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THE HASHEESH- EATER: BEING PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF A PYTHAGOREAN. In one Volume: pp. 371. New-York: HARPER AND BROTHERS.

CAN our readers recal that not far ‘Backward in the abysm of Time,’ when Lord BYRON’s ‘terrible melancholy’ raised up a host of simulators of the same: with wide down-turned shirt-collars and lustrous up-turned eyes: BYRONIC in every thing, except features, mind, knowledge, GENIUS? ‘Very well, then,’ as Mr. BUNSBY would say: do they also remember, that since DE QUINCEY wrote his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,’ many weak-minded aspirants to the fame which accrued from that successful work, have imitated the author in so far as to excite their entire thimble-full of brains with the ‘smoking mud,’ (under which name High Commissioner LIN denounced the drug,) and afterward published their ‘Confessions?’ This ‘Hasheesh-Eater’ is of the highest order of the great ‘Opium-Eater’s simulators. The small tribe before him have not followed DE QUINCEY in writing a book: no; their brains could not hold out, under spiritual pressure, sufficiently long: so they contented themselves with single papers, or short serials, in some popular journal or magazine. The ‘Hasheesh-Eater,’ on the contrary, is evidently a man of talent, and his reveries and experiences suffice to fill a book without the ‘forcing process.’ Every body knows what opium is, but every body may not know that Hasheesh is the resin of a peculiar sort of hemp, called ‘Cannabis Indica,’ which in southern climates loses its fibrous texture, and secretes this powerful narcotic drug. How the narrator came to eat Hasheesh; what were its effects; what fascination it exerted over his fancy; what dreams he dreamed; what joys and pains he felt; and in what manner he relinquished the use of this soul-exciting, soul-subduing drug, forms the subject-matter of the volume under notice. Its descriptions are somewhat fascinating: and we should not be at all surprised to find the ‘Hasheesh of commerce’ quoted before long in the mercantile ‘prices-current of our comercial daily journals. The ‘Yan-ne-kees’ always want to ‘try things,’ from a new mechanical-power, a new patent-medicine, or a new drug, to a new religion.