Destruction and Reconstruction. By Richard Taylor, Lieutenant. General in the
Confederate Army. (Blackwood.)—This book would, we think, have been better without the last three chapteis. The writer's criticisms on the military operations of the war, whether con- ducted by his own party or by his antagonists, are perfectly legiti- mate, and such as it clearly fell within his province to make. But his estimate of the character of Northern politicians, with whom he came in contact after the cessation of hostilities, cannot be thus justi- fied. The writer was too strongly interested to be competent to make it. And the language which he uses passes all bounds. "A spy under Buchanan, a tyrant under Lincoln, and a master to Johnson, this man was as cruel and crafty as Domitian," is a sentence which a Gibbon, writing of men dead ten centuries before, might use, but is not seemly in the ease of ono who had but recently passed away, especially as it is probably unjust.
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