is this position of our author: Afflictions are painful. When they cease to be painful, they cease to be afflictions.' Probability we think rather favors both of these conclusions; which remind us of a sentence in the imitation of Dr. JOHNSON in the Rejected Addresses: Permanent stage-doors we have none. That which is permanent cannot be removed. When once it is removed, it soon ceases to be permanent.' But there are few platitudes to be encountered in any thing from the pen of Dr. BETHUNE; while his eloquence, his genuine feeling, his affectionate tenderness, will win all hearts. Again we commend his volume to a cordial public acceptance.

POEMS BY THOMAS HOOD. In one volume. pp. 229. 'Library of Choice Reading.' New-York: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

PERHAPS there is no periodical in this country which has kept so full a 'running account' with the muse of rare THOMAS HOOD as the KNICKERBOCKER. Always an enthusiastic admirer of his genius; his inimitable sense of the humorous and the burlesque; his matchless command of language; his deep feeling, and honest tenderness of heart; his love of right, scorn of wrong, and hatred of cant, at all times and in all stations; we have lost no opportunity to place his productions, 'by parcels,' before our readers; until we find it difficult, in looking through any collection of his writings, in prose or verse, to find any one piece upon which we have not before trenched for the gratification of our readers. Premising that the volume under notice contains several of the most felicitous productions of Hood's facile pen, we content ourselves with the segregation of two or three passages from an ode addressed to a very godly critic' who had characterized some of his innocent playful verses as 'profaneness and ribaldry:'

'WELL!-be the graceless lineaments confest!

I do enjoy this bounteous beauteous earth;
And dote upon a jest

"Within the limits of becoming mirth;'
No solemn sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious;
Nor study in my sanctum supercilious
To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull.
1 pray for grace-repent each sinful act-
Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible;
And love my neighbor far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract
That 's turned by application to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven,
All creeds I view with toleration thorough,
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As any body's rotten borough.'

'I do not hash the Gospel in my books,
And thus upon the public mind intrude it,
As if I thought, like Otaheitan cooks,
No food was fit to eat till I had chew'd it.
On Bible stilts I do n't affect to stalk;
Nor lard with Scripture my familiar talk:
For man may pious texts repeat,
And yet religion have no inward seat;
"T is not so plain as the old Hill of Howth,
A man has got his belly-full of meat

Because he talks with victuals in his mouth!'

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'Spontaneously to GOD should tend the soul,
Like the magnetic needle to the pole;
But what were that intrinsic virtue worth,
Suppose some fellow, with more zeal than knowledge,
Fresh from St. Andrew's College,

Should nail the conscious needle to the north?

'I do confess that I abhor and shrink
From schemes, with a religious willy-nilly,
That frown upon St. Giles's sins, but blink
The peccadilloes of all Piccadilly;

My soul revolts at such a bare hypocrisy,
And will not, dare not, fancy in accord
The LORD of Hosts with an Exclusive Lord
Of this world's aristocracy.

It will not own a notion so unholy,
As thinking that the rich by easy trips

May go to heav'n, whereas the poor and lowly
Must work their passage, as they do in ships.'

A man may cry, 'Church! Church!' at ev'ry word,
With no more piety than other people;

A daw 's not reckoned a religious bird
Because it keeps a-cawing from a steeple.
The Temple is a good, a holy place,
But quacking only gives it an ill-savor;
While saintly mountebanks the porch disgrace,
And bring religion's self into disfavor!'

'Church is a little heav'n below,

I have been there and still would go,'
Yet I am none of those who think it odd
A man can pray unbidden from the cassock
And, passing by the customary hassock,
Kneel down remote upon the simple sod,
And sue informà pauperis' to GOD.'

It requires no recommendation of ours to insure a warm and cordial reception of this admirable volume. Those who can think and feel; who can enjoy innocent mirth and good-natured satire; or appreciate true pathos and chaste imagination, will need no incentive to secure its perusal.

ELEMENTS OF MENTAL PHILOSOPHY: containing a Critical Exposition of the principal Phenomena and Powers of the Human Mind. By L. A. SAWYER, President of Central-College, Ohio. New-York: PAINE AND BURGESS.

