city about the year 1838. But we do not suppose Dr. Mayo was indebted to either of these works for the idea of his story. And just as erroneous as the charge of plagiarism, and much more absurd, is the notion that he designed Kaloolah as a "satirical criticism on life and manners in New-York." A writer in the _North British Review_ declares that he "could not help laughing aloud," though seated quietly by himself, at the "description of a musical entertainment of the court of the hero's royal father-in-law, heaven knows where in Africa, and intended as a burlesque on the sheer noise which is the predominant element" in all our orchestras. We assure the shrewd critic most positively that the author never dreamed of such a thing. Kaloolah is too well known to need much description; its success was certain and immediate, and not many original works have ever been published in this country which have had a larger circulation. It evinces remarkable fertility of invention, is exceedingly interesting, and abounds in clearly defined, spirited, and occasionally well finished portraitures. Kaloolah, the heroine, is a fresh and beautiful creation, worthy of any of the masters of fiction. The hero, Romer, is designed merely as a type of the determined Yankee adventurer, drawn with only the exaggeration demanded in works of art; and half the seeming of extravagance in the narrative and the sketches of nature would have disappeared if the author had not, to reduce his volume to the size deemed by his publisher most promising of profit, omitted all his numerous and curious notes. Kaloolah was followed in 1850 by _The Berber, or the Mountaineer of the Atlas_, a story of Spain and Morocco, about the close of the seventeenth century. As a novel it is decidedly better than Kaloolah; it displays greater skill in narration, and is written in the same pure, distinct and nervous English. Dr. Mayo thoroughly understood from observation as well as study all the accessories of his subject, and we are mistaken if any recent book on northern Africa gives a more clear, spirited or just impression of its scenery or of the character and manners of its people. The hero is of the highest style of the half-barbarian chiefs of the country and time; born a Christian, educated a Mohamedan, and ambitious to free his tribe from the domination of the Moors, and to found a new empire, with a higher civilization than was ever known to the race he leads; and other characters have enough adventures, dimly sketched, to fill the circles of a dozen tragedies if brought more near the eye. The faults of the book are, an excess of incident, discursiveness preventing proper unity and proportion, and a confessed failure of the story to evolve all the intended moralities, which the author therefore in some cases brings forward in his own person.