Bubal Essays. By A. J. Dowing. Edited, with a Momolr of the Author, by George William Cuetis; and a letter to his Friends by Frederika bremer.. New York: George G. Putnum & Co., 10 Park Place.

While Mr. Downing was yet alive and well, with a prospect of long years of usefulness and happiness before him, we thought that those charming rural essays of his that appeared from month to month in the Horticulturist, should be collected and put in a form more accessible to us all, and one especially that would place them more within the reach of thousands of general readers who eschew horticultural journals. This has at length been done; but alas I not as we hoped to see it done by himself, but by his bereaved friends, as a last sad duty. It is a beautiful volume of nearly six hundred pages, embellished with a portrait of the author, and many of the finest engravings that have appeared in the Horti-cultwrist. A memoir by George William Curtis, and a letter to Mr. Downing's friends by Frederika Bremer are prefixed.

Mr. Curtis is well known as a tasteful and elegant writer, and the memoir which we have read carefully and with a painful intesest, shows that he was a warm and intimate friend and ardent admirer of Mr. Downing, and that in many respects he appreciated correctly his talents, character, and influence. We must confess, however, that we are not pleased with him. We think we can see in several passages of the memoir an endeavor to exaggerate or color certain facts and circumstances in order to give additional interest to the production - a thing entirely superfluous - or perhaps to give more scope to his imagination and his pen. This is a very natural failure with such men as Mr. Curtis, the particular charm of whose writings consist in highly colored, over-drawn pictures, but it is a great pity that in this instance he was not satisfied with a plain, unvarnished statement. The people who feel most interest in Mr. Downing's history are not mere novel readers, whose romantic appetites only be satiated with the wonderful and supernatural; on the contrary, they are people whose minds dwell upon roalities, lovers of the beautiful in nature and art, cultivators and improvers of the field and the garden, worshippers of Flora and Pomona, and Mr. Downing was their chosen leader, the man whose writings not only conveyed instruction and encouragement, but struck a chord of sympathy in their hearts that bound them to him as to a brother.

How Mr. Downing's manliness of sentiment would have scorned such a puerile passage as the following:

"Andrew was born many years after the other children. He was the child of his parents' age; and, for that reason, very dear. He began to talk before he could walk, when he was only nine months old, and the wise village gossips shook their heads in his mother's little cottage, and prophesied a bright career for the precocious child. At eleven months that career manifestly began, in the gossips' eyes, by his walking bravely about the room: a handsome, cheerful, intelligent child, but quiet and thoughtful, petted by the elder brothers and sister, standing sometimes in the door, as he grew older, and watching the shadows of the clouds chase each other over the Fishkill mountains upon the opposite side of the river; soothed by the universal silence of the country, while the constant occupation of the father, and of the brother who worked with him in the nursery, made the boy serious, by necessarily leaving him much alone".

Does not this partake too much of the trifling style of a certain class of novel biographies? Further on he tells us:

"The mother, a thrifty housekeeper and a religious woman, occupied with her many cares - cooking, mending, scrubbing, and setting things to rights - probably looked forward with some apprehension to the future condition of her sensitive Benjamin, even if he lived The dreamy, shy ways of the boy were not such as indicated the stern stuff that enables poor men's children to grapple with the world. Left to himself, his will began to grow imperious. The busy mother could not severely scold her ailing child; but a sharp rebuke had probably been pleasanter to him than the milder treatment that resulted from affectionate compassion, but showed no real sympathy. It is evident, from the tone in which he always spoke of his childhood, that his recollections of it were not altogether agreeable. It was undoubtedly clouded by a want of sympathy which he could not understand at the time, but which appeared plainly enough when his genius came into play. It is the same kind of clouded childhood that so often occurs in literary biography, where there was great mutual affection and no ill feeling, but a lack of that instinctive apprehension of motives and aims, which makes each one perfectly tolerant of each other".

It would appear from the last sentence in this quotation, that Mr. Curtis had in his mind a certain stereotyped style of u literary biography" to which the subject of his memoir must whether or no be adapted. The inference that one would naturally draw from the last. quotation would be, that Downing's parents were very poor, and very ignorant as well, and that they showed him no sympathy. Now, as far as we know, such a conclusion would be quite erroneous. Mr. Downing's parents were, as we have been informed, during his childhood in easy, comfortable circumstances, plain, unpretending, but intelligent people, enjoying a respectable social position in the neighborhood. As a proof that they were not so poor as we would infer from Mr. Curtis, Mr. Downing's father at his death bequeathed to his children, free from debt, the beautiful property on which Mr. Downing lived and died.* In another place we are told by Mr. Curtis that - "He, too, had been hoping to go to college; but family means forbade. His mother, anxious -to see him early settled, urged him, as his elder brothers were both doing well in business - the one as a nurseryman, and the other, who had left the comb factory, practising ably and prosperously as a physician - to enter as a clerk in a dry goods store.