disturbed possession of territory so long and so bloodily disputed with the savages. The narrative of Colonel Smith refers to this pioneer existence during a space of time when its perils, privations, and atrocities seemed an established condition of things. He was captured by the Indians just before Braddock's defeat in 1755, and remained with them five years; and thereafter, in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, spent nearly all his days in conflict with them.

His narrative was first printed at Lexing. ton, Kentucky, in 1799, and has been several times reprinted, but has of late years been in effect out of print. It is the story of a man of clear, strong mind, with a vein of humor which has now and then a very witty expression, — almost a modern expression; and though the style has few solicited graces, it is plain that this old Indian hunter had some good literary instincts. He attracts, for example, the interest of the reader at once, by telling him in the beginning, after a reference to Braddock's expedition: "Though I was at that time only eighteen years of age, I had fallen violently in love with a young lady, whom I apprehended was possessed of a large share of both beauty and virtue; but being born between Venus and Mars, I concluded I must also leave my dear fair one, and go out with this company of road-cutters, to see the event of this campaign; but still expecting that some time in the course of this summer I should again return to the arms of my beloved." And in chronicling his return to home and friends after his five years' captivity, he remembers to confide the sad close of this passion: "Upon inquiry, I found that my sweetheart was married a few days before I arrived. My feelings, on this occasion, I must leave for those of my readers to judge who have felt the pangs of disappointed love, as it is impossible now for me to describe the emotion of soul I felt at that time."

Otherwise, the narrative of Colonel Smith is marked by few indulgences of sentiment, though always by good feeling, and a shrewd and sympathetic observation of nature as he saw it in the wilderness and the savages about him. He was taken prisoner near "the Alleghany Mountain" in Pennsylvania; the greater part of his captivity was passed in the region of Northern Ohio; he escaped, at last, from the Indians near Montreal, and was exchanged with other English prisoners by the French. Up to the

;

beginning of the Revolution he was engaged in various expeditions, more or less irresponsible, against the Indians; and during the Revolution he fought them as the leader of a properly authorized border force. He shows always a rough respect for them, though he was bent upon their destruction and he says that, after duly considering their "want of information," he could not blame them so much for the atrocities they committed. When he had once been adopted among them, they treated him with invariable justice and kindness; and he notes many noble and magnanimous traits in them. He regarded them as masters of the art of war in a wilderness country; and he declares that, far from being "undisciplined savages,' they were so well disciplined in their own way, and in that way had so often beaten vastly larger forces of whites, that until the Americans adopted the Indian style of fighting they could never cope with them. And a principal object of Colonel Smith in setting down his opinions and observations was to enforce the necessity of fighting the Indians in the Indian manner; for it appeared to the doughty old pioneer, who had spent his life in such hostilities, that war with them was to remain indefinitely the condition of the border, as in fact it has done in some sort.

There has probably never been any study of Indian life and character more sincere and practical than his; and we know of none so interesting. On the whole, we believe the reader will think all the better of the savages for knowing them through him; though as for their unfitness to be guests at a small tea-party, we suppose there can never be any doubt. We should like to repeat here some of the things Colonel Smith tells of them; but his context is precious, and we forbear, for the reader's own sake. Still we must give some passages of ironical humor from his account of the ceremony of his adoption, because they are pleasant, and because they serve so well to confirm what we have been saying in praise of his manWe do not think any literary man could have said these things more neatly, and we have many literary men in our eye who would have said them inexpressibly worse; by which we mean to teach that for literary purposes it is not always well to be of the profession. Colonel Smith says:

ner.

They put a large belt of wampom on my neck, and silver bands on my hands and

right arm; and so an old chief led me out in the street and gave the alarm halloo, coowigh, several times repeated quick, and on this all that were in the town came running and stood round the old chief, who held me by the hand in the midst. As I at that time knew nothing of their mode of adoption, and had seen them put to death all they had taken, and as I never could find that they saved a man alive at Braddock's defeat, I made no doubt but they were about putting me to death in some cruel manner. The old chief holding me by the hand made a long speech very loud, and when he had done he handed me to three young squaws, who led me by the hand down the bank into the river until the water was up to our middle. The squaws then made signs to me to plunge myself into the water, but I did not understand them; I thought that the result of the council was that I should be drowned, and that these young ladies were to be the executioners. They all three laid violent hold of me, and I for some time opposed them with all my might, which occasioned loud laughter by the multitude that were on the bank of the river. At length one of the squaws made out to speak a little English (for I believe they began to be afraid of me) and said, no hurt you; on this I gave myself up to their ladyships, who were as good as their word; for though they plunged me under water, and washed and rubbed me severely, yet I could not say they hurt me much.”

