The Express. — 1851-02-01 (London, England)

NITERIRT ♦NZODOTI.  The little Pontera;l;;laOartWwhovras extremely illtempered, but by far too expert in her avocations to be dismissed on that account. Her ways were various for tearing them. She wood not glee them what they asked for till there had been a regular storm about it ; and oat day, when she was more pertinacious In her refusal then usual, one of the little wonden said, " Nurse, what am Ito do more be' fore you give me that cake ? —I have both kicked and cried ' for it ?" The logic was perfect, and the cake was immedi• ately given. One boy, when told to be patient, and take example by Job, answered candidly, " I do know Job very well. He was a nasty, disagreeable old man! I do not ' went to be the least like him.  &LIM from Italian Life. By L. Merlotti. Newby. The compositions brought together in this volume Ire perhaps as diverse in style and structure as ever met under a common title. Two are strict soliloquies; some are pictures of rural life or natural scenery, and others are altogether of biographical interest. Above this formal discrepancy there reigns, however, an essential and remarkable unity. The work consists of nine independent scenes, and, with one exception, all are powerful and even terrific representations of the gloomiest side of human experience. The mental anguish, the paroxysm of despair of a young Italian, who, imprisoned in Fort Diamente, at Genoa, commits suicide from sheer despair of his country; the frenzied recollections of a maniac, whose reason has been unseated by the arts of the priesthood, who have defrauded him of wife, family, and home; the terrible loneliness of a sensitive priest, isolated in the world with which he sympathises, and in a corner of which be dies unknown ; are examples of the subjects which Signor Mariotti has chosen to illustrate with a vividness and pwer rarely to be found. This penchant for the terrible has somewhat mastered the writer's preferences for the real, and led him beyond the bounds of the Italy or the life which he undertook to pourtray. Unquiet spirits return to reanimate the flesh in the stillness of night ; the dead are recalled from sleep by strange arts, and imprisoned souls moan from beneath the sod in these tales, bat it needed not the German mottos prefixed by Signor Merlotti to his sketches, to indicate the reading which has suggested those supernatural horrors. 01 the political narratives, the first, that of Jacopo Ruffini, is a masterpiece of bold delineation. The story of Montoreno, a Byronic spirit, who by accident becomes a monk of St. Bernard, but, escaping at the news of the Lombard insurrection, turns soldier, and dies in the hour of the victory of Goito, is distinguished by great power. Between these dread realities of individual experience, and the ghost stories, stands the tale of Marcella. Its heroine is a lively peasant girl, whose faith in the village traditions of ghosts and night-walkers has been shaken by the conversation of a young student to whom she is attached. One evening, in the midst of the village throng, and while an old campaigner is relating the manner, time, and place in which a ghost appeared to him, Marcella avowed her scepticism, and when the habitual reappearance of a buried robber was quoted against her, she offered to go alone et midnight and plant her spindle in his grave. The issue of this rash undertaking is thus presented:  The doleful and solitary condition of the Sandboys,l after the departure of their neighbours, breaks the paternal determination at last, end the put concludes with the intelligence that we shalt find the Sandboys  on their way to in the March number. Mr. Cruickshank's drawing of " All the World going to see the Great Exhibition of 1851," is one of those masterly sketches in which he outstrips every other modern illustrator. Its wondrous minuteness is as astonishing as its general effect is artistic and powerful.  their intangibility gives them over mere flesh and blood, but must needs h►ve recourse to the ungenerous stratagem of as assault from behind.  Sketches of Character. Br