Mr. John Bigelow, who was well fitted for his task by many years of intimate association with Bryant, has contributed a life of the poet to the American Men of Letters series. He gives an interesting account of Bryant's early days, his country life and his studies; portrays his disappointment at being excluded, through poverty, from pursuing a college course, and his attempt to reconcile himself to the distasteful profession of the law. Mr. Bigelow further treats of Bryant's success as poet, as journalist and as orator, and draws a pleasant picture of the honor and love which attended his latter days. The keynote of Bryant's character, his perfect uprightness, is here strongly dwelt upon. Through all the temptations of a newspaper editor's life, Bryant never swerved an inch from what seemed to him the path of honor. An interesting incident in his life, now made public for the first time, is a letter written in 1814, when Bryant was a boy. He was much excited over the war with England, and the way in which "His Imbecility," as he called Madison, treated New England; and urged the enlistment of state troops in Massachusetts, on exactly the same arguments which he so earnestly fought against when advanced by secessionists in 1861. The book is written in a pleasing style and forms an interesting biography of a retiring but eminent man.

[William Cullen Bryant. American Men of Letters. By John Bigelow. Houghton, Mifflin and Co. Boston. 1890.]