THE “Life of Charles XII” that Mr. John Burns once bought for a penny in the New Cut—an incident in itself historical if one looks at it in the right way—was, he writes to say, an English version of Voltaire’s book. The “Histoire de Charles XII, Roi de Suède,” was first published at Rouen in 1731, first freely translated into English by Alexander Henderson in 1734, and soon afterwards reduced into a chap-book, which made the King a proverbial hero in English fairs and market-places. There have been other translations since Henderson’s, and it is now retranslated by Miss Todhunter with a closer correspondence than his to Voltaire’s original.