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LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.

SINCE the days of The Gentleman's Magazine, and the pet Spectators, Ramblers, Idlers and Adventurers, what an advance has been made! There are more books than ever before, and as good ones; the quarterlies are but books jointly composed by several co-operating authors, and contain papers, often, which represent the ripe results of a whole lifetime's experience or reflection in every department of learning. The monthlies, if less stately, are hardly less able; and all this is without prejudice to the weekly and daily newspapers, which command some of the best thinkers and writers in England and America.

It was a happy thought, to select from this wide range of matter the best articles in every department, and by bringing them together in a new work, to give to the people at a very moderate sum, the cream of a hundred different inaccessible and expensive magazines and papers. But this Mr. Littell has done, and done so well as to have deserved and earned for himself the thanks and esteem of all grateful readers. Our readers have doubtless seen the stereoscopic boxes which contain from twenty-five to a hundred plates, which, revolving, come up in succession before the eye and present living pictures from every part of the world. This is just what Mr. Littell does for us in literary matters. His Living Age is a stereoscopic series of the learned and literary doings of the world. It comes every week with a new set of pictures, reflecting every side of the writing world, scientific, philosophical, historic, didactic, critical, statistical, poetic; narrative, biography, stories-in short, every thing except stupid goodness and smart immorality.

natures a payment in coin less gross but more precious. If we were to express the sense of love and gratitude which we feel to the authors that have companied with us, first as teachers, and since as reverend companions, we should scarcely find words or space for the fulness of the offering! We love to cherish a sense of unpayable obligation to great hearts. And there is no man who performs the humblest service in the realm of learning and literature, who has not a right to the honors and gratitude of benefactor.

Mr. Littell is not pursuing a new or recent thing. As long ago as 1836 we became subscribers to the Museum, a work similar to The Living Age, published monthly at Philadelphia. This was the beginning of a second series. We know not when the first one began. What a period between 1836 and 1859! And what a treasure is a consecutive series of volumes made up of the best matter which has appeared in that long period of more than twenty years!

Of The Living Age we have a complete set upon our shelves, and we find it universally popular and useful. For invalids, on whose hands time hangs heavily, and whose capricious taste every day needs some new resource, these bound volumes must be invaluable. For those who resort to the country in summer, and wish an abundance of miscellaneous reading; for long voyages: for those who love to go back to other years and read of events which now are histories, but then were transpiring, we can cordially commend this unfailingly interesting series. Every year they grow more interesting, not only by the progressive contents, but because as we re cede from past years, we find it delightful t have the means of recalling them. Those who have full sets of The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly, and who can read the articles which were written upon the appearance of Byron's poems, Scott's, Crabbe's, the Waverley Novels, etc., know how deeply interesting that contemporaneous criticism becomes with every year that lengthens the period between us and it. But we must not trespass upon the space, further, in this busy week. And we perform but a duty, while it is a pleasure, in saying that we congratulate him who has, and pity him who has not, upon his shelves the now almost little library-Littell's Living