What he means for his more elevated characters are tiresome with something of that melodramatic sentimentality with which Mr. Dickens has infected so much of the lighter literature of the day.  Here and there the style suffers from that overmuchness of unessential detail and that exaggeration of particulars which Mr. Dickens brought into fashion and seems bent on wearing out of it,—­a style which is called graphic and poetical by those only who do not see that it is the cheap substitute, in all respects equal to real plate, (till you try to pawn it for lasting fame,) introduced by writers against time, or who forget that to be graphic is to tell most with fewest penstrokes, and to be poetical is to suggest the particular in the universal.  We earnestly hope, that, instead of trying to do what no one can do well, Mr. Trowbridge will wisely stick close to what he has shown that no one can do better.

“The Old Battle-Ground,” whose name bears but an accidental relation to the story, is an interesting and well-constructed tale, in which Mr. Trowbridge has introduced what we believe is a new element in American fiction, the French Canadian.  The plot is simple and not too improbable, and the characters well individualized.  Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed figures.  The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo and Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching.  Indeed, there is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, unpleasant as patchouli.  Generally, however, it has the merit of unobtrusiveness,—­a rare piece of self-denial nowadays, when authors have found out, and the public has not, how very easy it is to make the public cry, and how much the simple creature likes it, as if it had not sorrows enough of its own.  But it is in his more ordinary characters that Mr. Trowbridge fairly shows himself as an original and delightful author.  His boys are always masterly.  Nothing could be truer to Nature, more nicely distinguished as to idiosyncrasy, while alike in expression and in limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story.  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.