novel, possess none of the same traits, and are not, in point of fact, identical. Sterling is a mere mountebank, without even the merit of being an original one: and his death-bed repentance is too ludicrously ill-managed, and altogether too manifestly out of place, to be mentioned any farther. Squire Schlachtenschlager, the Magistrate, is the best personification of a little brief authority in the person of a Dutchman, which it has ever been our good fortune to encounter. In regard to that purely mechanical portion of Dr. Bird's novel, which it would now be fashionable to denominate its _style_, we have very few observations to make. In general it is faultless. Occasionally we meet with a sentence ill-constructed--an inartificial adaptation of the end to the beginning of a paragraph--a circumlocutory mode of saying what might have been better said, if said with brevity--now and then with a pleonasm, as for example. "And if he wore a mask in his commerce with men, it was like that _iron_ one of the Bastile, which when put on, was put on for life, and was at the same time _of iron_,"--not unfrequently with a bull proper, videlicet. "As he spoke there came into the den, eight men attired like the two first _who were included in the number_." But we repeat that upon the whole the style of the novel--if that may be called its style, which style is not--is at least _equal_ to that of any American writer whatsoever. In the style _properly_ so called--that is to say in the prevailing tone and manner which give character and individuality to the book, we cannot bring ourselves to think that Dr. Bird has been equally fortunate. His subject appears always ready to fly away from him. He dallies with it continually--hovers incessantly round {46} it, and about it--and not until driven to exertion by the necessity of bringing his volumes to a close, does he finally grasp it with any appearance of energy or good will. The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow is composed with great inequality of manner--at times forcible and manly--at times sinking into the merest childishness and imbecility. Some portions of the book, we surmise, were either not written by Dr. Bird, or were written by him in moments of the most utter mental exhaustion. On the other hand, the reader will not be disappointed, if he looks to find in the novel many--very many well sustained passages of great eloquence and beauty. We open the book at random, and one presents itself immediately to our notice. If Dr. Bird has a general manner at all--a question which we confess ourselves unable to decide--the passage which we are about to quote is a very fair, although perhaps rather too favorable specimen of that manner.