FROM the internal evidence of the novel itself it would be a difficult matter to determine the sex of the author of "Miss Van Kortland." The men of the story are portrayed as men appear to women, and the women as they appear to men. This is not saying that the characters are not tolerably natural and recognizable, but it is saying rather that the author does not go very deeply into human nature. We would not be understood to hold this fact up to blame, especially in an American novel; for the same good sense which has kept our author on the surface of things has kept the work free of a manifest purpose. The only moral taught in the book will be considered an immoral one by the majority of its readers;

and the religious feeling of the author is so shadowy, that it will be misunderstood by a great many who are pleased by the attractive, straightforward movement of the story. The author and we must call him a man when we come to this moral — has attempted to cure the American public of a certain false delicacy; but even those who sympathize somewhat with his endeavor will hardly admire his method. His religious standpoint is apparently the serenest altitude of the High Church doctrine, yet he seems full of the little fanaticisms of a man who believes nothing.

Taken as a whole, the novel of "Miss Van Kortland" is a very respectable performance. It is studiously non-sensational. The principal characters are two pairs of lovers, whose doings are made interesting without any complicated plot. They talk and act, generally, as bright people may be supposed under such circumstances to talk and act in life. The whole book treats in an easy, humorous way, except in the intentionally humorous scenes, of the ordinary skirmishes, advances, retreats, and flank movements preliminary to the battle of life, which, according to the modern novel, is the rearing of a family. It is not likely that the world will ever get tired of these things either in reality or their imaginative portrayal; and the positive ceremony of getting married, being, as some timid people believe, one of the most arduous and distressful duties of this life, it is probably just as well that this sort of introductory halo should be thrown around it.

We have intimated that the professedly humorous scenes of this novel are not amus

ing. There are a great many of these scenes, and each one of them is carried too far. Indeed, it is some time after having passed through one of them, before you recover your patience with the otherwise agreeable narrative. In almost every scene of this nature there is an undertone of cruelty, which leaves an impression contrary to the one intended. When a clergyman in his fright drops the baby he is about to baptize, "and nearly cracked its skull on the stone fount"; and when the impulsive Nora throws hot water about recklessly, and pulls the sensitive Miss Maguire down stairs by the heels, bumping her head most unmercifully, and has metal tips put upon the toes of her shoes to kick the shins of the unof fending negro boy, Jupe, and so kicks him quite through the book; and when a poor

sentimentalism in him. Here is something pretty, tender, and real; and that it is one of his best things we are likewise bound to say:

"A NICE CORRESPONDENT ! "The glow and the glory are plighted

To darkness, for evening is come; The lamp in Glebe Cottage is lighted, The birds and the sheep-bells are dumb. I'm alone at my casement, for pappy Is summoned to dinner to Kew:

I'm alone, my dear Fred, but I'm happy-
I'm thinking of you.

"I wish you were here. Were I duller
Than dull, you'd be dearer than dear;
I am drest in your favorite color, -
Dear Fred, how I wish you were here!
I am wearing my lazuli necklace,

The necklace you fastened askew ! Was there ever so rude or so reckless A darling as you?

"To-day, in my ride, I've been crowning

The beacon; its magic still lures,
For up there you discoursed about Browning,
That stupid old Browning of yours.
His vogue and his verve are alarming,
I'm anxious to give him his due ;
But, Fred, he's not nearly so charming
A poet as you.

"I heard how you shot at The Beeches,
I saw how you rode Chanticleer,
I have read the report of your speeches,
And echoed the echoing cheer.

There's a whisper of hearts you are breaking,
I envy their owners, I do!
Small marvel that Fortune is making
Her idol of you.

"Alas for the world, and its dearly

Bought triumph, and fugitive bliss!
Sometimes I half wish I were merely
A plain or a penniless miss;
But, perhaps, one is best with a measure
Of pelf, and I'm not sorry, too,
That I'm pretty, because it's a pleasure,
My dearest, to you.

"Your whim is for frolic and fashion,

Your taste is for letters and art,
This rhyme is the commonplace passion
That glows in a fond woman's heart.
Lay it by in a dainty deposit

For relics, we all have a few!
Love, some day they 'll print it, because it
Was written to you."

Mr. Locker is no such writer, to be sure, as William Mackworth Praed or Dr. Holmes, who are masters of their art; but he reminds us agreeably of them, in the way that shows a kindred faculty as well as a cordial appreciation. Dr. Holmes's insurpassable little poem, "The Last Leaf," has been of great profit to him, -more than he will himself be to his readers in any one poem; but he is sufficiently graceful; he is

wicked only to a blameless degree; he is sprightly, not to say witty; and space, if nothing else, forbids him to be tedious. So we do not see why we should not praise him.

