As the fidelity to nature, in the character of the principal actors, must always be one of the highest sources of interest to a critical reader, we shall notice very briefly, the manner in which the author of the "Insurgents" has succeeded in the _personnel_ of his descriptions. The old Colonel, the father of Henry Eustace, is exactly such a personage as every reader may have met with--brave, generous, careless, and ignorant, he is, perhaps, a very correct picture of the better part of the _ancien regime_ of our colonial and revolutionary times. Without any striking peculiarities of character, and playing but a subaltern part in the story, he only appears as a piece of the family furniture, brought into play, by the casual location of the scene. The reader has no cause to regret the slightness of the acquaintance. The Colonel's second son, Tom, is but an appendage to the story. Henry, one of the heroes, begins in the army, a mischief loving, rule breaking, but active and gallant youth; and in the progress of the story, becomes an eloquent, restless, rebellious demagogue--stirring up insurrection among the people--defending in the Legislature, with consummate ability, their pretended wrongs and actual treason; and upon one occasion, displaying in the field, the chivalrous courage of his hot and impatient years. He is, however, always honorable and sincere. His treason is infatuation, and his _demagogueism_ (if we may coin a much wanted word,) the frenzy of passion and thoughtlessness. Talbot, on the contrary, is bold and eloquent; a brave soldier, and an accomplished advocate; but a cunning and unprincipled politician, who, in the beginning of his career, espouses the cause of the malcontents, as the only means of securing the representation of his native village in the Legislature, and as quickly abandons it, when a higher office is promised him by the friends of the government, as the price of his desertion. Dr. Talbot, a country physician "of long practice and high repute," is an abrupt, rough, but good natured disciple of Esculapius, and seems to have been intended for no other purpose, than to enable the author to discharge his wit at the expense of some of the ill mannered admirers of the surly blackguardism of the Abernethy school of medical gentility. Of the two heroines, Mary Talbot is a thoughtful, reserved, bright eyed _blue_; Elizabeth Eustace is younger, and prettier, but more entirely the child of nature. Neither of them, however, say or act any thing that can distinguish them from the common _materiel_ of all novel-women, and serve rather the necessities of the plot, than the illustration of any of the more touching or exalted beauties of female character. Of the _Dii minorum gentium_--the lower order of character, Zeek Morehouse, a worthless understrapper about the old Colonel's domestic establishment--Hezekiah Brindle, another domestic, who, when fortune had abandoned the standard of the Insurgents, with the most