The Sun.
London, England, 1856-02-26 00:00:00

, FEBRUARY 26. 1856.

being really admirable as miniature memoirs of our '
living celebrities. But then again in the mid: t A our
consequent satisfaction at these moments we sud-
denly come plump upon some one that might
really as lief have been left out—say, for in-
stance, a provincial parson like the Rev. F.
Close, a name of utter indifference, we presume,
to every one out of the limits of a zmall division
of Gloucestershire. Vainly, too, while stumbling
over name after name, equally unimportant in its
way to the ens we have just particularised, may
the reader look for the smallest scrap of informa-
tion about a delightful writer, such as Peacock of
the India House, the author of Nightmare Abbey,
and the friend of Shelley. The vofinne, indeed, is
glaringly incomplete in several particulav, and as
glaringly replete with obscurities instead of celebri-
ties who are in its pages 7-y scores and by shoals for-
mally proclaimed to be fitting objects of our admi-
ration. Altogether the book would have been
much better if many of the memoirs in it had been
left out, and if several others, nowhere discoverable
from first to last, had been introduced in their
proper places alphabetically. No doubt the com-
piler of a work of this very novel character is la-
bouring under a variety of difficulties while carrying
his design into execution. He has to gather his
particulars together from sources the most uncer-
tain and the most scattered. He has to exercise
his judgment in his selection of the proper
themes for attraction. He has to take as much
care as possible to give enough, and at the
same time not to give too much. And in
doing all this he must necessarily he liable
to overlook what ought never to have been over-
looked, and to chronicle what ought never to have
been chronicled. It seems ridiculous, par example,
to find in the notice of George Cruikshank not a
whisper about his famous little drollery of Lord
Bateman and not a syllable of reference to his
etchings illustrative of such gems of fictions as the
masterpieces of Henry-Fielding and Tobias Smol-
lett. Appended to the volume are some hundred
and odd pages, giving biographical sketches of
celebrated " Women of our Time "—a supplemen-
tal portion of the work, from which we could spare
nothing, though one to which we conceive
a good deal might be added with consider-
able advantage. A compilation like the one
before us, relating to se many persons of all
ages, is obviously liable to be rendered at any mo-
ment obsolete here aid there as the record of men
and women bat just snatched from among us by
death, and to whom we have become consequently
rather the posterity than the contemporaries. As
the editor of the book has been himself compelled
to notify apologetically by announcing as " de-
ceas3d during the passing of the work through
the press"—such men as Bishop the com-
poser, as Silk Buckingham the traveller, as
Count Mold the statesman, as Samuel Rogers
the poet, as Bruat the sailor, and Markham the
soldier, as Leon Faucher, and Robert Montgomery
Besides, a famous novelist-like Henrich Heine
dead since the actual date of the book's publication.
Notwithstanding its scarcely numeral le flaws both
of omission and commission, the book cannot fail to
be very uselul in its way, while to all those who
are really and accountably curious as to the salient
poiits in the career of the eminent men and women
of our times it must necessarily prove exceedingly
entertaining.