d with considerable artistic
skill.

Though the most really prominent person in the drama, he is, in the
representation, kept in the background,--a cynical, sneering, brilliant
demi-devil, who appears only when some plot against innocence is
beginning its wiles or approaching its consummation.

The incidents of the novel occur in some of the best-known localities
of New York. Nobody can mistake Chuzzlewit Hotel and Chrysalis College.
Every traveller has put up at the first and visited some literary
or artistic friend at the second. Indeed, Winthrop seems to have
deliberately chosen the localities of his story with the special
purpose of showing that passions almost as terrible as those which are
celebrated in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles may rage in the
ordinary lodging-houses of New York. He has succeeded in throwing an
atmosphere of mystery over places which are essentially commonplace;
and he has done it by the intensity with which he has conceived and
represented the internal thoughts, struggles, and emotions of the men
and women by whom these edifices of brick and stone are inhabited.

Though a clear narrator, when the story required clear narration,
Winthrop perfectly understood the art of narrating by implication and
allusion. He paints distinctly and minutely, not omitting a single
detail, when the occasion demands such faithful representation of real
facts and localities; but he has also the power of flashing his meaning
by suggestive hints which the most labored description and explication
could not make more effective. He makes the mind of the reader work
sympathetically with his own in building up the idea he seeks to convey.
Crimes which are nameless are mutually understood by this refined
communion between author and reader. The mystery of the plot is not
directly explained, but each party seems to bring, as in private
conversation, his individual sagacity to bear upon the right
interpretation.

The style of the book is admirable. It is brief almost to abruptness.
The words are few, and are crammed with all the meaning they can hold.
There is not a page which does not show that the writer is an economist
of expression, and desirous of conveying his matter with the slightest
possible expenditure of ink. Charles Reade himself does not condense
with a more fretful impatience of all circumlocution and a profounder
reliance on the absolute import of single words.

We might easily refer to part