NEW EDITION8.—It is a good proof that the race of
those who buy books is still sufficiently numerous, when we find a publisher under- taking so serious a work as the reissue of Sir Walter Scott's edition of Dryden. The first and second volumes of The Works of John. Dryden, with Notes, Life, ,ke., by Sir Walter Scott, revised and corrected by George Saintsbury (Paterson, Edinburgh), are now before us. The first volume contains the life, the second some of the plays. Mr. Saintsbury's purpose is to re-edit the whole as, it may be supposed, Sir Walter Scott, had he been alive to do it, would have re-edited it. He makes use of whatever additional materials have come to hand since Sir Walter Scott's work came out, Pepys' " Diary " 1-eing the principal item ; and ho has carefully revised the text. Personally, we are inclined to think that the ordinary editions of Dryden give quite as much as we want, and that the plays might have been left in the obscurity to which a common consent has rele- gated them. Still, if a complete edition was to come out, it could not have been entrusted to better hands than Mr. Saints- bury'J ; nor could it have bad a more handsome form than the publishers have given to the volumes before us.—We welcome heartily a collection by Professor S. B. Gardiner of his works relating to the history of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. These are now to take the form of a History of England, 1603-1642, which is to extend to ten volumes. The first volume, reaching down as far as the year 1610, is now before us. Professor Gardiner has had at his disposal much additional material, manuscript and other, since the contents of this volume first appeared, and they have bean accordingly, he tells us, thoroughly revised, and in part rewritten.—Lectures on the Science and Art of Education. By the late Joseph Payne. Edited by his Son, Joseph Frank Payne, M.D. (Lougmans.)—Mr. Payne was one of the earliest preachers in England of a doctrine which was then almost new, that there is an art of teaching. Here we have collected some of the lectures in which he set forth his theory, lectures of solid value, which are well worth preserving in a permanent shape.—We have received a reprint of the Secrets of Angling, by "J. D.," 1613, with an introduction by Thomas Westwood. (W. Satchell and Co.)—Mr. Westwood proves, satisfactorily, it would seem, that "J. D." was a certain John Dennys, of Pucklechnrch, in the county of Gloucester. This reprint is " a strictly faithful and literal transcript of the edition of
1613." We may give, as a specimen of "J. D.'s " verse, a stanza in which he describes the first of an angler's three requirements :-
" The first is Faith, not wavering. and unstable, But such as had that holy Patriarch old,
That to the Highest was so acceptable, As his increase and ofisping manifolds Exceeded tar the !Balms innumerable.
So mast he still a firma persuasion holde, That where as waters, brookes, and lakes are found,
Thera store of Fish without all doubt abound."
Alas ! it was easier in this, as in other matters, for our ancestors to have faith, than for ns.—XVIL Opuscules, by Juan de Valdes, translated from the Spanish and Italian, and edited by John T. Betts (Triibner and Co.)
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