J.B.D.


_Memoirs of an American Lady_ (Vol. i., p. 335.).--If this work cannot
now be got it is a great pity,--it ought to go down to posterity; a
more valuable or interesting account of a particular state of society
now quite extinct, can hardly be found. Instead of saying that "it is
the work of Mrs. Grant, the author of this and that," I should say of
her other books that they were written by the author of the _Memoirs
of an American Lady_. The character of the individual lady, her way
of keeping house on a large scale, the state of the domestic slaves,
threatened, as the only known punishment and most terrible to them,
with being sold to Jamaica; the customs of the young men at Albany,
their adventurous outset in life, their practice of robbing one
another in joke (like a curious story at Venice, in the story-book
called _Il Peccarone_, and having some connection with the stories of
the Spartan and Circassian youth), with much of natural scenery, are
told without pretension of style; but unluckily there is too much
interspersed relating to the author herself, then quite young.

C.B.


_Poem by Sir E. Dyer_ (Vol. i., p. 355.).--"My mind to me," &c.
Neither the births of Breton nor Sir Edward Dyer seem to be known;
nor, consequently, how much older the one was than the other. Mr. S.,
I conclude, could not mean much older than Breton's tract, mentioned
in Vol. i., p. 302. The poem is not in England's _Helicon_. The
ballad, as in Percy, has four stanzas more than the present copy, and
one stanza less. Some of the readings in Percy are better, that is,