ortunes." He here deals with the persons, scenes, and actions
of a hundred years ago, and thus gains that distance so valuable to the
novelist; and he neither burdens himself with an element utterly and
hopelessly unpicturesque, like modern reformerism, nor assumes the
difficult office of interesting us in the scarcely more attractive
details of literary adventure. But we think, after all, that we owe the
superiority of "The Story of Kennett" less to the felicity of his
subject than to Mr. Taylor's maturing powers as a novelist, of which his
choice of a happy theme is but one of the evidences. He seems to have
told his story because he liked it; and without the least consciousness
(which we fear haunted him in former efforts) that he was doing
something to supply the great want of an American novel. Indeed, but for
the prologue dedicating the work in a somewhat patronizing strain to his
old friends and neighbors of Kennett, the author forgets himself
entirely in the book, and leaves us to remember him, therefore, with all
the greater pleasure.

The hero of the tale is Gilbert Potter, a young farmer of Kennett, on
whose birth there is, in the belief of his neighbors, the stain of
illegitimacy, though his mother, with whom he lives somewhat solitarily
and apart from the others, denies the guilt imputed to her, while some
mystery forbids her to reveal her husband's name. Gilbert is in love
with Martha, the daughter of Dr. Deane, a rich, smooth, proud old
Quaker, who is naturally no friend to the young man's suit, but is
rather bent upon his daughter's marriage with Alfred Barton, a bachelor
of advanced years, and apparent heir of one of the hardest, wealthiest,
and most obstinately long-lived old gentlemen in the neighborhood.
Obediently to the laws of fiction, Martha rejects Alfred Barton, who,
indeed, is but a cool and timid wooer, and a weak, selfish, spiritless
man, of few good impulses, with a dull fear and dislike of his own
father, and a covert tenderness for Gilbert. The last, being openly
accepted by Martha, and forbidden, with much contumely, to see her, by
her father, applies himself with all diligence to paying off the
mortgage on his farm, in order that he may wed the Doctor's daughter, in
spite of his science, his pride, and his riches; but when he has earned
the requisite sum, he is met on his way to Philadelphia and robbed of
the money by Sandy Flash, a highwayman who infested that region, and
who, Mr. Tayl