With ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS. Price 50 cents in paper; cloth, 75 cents.
Opinions of the Press.

"NEW-YORK LIFE, by a New-Yorker, clever, sparkling, and life-like. A set of daguerreotypes, in which figure the drawing-rooms of the Avenue and Union Place—the most noted salons of the town—the butterfly crowds of the watering-places, and pre-eminently—the Course. The hero of the book, a modern fast young man, who has in a measure outgrown his fastness, and looks patronizingly on the aspiring efforts of a very young New-Yorker, cicerones you about, showing up the lions of town and country, and all with a cool blase sort of air that is wondrously telling. With a stroke of the pen he annihilates the huge pretensions of some parvenu or bestows the final stab on the waning virtue of some dashing belle. In the same moment giving a pithy rationale of American Society, and the best recipe for concocting a sherry cobbler; discussing, in the same breath, the popular theology of the town, and the winning pacer on the Long Island course. Throughout, quietly satirical yet seldom exaggerated. Looking at American life and manners from no distant point, but as one who has been in, and of, and through it all, pausing now and then to take down a jotting here, put in a bit of shadow there, making more of life than 'John Timon;' not mere squints through a Lorgnette, but broad, steady stares with the naked eye, with now and then the help of a quizzing-glass."—New-York Evening Mirror.

"They are sufficiently sprinkled with local satire, on a ground of a pervading egotism, to be attractive in a book—in which capacity they will hold their own with such memorable local effusions as IRVING and PAULDING'S Salmagundi, HALLECK'S Croakers, and MITCHELL'S Lorgnette."—Literary World.

"We are glad to see these brilliant 'Sketches of American Society,' incorporated into an elegant and portable volume, for they are unquestionably the most veritable pictures of certain classes of New-York society that have been written; we do not except even the equally graphic portraits of 'The Lorgnette.' The great charm of Mr. Bristed's sketches is the life-like characters he introduces as illustrations of the varied phases of American society. These sketches have been read with avidity as they appeared in the serial form, and will doubtless form an inseparable travelling companion to our tourists in their present compact shape, for they possess the interest of a novel, with the piquancy and truthfulness of a personal narrative."—Morris & Willis's Home Journal.

"We must say that this little volume contains some true and vivid sketches of men and manners, and that, notwithstanding its tone of levity, it has within it a good moral. The moral is applicable in all highly-civilized communities, and is simply this—when fashion is made the exclusive rule of life, one may search in vain for a man or woman worth more than a moment's passing glance. All that is manly and intelligent in the one sex, all that is feminine and lovely in the other, gives place to a tasteless coating clumsily laid over a worthless substance."—New-York Albion.

"These sketches are lively, and adorned with characters whose types, we may safely say whose originals, can be found in New-York in any winter, and in Saratoga and Newport every summer. Mr. Bristed's descriptions of gay life in those places certainly gave the English readers of Fraser's Magazine a very truthful and amusing picture of the trifling, bustling existence of the New-Yorker's whose days and nights are passed in the struggle for social notoriety. The book might better be styled, Germanics Sketches of the Ever-striving-to-let-you-see-that-they-the-Upper-Ten-Thousand-are."—New-York Courier and Enquirer.

"These sketches contain much truthful sarcasm and quiet stabs at vulgarism among the 'upper ten,' all under the garb of pictures of American society in New-York, or 'Sketches of American Society,' as they were called. Written in a rapid and pleasing style, and by a man who had few prejudices against the Americans, they may be considered a pretty fair expose of the ridiculous follies of the American people, while at the same time their many excellent qualities are placed prominently before the reader."—Rough Notes.