The Genial Showman: being Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward, and Pictures of a Showman's Career in the Western World. By EDWARD P. HINGSTON. New York: Harper and Brothers.

MR. HINGSTON was the agent of Mr. Charles F. Browne during that humorist's career as a comic lecturer in this country, and here is what he remembers of him. It is not much, nor particularly worth knowing. Mr. Hingston is an Englishman, and enjoys in a high degree the national disqualification for understanding or reproducing any other type. His Americans talk the conventional Americanese of the English tourists, -a dialect which no one else ever heard, and they are pretty nearly all fig ures of the cockney fancy. If he ever saw the finer and better side of "Artemus Ward's" nature, he does not let us see it ; and here again we think his nationality disabled him. His "genial showman" is a vulgar bore, not at all like the real Browne; who, in spite of evident defects, had yet ever so much good in him, and always considerably more good-humor than humor. About the quality of his humor it does not seem worth while to dispute: as written and as spoken it was fatally dependent upon manner. More amusing than anything he said or did was the fact that he became quite identified in the popular imagination with his own grotesque invention; but Browne's best things were not said in Artemus Ward's person. A pathos, from the circumstances of his early death, rests upon his memory; and this vaguely pensive association is more desirable than any information which his exagent has it in his power to give.

The Modern Job. By HENRY Peterson. Philadelphia: H. Peterson & Co.

It is a question for Mr. Peterson to settle with each of his readers, how far a thinker upon man's free agency and the existence of evil is justifiable in putting his speculations in the form of dramatic blank verse. This question is renewed from age to age; and

perhaps no one can say that a pill may not be sugared, and permitted to please the palate, at least; that beauty may not adorn use; that amusement may not agreeably blend with instruction. Let it be far from us, at any rate, to say this; we concern ourselves with other points. To tell the honest truth, Mr. Peterson, if no great affair as a poet, is neither a very startling philosopher; and if it is wrong to "justify the ways of God to man" in the form of drama, the author has not sinned greatly, for it is not much of a drama. His Job is a resident of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and is, like Job of old, in very comfortable circumstances at first; but he loses his whole family by a fever, and is obliged to sell his homestead; and, being afflicted with boils, has to go live in the cottage of a hideous dwarf, with whose misery and wickedness his own former prosperity and goodness had once formed a striking contrast. In this condition he is visited by two ministers (terribly dull, bigoted fellows they are), who talk evangelical Christianity at him, and go off thinking his soul in a very bad way, — in fact, telling him as much. Then the doctor has his say, which is the say of modern scientific thought, and gives little quarter to the doctrine of special providences, or the interference of God with his own laws. Then in a dream comes the Archangel Michael, the celestial regent of the universe, and discusses the coexistence of evil and an omnipotent God, and ends, like a wise archangel, by confessing that he does not know how it is. Job is so much comforted by this dream, that he gets well of his boils and lives to be seventy years old.

The tendency of the whole drama is to teach charity and the acceptance of truth in every form, and we do not observe anything in it which is not familiar to the reader of the current discussion of such topics, as well as to the thoughts of nearly every educated

duction, to the critic, and "not for publica tion." We assure him that we have read these with profound sorrow, but no great surprise. They are dreadfully good-natured, those distinguished poets and poetesses, and we warn the literary aspirant against their flatteries. Would that we could warn them against him!

The author may not believe us, but it is nevertheless true, that his versification is often clumsy, and that there are as few evi dences of artistic power in his poem as of novel thought. Yet we think he will be lieve us, though we may be wrong, that there is at least one fine stroke of imagination in it, namely, this by which Satan is portrayed :

"Who is this

Coming this way?-so large and vast, but yet
So mean and misproportioned. And his face,
Handsome, it may be, once,- but now so gross,
Rapacious, ugly, cruel. Can this be he
Whom all men fear? Yes, it is he. The lord
Of disproportion and excess, the foe
Of harmony and moderation wise."

The American Annual Cyclopædia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1869. Vol. IX. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

THE ninth volume of this useful work does not differ from former ones in method, and there is little to say about it. There are the usual records of progress in different directions and different localities, the necrology of the year, and notices of political and religious events. A defect is the absence of the customary article on fine arts; but there is a very full review of all matters of literary interest, which is not wiser in appearance, nor less so in fact, perhaps, than most criticisms. The narrative of events in France during 1869, with the account of the Emperor's advance towards constitutional government, has already become very curious historical reading. Among the longer articles on persons deceased is a very satisfactory one on Lamartine, - rather eloquent in places, but on the whole satisfactory.