The reader meets his old friends, the Squire, Master Simon, old Christy, and the Oxonian. New characters are introduced, Lady Lillycraft and General Harbottle, Ready-money Jack, Slingsby the schoolmaster, and the Radical who reads Cobbett, and goes armed with pamphlets and arguments. Among them all none is more attractive than the Squire. With his scorn of commercialism, his love of ancient customs, his good-humored tolerance of gypsies and poachers, with his body of maxims from Peacham and other old writers, and his amusing contempt for Lord Chesterfield--these and other delightful traits make Mr. Bracebridge one of the most ingratiating characters in fiction. _Bracebridge Hall_ contains interpolated stories, the ‘Stout Gentleman,’ the ‘Student of Salamanca,’ and the finely finished tale of ‘Annette Delabarre.’ The papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker are not yet exhausted; having furnished Rip and Ichabod to _The Sketch Book_ they now contribute to _Bracebridge Hall_ the story of ‘Dolph Heyliger.’ The _Tales of a Traveller_, a medley of episodes and sketches, is divided into four parts. In the first part the Nervous Gentleman of Bracebridge Hall continues his narrations. These adventures, supposed to have been told at a hunt dinner, or at breakfast the following morning, are intertwined, Arabian Nights fashion, story within story. They are grotesque (the ‘Bold Dragoon,’ with the richly humorous account of the dance of the furniture), or weird and ghastly (the ‘German Student’), or romantic (the ‘Young Italian’). The second part, ‘Buckthorne and his Friends,’ displays the seamy side of English dramatic and literary life. Modern realism had not yet been invented, and it is easy to laugh over the sorrows of Flimsy, who, in his coat of Lord Townley cut and dingy-white stockinet pantaloons, bears a closer relation to Mr. Vincent Crummles than to any one of the characters of _A Mummer’s Wife_.