n
of the Hampton Labyrinth, and with about as much real profit or
amusement.

It is a melancholy sign of the times to learn that such hackneyed
English trash as _The Channings_ has sold well! It has not deserved it.
American novels which have appeared nearly cotemporaneously with it, and
which have ten times its merit, have not met with the same success, for
the simple and sole reason that almost any English circulating library
stuff will at any time meet with better patronage than a home work. When
our public becomes as much interested in itself as it is in the very
common-place life of Cockney clergymen and clerks, we shall perhaps
witness a truly generous encouragement of native literature.

THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND. A Story of the Coast of Maine.
By Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

In reading this quiet, natural, well-pictured narrative of Northern
life, we are tempted to exclaim--fresh from the extraordinary contrast
presented by _Agnes of Sorrento--O si sic omnes!_ Why can not Mrs. Stowe
_always_ write like this? Why not limit her efforts to subjects which
develop her really fine powers--to setting forth the social life of
America at the present day, instead of harping away at the seven times
worn out and knotted cord of Catholic and Italian romance? _The Pearl of
Orr's Island_, though not a work which will sweep Uncle Tom-like in
tempest fashion over all lands and through all languages, is still a
very readable and very refreshing novel--full of reality as we find it
among real people, 'inland or on sounding shore,' and by no means
deficient in those moral and religious lessons to inculcate which it
appears to have been written. Piety is indeed the predominant
characteristic of the work--not obtrusive or sectarian, but earnest and
actual; so that it will probably be classed, on the whole, as a
religious novel, though we can hardly recall a romance in which the
pious element interferes so little with the general interest of the
plot, or is so little conducive to gloom. The hard, '_Angular_ Saxon'
characteristics of the rural people who constitute the _dramatis
personae_, their methods of thought and tone of feeling, so singularly
different from that of 'the world,' their marked peculiarities, are all
set forth with an apparently unconscious ability deserving the highest
praise.

THE GOLDEN HOUR. By MONOURE D. CONWAY, Author of
the 'Rejected Stone,' '_Impera Par