The object of the conduct ors of the review is not, however, merely to collect good papers on history, though they will value all such con- tributions ; but to form a kind of museum or depository in which all the new learning about history, accumulated by English-speaking men all over the world, may be deposited, valued, and, as it were, furnished with a descriptive catalogue for general use. The Re- view "will piesent a full and critical record of what is being accomplished in the field of history, and become the organ through which those who desire to make known the progress of their researches will address their fellow-men." That is a fine object, and it is one which men like those who have started this Review ought to be able to accomplish. Their success can only be judged after many numbers, but in this one they seem to us to have attained their end, and to have produced a book—for it is a book—which men who are in- terested in historic study, though not themselves historians or full of historic knowledge, will read with that acute pleasure which comes only from a certainty that the reading is nutritious. The reviews of books in particular strike us as altogether exceptional in the authority of their judgments. We only wish the editor could find room for an additional department, giviug the important documents of current history as they appear, if not in extenso, at least in a sufficient synopsis. It would soon become simply invaluable to the future historian:
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