The author has moreover been guilty of a very strange mistake in his geography. He makes his hero swim, "Leander-like," over the majestic James,--which according to our reckoning, and agreeably to the map of the country--would have landed him on the _south side_, in the very respectable county of _Surry_;--but, to our utter amazement, the next glimpse we have of him, he is rushing on his fleet courser into the wilderness on the margin of the Chickahomony,--which our best informed geographers have placed on the _north_ side of the ancient _Powhatan_,--now called _James river_. Such mistakes are altogether inexcusable,--and the more so as the author is a native of the "Old Dominion," and ought to have been more circumspect in his topography. Equally unfortunate is his arrangement of historical events,--for if he had looked a little into our early writers, he would have found that Bacon was never carried prisoner to the Eastern Shore; and that the treachery of Larimore, did not betray the insurgent squadron into the power of Berkeley, until _after_ the destruction of Jamestown. These errors in chronology however, might have been forgiven, if the author had otherwise redeemed himself from equally formidable objections. The whole story of the Recluse,--and the miraculous preservation of Bacon when an infant, as related by the old nurse,--strike us as evincing poverty of invention, and as altogether too absurd for an ordinary writer at least to use as materials for romance. Scott, perhaps, might have turned them to some advantage;--at all events, the matchless vigor and beauty of his style, would have thrown a veil over other imperfections. The author might have made something of Wyanokee, but unfortunately failed to do it,--and we cannot say that we even felt interested in the sorrows of Virginia Fairfax. The girl is well enough--very pretty--amiable--and all that, but she wants force and individuality of character. The whole scene in which the dying Mrs. Fairfax is exhibited in the bloody conflict with the Indians in the neighborhood of Richmond, is particularly horrible, and in wretchedly bad taste. In taking our leave of the author, we would also advise him, when he writes another romance, to "sink the shop,"--or rather the _profession_; and not to describe the wounds and bruises of his _dramatis personæ_ with that technical precision which only surgeons and anatomists can fully comprehend. We would also recommend to him, as a medical man, that when any unlucky hero of his is hereafter tied to an Indian stake, by all means to have him rescued before the pine splinters have actually pierced the flesh,--especially when that hero is made so soon thereafter to perform a series of active exploits requiring sound bodily health and great muscular exertion.