The story of _The Cossacks_ exhibits a close similarity to that of a recent English (or rather Irish) novel, _The Hon. Miss Ferrard_. Both books transport a man of culture to the midst of a rude and more or less primitive people: in each, the hero, smitten with the beauty of a native girl (and in Olenin's case with the wild freshness of the life), is seized with a desire to throw off his old life, with its polish, its intellectual disappointments and its limitations, and become a primitive man among primitive men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more natural than his presenting the young Cossack Lukashka with a horse in a fit of generous enthusiasm, and the latter's astonished and suspicious reception of the gift. Being utterly unable to divine its motive, he suspects some lurking design of evil, and regards the generosity as a deceit practised upon him. But any comparison with an English book would but faintly illustrate _The Cossacks_. In the novelty of its scenes and characters, in its poetic simplicity of form and its unconscious picturesqueness, it is widely different from anything in our literature. It has a certain coldness, the coldness of an epic; for passion, though not lacking, is kept in abeyance in its pages, which are indeed chiefly filled with pictures, a set of literary _chef d'oeuvres_, drawn with great power and vividness and full, of color and poetic feeling. That the book should produce such an impression in a translation so uncouth and blundering as Mr. Schuyler has given us is a strong testimony to its merit. It is usually thought that a translator ought to be tolerably familiar with two languages, but readers of _The Cossacks_ will be forced to doubt if Mr. Schuyler is acquainted with one. Molly Bawn: A Novel. By the author of "Phyllis." Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.