is a masterpiece, worthy to rank with the finest passages of Cooper or Scott.  The fierce, swift black stallion, “Don Fulano,” a horse superior to any which Homer has immortalized, is almost the hero of the romance.  That Winthrop, with all his sympathy with the “advanced” ideas and sentiments of the reformers and philanthropists of the time, was not a mere prattling and scribbling sentimentalist, is proved by his glorious idealization of this magnificent horse.  He raises the beast into a moral and intellectual sympathy with his human rider, and there is a poetic justice in making him die at last in an attempt to further the escape of a fugitive slave.

The characterization of the book is original.  Gerrian, Jake Shamberlain, Armstrong, Sizzum, the Mormon preacher, are absolutely new creations.  Hugh Clitheroe may suggest Dickens’s Skimpole and Hawthorne’s Clifford, but the character is developed under entirely new circumstances.  As for Wade and Brent, they are persons whom we all recognize as the old heroes of romance, though the conditions under which they act are changed.  Helen, the heroine of the story, is a more puzzling character to the critic; but, on the whole, we are bound to say that she is a new development of womanhood.  The author exhausts all the resources of his genius in giving a “local habitation and a name” to this fond creation of his imagination, and he has succeeded.  Helen Clitheroe promises to be one of those “beings of the mind” which will he permanently remembered.

Heroism, active or passive, is the lesson taught by this romance, and we know that the author, in his life, illustrated both phases of the quality.  His novels, which, when he was alive, the booksellers refused to publish, are now passing through their tenth and twelfth editions.  Everybody reads “Cecil Dreeme” and “John Brent,” and everybody must catch a more or less vivid glimpse of the noble nature of their author.  But these books give but an imperfect expression of the soul of Theodore Winthrop.  They have great merits, but they are still rather promises than performances.  They hint of a genius which was denied full development.  The character, however, from which they derive their vitality and their power to please, shines steadily through all the imperfections of plot and construction.  The novelist, after all, only suggests the power and beauty of the man; and the man, though dead, will keep the novels alive.  Through them we can commune with a rare and noble spirit, called away from earth before all its capacities of invention and action were developed, but still leaving brilliant traces in literature of the powers it was denied the opportunity adequately to unfold.

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FOREIGN LITERATURE.