"I HAVE seen,

says Du Maurier, speaking of Grotius, "I have often seen this great man just cast his eye upon a page of a huge folio volume, and instantaneously become acquainted with the whole of its contents." We are about to handle the great volume of a whole year's literature; to turn its leaves rapidly, nor pause as they rustle through our fingers; but we pretend not ourselves to possess, and we hope not to find in our readers, minds full charged with universal knowledge-the secret of the faculty that Du Maurier envied and Grotius possessed. If we have pleasure in looking back over the wide expanse, it is that we have won our way through it by patient labour; if we have a hope to interest others as we point out its peculiarities, it is based upon a hardly-earned power to revive fading recollections of the path they travelled, or to indicate those in which they may most pleasantly walk. Oh! for a tenth muse (a muse who should superintend the condensing, abbreviating, indexing, and classifying department) to help us through this wilderness of printed paper! What a chaos of ideas, what a multitude of hobbies, what a mound of incongruous things! Novels and sermons, poems and bishops' charges, histories, travels, fierce polemics, childrens' books, lives of folks whom no one ever heard of when living, classics, jest books, annuals, political economy, and all those flying sheets that fell frequent as snow flakes during the four great controversies of the year, and which are drifting now to

our imminent discomfort

Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
Much future ode and abdicated play,
Nonsense precipitate like running lead,

That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head;

All that on

Folly Frenzy could beget,

Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit.

As the lines run in our head we think of Mr. Bayes' meritorious intention of making a funeral pyre of all these, and we wonder whether, if the mass before us were consigned to the baths and washhouses, the world would be one whit less wise, or one unpaternal sigh would follow the last leaf that crumpled in the flame.

But we must not lag upon the threshold of our work. We have to sort and label SIX THOUSAND AND FIFTY-FIVE new books, for such is the number of the literary offspring of the past year. We have to cast aside the rubbish, to cull the flower, to recognize the unsuspected gem, to test the pretensions of intrusive sparklers which call themselves mountains of light, and yet may be but worthless paste; to whisper some word of comfort to the unappreciated tyro whose soul is fluttering like dying birds, to strike a short and trenchant passing blow upon the brazen armour of the veteran book maker,—all this

and much more must we do, and in such a short time, that the patience of the reader who pauses to see the task performed may not ooze away ere it be done.

Notwithstanding the six thousand prints and re

prints which it has been the publishers' good plea

sure to bring forth in this most pretending and pre

suming of all past years-for none ever heralded its

own praises so loudly-the fact is past gainsaying, and we may as well therefore state it at once-the year 1851 will be a blank in literary history. It has left Mr. Macaulay's great romance upon the History of England as it found it-at the point where Lords and Commons elect William and Mary, and where the newly-chosen sovereigns reply, "We thankfully accept what you have offered us." The mighty labour of Grote (the only living banker who