Nick
Whickson, too, the good-natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and
everybody's way till he finds his natural vocation as an aid to a dealer
in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy
is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the
"heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief and long-lost
relative line.
We are safe in assigning to Mr. Trowbridge a rank quite above that of
our legion of washy novelists; he seems to have a definite purpose and
an ambition for literary as well as popular success, and we hope that
by study and observation he will be true to a very decided and peculiar
talent. We violate no confidence in saying that the graceful poem, "At
Sea," which first appeared in the "Atlantic," and which, under the name
of now one, now another author, has been deservedly popular, was written
by Mr. Trowbridge.
JULY REVIEWED BY SEPTEMBER.
The Editors of the "Atlantic," of course, have universal knowledge
(with few exceptions) at their fingers' ends,--that is, they possess
an Encyclopaedia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable
information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the
motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the
liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set
of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by
assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the
books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed
glibness in pronouncing himself on certain topics.
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