Realizing this fact, Mr. KIMBALL, a lawyer of twenty years' standing in Wall St., and consequently perfectly familiar with all its characteristics, has devoted literary talents, which long ago acquired for him not merely an enviable American but a wide European celebrity, to describing this broker-life, with its lights and shadows. Choosing a single subject and a single class, he has elaborated it with a truthfulness which is positively _startling_. As we often know that a portrait is perfect from its manifest verisimilitude, so we feel from every chapter of this book that the author has, with strictest fidelity, adhered to real life with pre-Raphaelitic accuracy but without pre-Raphaelitic servility to any tradition or set mannerism. The pencil of a reporter, the lens of the photographer, are recalled by his sketches, and not less life-like, simple and excellent are the reflections of the business office as shown in its influence in the home circle. The reader will recall the extraordinary popularity which certain English romances, setting forth humble unpoetic life, have enjoyed of late years. We refer to the _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_ school of tales, in which every twig is drawn, every life-lineament set forth with a sort of DENNER minuteness--truthful, yet constrained, accurate but petty. In this novel, Mr. KIMBALL, while retaining all the accuracy of _Adam Bede_, has swept more broadly and forcibly out into life;--there are strong sorrows, great trials seen from the stand-point of a man of the world, and a free, bold color which startles us, while we, at the same time, recognize its reality.