custom, to delay as long as possible the main interest of a novel--no doubt with the very laudable intention of making it the more intense when it does at length arrive. Now for our own parts we can see little difference in being amused with the beginning or with the end of a book, but have a decided preference for those rare volumes which are so lucky as to amuse us throughout. And such a book is the one before us. We enter _at once_ into the spirit and meaning of the author--we are introduced _at once_ to the prominent characters--and we go with them _at once_, heart and hand, in the various and spirit-stirring adventures which befall them. Horse-Shoe Robinson, who derives his nick-name of Horse-Shoe (his proper _prænomen_ being Galbraith)--from the two-fold circumstance of being a blacksmith, and of living in a little nook of land hemmed in by a semi-circular bend of water, is fullly entitled to the character of "an original." He is the life and soul of the drama--the bone and sinew of the book--its very breath--its every thing which gives it strength, substance, and vitality. Never was there a rarer fellow--a more laughable blacksmith--a more gallant Sancho. He is a very prince at an ambuscade, and a very devil at a fight. He is a better edition of Robin Hood--quite as sagacious--not half so much of a coxcomb--and infinitely more moral. In short, he is the man of all others we should like to have riding by our side in any very hazardous expedition. We think Mr. K. has been particularly successful in the delineation of his female characters; and this is saying a great deal at a time when, from some unaccountable cause, almost every attempt of the kind has turned out a failure. Mildred Lindsay, in her confiding love, in her filial reverence, in her heroic espousal of the revolutionary cause, not because she approved it, but because it was her lover's, is an admirable and--need we say more?--a truly _feminine_ portrait. Then the ardent, the eager, the simple-minded, the generous and the devoted Mary Musgrove! Most sincerely did we envy John Ramsay, the treasure of so pure and so exalted an affection!