"Still, the faults of the book are of the most serious kind. It is incomplete in plan: for it is neither a regular narrative, nor a treatise, nor a commentary, nor a history, nor an article for a review--but something of all five. As we have said, it is written in a tone highly excited and partial; and it has the misfortune to appear before the world as the exponent of seemingly a new, but in reality of an old and familiar, doctrine, by employing examples and reasonings of which very few people indeed will not be able to detect at once either the sophistry or the incompleteness. "We forbear to enter into any general discussion on the well-worn topics of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritan settlements. The verdict of an impartial age has been long ago pronounced on these questions: and we may well deplore the unsound judgment of any writer of the deserved eminence of Judge Haliburton who gratuitously brings upon himself an imputation of outrageous eccentricity by attempting to unsettle, on his own single authority, conclusions so well and so long established.... "There is a great deal said in these volumes in disparagement of the early New Englanders. They are stigmatized as turbulent, schismatic, dishonest, revolutionary, bigoted, cruel, and so on. These are old charges, which have been several times placed in their true light; and it is needless again to undertake a defence and to enter into explanations which are familiar to most educated persons. We are not the indiscriminate admirers of the policy pursued by the first colonists of Massachusetts Bay; but the course which they adopted, the communities which they built up, and the form of liberty which they introduced into the New World can be adequately understood only when surveyed from a comprehensive and impartial point of view. It is at best a shallow criticism which contents itself with the discovery that the settlers were religious zealots, and had no particular respect for either kings or bishops. ... "We close these volumes. We regret that the author has been so ill-advised as to publish them at all. They are well written, as we have said--and in some respects possess great merit; but truth compels us to add, that they are very unworthy of the author and of the great questions they profess to elucidate and discuss." A FEW QUESTIONS FROM A WORN-OUT LORGNETTE. WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE BY A. OAKEY HALL.