Critical Notices [pp. 255-288]

Crzitical Notices.
book provides the proper rules for taking them and dressing them for
dinner. We wish we could secure some good correspondent for discussing the merits of such volumes as the one before us. William Elliott could do it, if he would. But he is so perversely a loiterer that we
give him up. We have no hope of his reform in our day. Yet, what
a pity! Such articles as he could write, such volumes as he could
make, touching the sports and the game of the South, it is melancholy
to lose. Will he not listen to counsel? Will he not amend, and turn
from his unperformning ways in season. Here is the book of Herbert,
out of which he could frame an article which would make the mouth of
the gourmand to water, and would raise the sportsman to the dignity
of a philosopher, after the fashion of Isaac Walton.
The British Invasion of North-Carolina, in 1776, a Lecture delivered before the Historical Society of the University of North-Carolina.
By Hon. DAVID L. SW.AIN. 1852. This is an interesting contribution
to the historical materials of the South, and exhibits equal industry and
discrimination on the part of the author, who has had access to sources
of information not previously in the possession of the general reader.
Our space will not suffer us to pursue, in detail, the progress which
our author has made through his documents. An introductory section,
devoted to the first outbreak of the revolution, is made, with propriety,
the first step to a review of the British invasion of North-Carolina in
1780-'1. The repulse of the British fleet at Fort Moultrie, in 1776,
kept them away from the South till 1779. In possession of Georgia,
they overran South-Carolina, and then penetrated the Old North State.
From this period till the flight of Cornwallis to Virginia, our lecturer
traces their progress, with a faithful, careful and scrutinizing pen. His
pamphlet is well worthy of perusal, and deserves especially to be bound
up with others of its class, and honoured by a place in the library.
The Poetical IVorks of Thomas Gray, edited, with a, Memoir. By
HENiRY REED, Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird. 1853. The editorship
of Prof. Reed is executed with taste, good sense and excellent discretion,
and renders this edition of the works of Gray, the most complete that
has ever been published in America; and we doubt if it be not superior
to most, if not all of the English editions. The posthumous and Latin
poems are all preserved, and great care has been taken to render them
perfectly correct. The notes are ample and judicious. The memoir is
full and gracefully written. For this most pure and delicate of the
1853.]
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