en, and thus does not always distinguish
between cargo and dunnage. The current of the story often flows with a
very languid movement. It happens, rather unluckily, that this is
particularly true of the first seventy pages of the first volume. We
fear that many professional novel-readers may break down in the course
of these pages; and we confess ourselves to have been a little
discouraged. But after the ninth chapter, and the touching account which
Skipper George gives of the death of his boys,--a story which the most
indifferent cannot peruse without emotion,--the reader may be safely
left in the author's hands. They will go on together to the end, after
this, on good terms. And the prospect brightens, and the horses are
whipped up, as we advance. The second volume is much more interesting,
in the common sense of the word,--more stirring, more rapid, more
animated, than the first.

It is but putting our criticism into another form to say that the novel
is too long, and, as a mere story, might with advantage be compressed
into at least two-thirds of its present bulk. There are, especially, two
departments or points to which this remark is applicable. In the first
place, the conversations are too numerous, too protracted, and run too
much into trivialities and details. In the second place, the
descriptions of scenery are too frequently introduced, and pushed to a
wearisome enumeration of particulars and minute delineation of details.
In this peculiarity the author is kept in countenance by most
respectable literary associates. This sort of Pre-Raphaelite style of
scenery-painting in words is a characteristic of most recent American
novel, especially such as are written by women. Every rock, every clump
of trees, every strip of sea-shore, every sloping hillside, sits for its
portrait, and is reproduced with a tender conscientiousness of touch
wholly disproportioned to the importance of the subject. When human
hearts and human passions are animating or darkening the scene, we do
not want to be detained by a botanist's description of plants or a
geologist's sketch of rocks. The broad, free sweeps of Scott's brush in
"The Pirate" are more effective than the delicate needle-point lines of
the writer before us.

We think, too, that too much use is made of those strange and uncouth
dialects which have to be represented to the eye by bad spelling. We
have the familiar Yankee type in Mr. Bangs, and a new form of
phraseology in