No work has appeared since that of Dr. BROWN, which seems to us to go so thoroughly into the investigation of the great principles of Mental Science, as the volume before us. The purpose of the book is not merely to give a digest of the results obtained by others, and to teach clearly and forcibly the well-established views of metaphysicians, but to give new and better solutions of the principal problems in Mental Science, and to make essential improvements in it. The book contains little common-place matter, but argues the most difficult and abstruse questions with clearness, and attains important speculative and practical results by short and sure processes. The style is concise and forcible, and often eloquent; the range of discussion is wide, and the tone manly and dignified. The author's theory of ideas is an entire departure from the views of the English and Scotch Metaphysicians, and is equally removed from the dreamy mysticism and artificial theories of the Germans. This part of the work necessarily requires close and careful attention, and cannot be read on the ruse; but is intelligible, and opens to reflecting men wide fields of thought hitherto imperfectly unexplored.

His theory of the imagination is a beautiful exposition of that noble faculty, and contains profound and original views, which will be read with interest. The author's exposition of the Logic of ARISTOTLE, and of reasoning generally, will attract the attention of metaphysicians. Lord BACON condemned the logic of ARISTOTLE, and proposed a new organum, which has since been called the 'inductive logic.' Subsequent writers have

been greatly divided, some defending ARISTOTLE, and endeavoring to reconcile his logic with the principles of inductive reasoning, and others condemning him. Most authors have taught that all reasoning is of the syllogistic kind, and that all judgments are informed from major and minor premises, making the inductive reasoning of BACON of the same kind precisely as that of ARISTOTLE. This common error of modern times, and especially of English metaphysics, is committed by MILL in his elaborate work on logic. MILL perverts the syllogism entirely, in order to reduce it to such a form that all reasoning may be worked into it. Those who have patience to follow him through the long arguments by which he 'darkens counsel by words without knowledge,' in endless mazes bewildered and lost, will be refreshed with the profound and convincing exposition of the same subject in the work under notice. Another subject of equal importance in which MILL fails, in common with English and Scotch metaphysicians generally, is that of the theory of Cause and Effect. A large portion of his work is devoted to this subject, and the same vicious solution of the great question respecting it is given which furnished HUME and others with premises for a system of skepticism. Mr. SAWYER's work resolves this whole matter in a manner which takes away the premises, from which the modern systems of skepticism and idealism are inferred, and which must put these controversies at rest. No one can read his simple solution without being satisfied of its truth, and feeling that he has superseded the learned volumes of British disquisition on these subjects. We commend the work to the cultivators of sound mental science, and to the patrons of original American literature.

HISTORY OF THE BASTILE. BY R. A. DAVENPORT. Complete in one volume. With a Ground Plan of the Bastile. Number One of CAREY AND HART'S 'Library for the People.'

We judge of its proba

THIS is one of the most interesting books of the season. ble influence upon the general reader by its power over a professional reader, so to speak, who must needs read every thing going;' and when we say, that having taken up the volume we could not lay it down until we arrived at the three hundred and forty-ninth page, the last in the book, we look to have the fact taken as prima facie evidence of the character of its contents. The author has linked with the history of the Bastile that of France, and has traced the rise and progress of those parties, factions and sects which furnished inmates to the prisons of state. He has consulted every document that was accessible, which could throw light upon any branch of his subject. The author does by no means assume too much in hoping that the volume will tend not only to keep up an abhorrence of arbitrary power, but also to inspire affection for governments which hold it to be a duty to promote the happiness of the people. It is enough to melt the hardest heart with pity, to read the accounts of the inhuman treatment to which the prisoners of the Bastile were subjected; shut out from the beautiful forms of nature, the treasures of intellect, and the delights of social converse, from all that can animate or console; racked by a thousand remembrances, conjectures, passions and fears; brooding in unbroken seclusion and silence over the past and the present, and vainly struggling to penetrate the darkness of the future; and even when his long series of woes is at last ended; when Death has rent asunder the fetters of the captive, and he is where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest,' an ingenuity of torment carries vengeance beyond the grave, and entails upon kindred a share of suffering. The work before us is the only one in the language which can be denominated a History of the Bastile.

