The English Poets : Lessing : and Rousseau. By J.
R. Lowell. (W. Scott.)—In this little volume, one of the " Camelot Series," Mr. James Russell Lowell republishes lectures delivered many years ago on Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats, adding to these discourses on English poets, two that deal with Leasing and "Rousseau and the Sentimentalists" respectively. The novelty in the volume is, we take it, the preface, an "Apology for a Preface," the writer ealls it, a singularly happy production, in spite of Mr. Lowell having had, as he says, no more practice in this kind of writing " than he has in dying, having written," he tells us, " but one in his life,"—but is not even that more experience than he has had in dying ? All the essays, we need not say, are well worth reading ; but perhaps the reader, if he has any spice of wickedness in him, will be most entertained by the " Milton," a review of the earlier volumes of Professor Masson's stupendous Life of Milton.
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