There are advices from New York to the 10th instant.
Henry Clay, the great American statesman, died at
Washington on the 29th of June, at the age of 75. As
soon as his death was announced to Congress, both
houses adjourned. On the 1st of July a grand and
solemn funeral service was performed over the remains
at Washington; at which the President of the Union,
the Ministers, all the members of Congress, and a
concourse of other American worthies, participated. After
the obsequies, the corpse was removed in state to
Baltimore, and thence to New York, on the way to its
final resting-place at Lexington in Kentucky. The
authorities of Baltimore and New York, and the citizens
of those towns en masse, went out to meet the cortége.
A terrible calamity had occurred on the 5th inst. at
Staten Island, by the giving way of the Ferry Bridge,
and 159 persons were precipitated into the river, about
25 of whom were drowned. On the 4th, a fatal affray
took place at Hoboken between two sets of waiters, one
set white, the other coloured. The whites were Irishmen;
one of the coloured men was killed in the
encounter, and some severe wounds inflicted on both
sides. Several deaths had occurred in New York from
sun-stroke, and the weather had been intensely sultry.
In the southern states, the whigs have declined to
sanction the nomination of General Scott for the
presidentship, and fresh opposition continues to pour in
every day from the slave states. In the House of
Representatives a bill had been reported authorising
the postmaster-general to contract for the transportation
of mails twice in the month, in first-class steamers,
between New York and Galway; the sum to be paid
not to exceed 10,000 dols. the round trip. An extensive
fire occurred at Boston on the 10th instant, which
destroyed property to the amount of half a million
dollars.

Accounts from the Havannah state that a conspiracy
of 30 young men of that place had been discovered.
Eight of them had been condemned to death and
executed. The conspirators had freighted a vessel, with
the intention of joining, either at sea or in an American
port, the adventurers who are said to contemplate
another descent on Cuba.

NARRATIVE OF LITERATURE AND ART.

THE remark was made in last month's "Narrative,"
that the publishing world could hardly at any time
have been so dull as in the month then immediately
preceding. But, as Dryden said of his friend Durfey
that vast as was his reputation for dulness his powers
were quite underrated, and that nobody yet knew how far
he could go in that direction, so is it now to be said of the
world of books. The month of July 1852 may hereafter
be not only remembered as that of the famous general
election when the Protectionists all swallowed the
big loaf of Free Trade, but also as the month when the
sum of the contributions made to general literature by
all the great metropolitan publishing houses, consisted
of nothing more worthy of mention than two novels,
neither of them natively grown, two biographies,
neither of them likely to outlive the year, and a single
volume of very earnest politics and more than doubtful
political economy

Such is literally the case. "Leather and prunella"
would be a too exalted description for the rest of the
month's literature, mainly consisting as it does of entirely
unimportant pamphlets and tracts, that may never hope to
aspire to the dignity of calf or sheepskin. We do not
know that exception may be made for even the bulky
collection of Reports of the Juries of the Great Exhibition
on the award of the several medals and certificates. As a
set-off to such lack of performance, however, we have
a magnificent promise to record. Mr. Halliwell has
announced a new edition of Shakespeare to be contained
in twenty folios, each of the same size as that single
folio of Heminge and Condell which for two hundred
years and upward has managed to keep the poet's
fame tolerably lively and flourishing. It may be
doubted if the twenty folios are likely to do more.

Woman's Life and The Blithedale Romance are the
two novels to which allusion has been made. The first a
translation from the Swedish, the second an importation
from America; the design of the first, to depict
those frailties and trials of the heart and temper which
are common to all countries, and have lasted as long as
the old world; that of the second, to show the folly of
trying to build a new world with no better materials to
set it or keep it going than those very frailties aforesaid.
Both are well-written stories. The Life of Lord Langdale
by Mr. Duffus Hardy, is in bulk as disproportionate
to the demands of the subject as the expectations once
formed of the hero of the book transcended what was
actually achieved by him. But it is a conscientiously written
biography, containing among other things curious
evidence of the petty motives that so often frustrate great
designs in the affairs of public life. The late Lord
Cottenham makes a poor figure in its revelations as to law
reform, and it is to be wished that even Lord Brougham
figured better than he does in the same field. The other
biography is a Life of the Rev. Wm. Kirby, the delightful
naturalist, who deserved an easier biographer. Mr.
Freeman is full of good intentions, and a sensible grave
admiration, but he sits rather heavily on his friend.
The book of Political Economy, which is by Mr. Lalor,
under the title of Money and Morals deals with several
unsettled questions of financial science, always earnestly
if not always so successfully. The most heterodox of
Mr. Lalor's economical views have been propounded
before, but he brings much novel and forcible illustration
in aid of them, and the volume deserves attention.

As for the rest of the publications of the past month,
they are really not worth the space which it would take
to transcribe their titles. Where they are not new
editions (as the neat little Poems of Coleridge, which
Mr. Moxon has issued; the handsome volume of
Messrs. Black's Waverly Novels; Mr. Knight's re-issue
of his Imperial Cyclopœdia; Doctor Forbes's Physician's
Holiday; Mr. Moultrie's republication of poor
Sydney Walker's Poems, to which is prefixed a slight
but not uninteresting Memoir; Mr. Bohn's excellent
addition of Miss Bremer's Works, Neander's Memorials,
and Kirby's Bridgewater Treatises, to his Standard
and Scientific Libraries; Hazlitt's republished Life of
Napoleon; a cheap and careful revision of Webster's
Dictionary; and a new translation of Madame Guizot's
Moral Tales;) they are pamphlets on subjects of little
or no interest, or they are waifs and strays of volumes
that nobody should care to own, and that should be
therefore permitted to pass out of the world as they
have entered it, in obscurity and silence.

The last concert of the Philharmonic Society took
place on the 28th of June. The season has been highly
successful.

The Sacred Harmonic Society have also terminated
a very successful season. On the 5th inst., Spohr's
celebrated oratorio, Calvary, was performed at Exeter
Hall under the personal direction of the composer. The
society has published a report for the year 1851, from
which it appears that the 31 concerts of that year produced
upwards of £9000 and that the ordinary expenses
connected with them were nearly £7600. Including
subscriptions, the gross receipts of the year exceeded £10,000.
Exeter Hall is now closed for alterations and re-decoration;
and important improvements are to be made in
the organ, which will be entirely reconstructed.

Spohr's opera, Faust, was produced at the Royal
Italian opera on the 15th under the composer's own
direction. In order to adapt it to the Italian stage, the
dialogue, originally spoken, was converted into recitative,
the music of which was written by Spohr himself.