A DEFENCE OF FRENCH COOKERY, BY ONE WHO KNOWS.'-Perpend the annexed epistle to the EDITOR, tasteful reader, from an accomplished Philadelphia caterer, and judge between him and the adversaries whose positions' he attacks with marked enthusiasm and skilful weapons: As a pendant for that extremely epicurean account of a Roman dinner, by the Man without a Shadow,' (May his shadow never be less!' for he must be a true gourmet, in the best sense of the word — French sense, of course,) and as a beacon-light to such sober old cits as may, after toiling a half-century to amass a plum' by retailing fish or tapes, feel desirous of astonishing neighbor JONES and friend SMITH with a magnificent entertainment, consisting of a quart of terrapin-soup, ordered from the nearest oyster-cellar; a hundred oysters, purchased under his own eye, and opened by one of God's ebony images; a roast turkey, which took him two days to buy, because the confounded hucksters wanted a sixpence too much, and in the cooking of which he is almost ruined by the immense quantity of stale bread, parsley, sage and onions required for its stuffing; two kinds of watery vegetables; a composition of butter, rice and milk, dignified with the name of 'rice custard,' and a faint imitation of puff paste, filled with cranberries, or some other acid fruit; all of which are to be accompanied by a quart of darkcolored liquid, which he was obliged to take some years before for a bad debt from a second-rate grocer, said grocer facetiously styling it Port; a wine much talked of, but seldom seen in England- I say, as a beacon-light to such as dine after this

fashion, I send you a carte' of a breakfast and a dinner served up at one of our Philadelphia hotels, within a few weeks past. For the information of the uninitiated, I would inform them that both entertainments were served à la Russe, the only Russian custom, by-the-way, worthy of imitation, and the only style by which each guest is enabled to make comfortably the tour of the table,' and eat his proportion of each dish'à son point,' the indispensable duty of every sensible gourmet. Twenty minutes were allowed to intervene between the going down and coming up' of consecutive dishes, to enable the digestive organs to perform properly their regular duties. The wines, the choicest of their kind, were all properly cared for, and served at the proper time, without stint, and without precipitation; the amphitryon carefully observing that each guest's glass was neither full nor empty. And, in short, as 'CESAR and his fortunes' were embarked in this affair, you may be sure it was cooked as but one man in this country can cook, and served in such a style as 'any friend of CESAR'S' might be proud of. But while I am prating, the dishes are getting cold. The

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first entertainment was a ‘Déjeuner à la Fourchette pour dix couverts,' given by a Philadelphian to a very celebrated 'gastronome' of your city, than whom perhaps no one in this country is better capable of appreciating the efforts of an artiste; and the following is the carte,' the name of the wine that accompanied each dish being added:

After which, a couple of magnum bottles of DELMONICO's celebrated Burgundy, obtained expressly for the occasion. Then, Café à la Grecque, and Toste d'Anchois; and as Chasse Café,' or 'Coup d'aprés,' a bottle of some extraordinary Essence de Moka de Martinique,' a liqueur without an equal. Before parting, digestion had so well waited on appetite, that it was necessary to furnish the guests with a cup of Chocolat à la créme' to prevent their leaving the table hungry!

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The second affair was got up by a party of the Upper Ten Thousand,' who have always objected to dining at a hotel, but departed from their rule in this instance for the purpose of testing the abilities of the parties concerned in the abovementioned repast. Their order was a carte blanche,' and the way they 'footed the bill' fully expressed their satisfaction with an affair which the world is challenged to surpass! It would be time lost to expatiate upon the merits of this carte;' for the experienced gourmêt a single glance will be sufficient; to the inexperienced and ignorant, volumes would not induce them to think that a dinner could be any great things,' which appeared to them composed of but chicken soup, calf's head, lamb chops, sweet-breads, chickens' livers cooped up in paper, snipe, cooked in some 'd-d French way,' a roast chicken stuffed with black potatoes! a lobster salad, with a few common-place vegetables, and a lot of French sugared kickshaws.' The salmon might perhaps arrest their attention for a moment, but when they marked the sauce they would pass even that with a Pish! some infernal French mussing!' and would possibly come to the conclusion that Orange ice cream might be good, but for their parts they would much prefer lemon or vanilla.' With such men, French cooking and Italian operas are placed on a par; neither worth a d-n, that they are aware of. Some such genius in the city of Baltimore, who prides himself on his talent for making and describing the modus operandi' of a sherry-cobbler, in a long article descriptive of the good things the mob-towners get at Guy's, (by-the-way, let me add that Guy's dinners are far better than the author's description of them,) attacks French cooking in a most savage manner, and emphasizes the following bright assertion: You can make a French dinner out of any thing; Heaven itself has been good enough to provide the things we eat in Baltimore.' And again: The superior excellence of French cooking arises from the wretchedness of French food!' If the individual who penned the above extraordinary remark were an ignoramus, or a writer of no note, his very insignificance would prevent his being called to account; but such is not the case; and we must therefore infer that he is seeking to build up

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