Once Upon a Time. By Charles Knight. (Routledge, Warne, and
Routledge.)—A new and enlarged edition of the collection of essays to which their anther has affixed this rather quaint title. "I think," he says, "they are not untrue representations of other states of society, but they have no pretensions to the completeness which history, even domestic history, demands. They are glimpses of the past." They are in fact capital specimens of the gossiping antiquarian essay, by which people who would not read anything that was not " new" get a good deal of information about their predecessors. Especially we may men- tion the essays on the "Paxton Letters," on "John Anbrey's Biographical Notes," and " Street Lights." Excellent in a different way are the papers on Sir John Dinely and Oberlin. The humorous essays, such as that on Queues, are generally failures. They remind one of Charles Lamb, and will not bear the comparison.
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