To this latter class of novels, based on what may be called the centrifugal forces of wedlock, "Christian's Mistake" perhaps belongs. Its clear and practised style is refreshing, after the comparative crudeness of some other recent treatises on the same theme; the characters are human, not wooden, and the whole treatment healthful and noble.
"Uncle Silas" is the climax of the sensational, and goes as far beyond Mrs. Wood as she beyond Miss Braddon, or she beyond reason and comfortable daylight reading.
_The Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, Bart._ By WILLIAM L. STONE. Albany: J. Munsell.
We well remember the interest with which, more than twenty years ago, we heard that Mr. William L. Stone was preparing a life of Sir William Johnson. His collection of material was very large, comprising several thousands of original letters, besides a great mass of other papers. He had written, however, but a small part of his work, when death put a period to his labors, and the documents which he had gathered with such enthusiastic industry seemed destined to remain a crude mass of undigested material. We think it fortunate for all students of American history, that a son, bearing his name and inheriting in the fullest measure his capacity for the work, has undertaken its completion, partly from affection and a sense of duty, and partly, it is evident, from a natural aptitude.
In the whole range of American history no other personage appears so remarkable in character and so important in influence, and at the same time so little known to general readers, as Sir William Johnson. The reason is, that his great powers were exercised on a theatre which, though vast and wellnigh boundless, was exterior to the familiar field of political action. Yet on the single influence of this man depended at times the prosperity and growth of all the British American colonies. Could France have won his influence in her behalf, England could not have broken that rival power in America without an exhausting expenditure of men and treasure, and without leaders of a different stamp from the blockheads with whom she long continued to paralyze her Cisatlantic armies. At the darkest crisis of the last French War, the influence of Johnson alone saved the English colonies from the miseries which would have ensued from the enmity of the powerful confederacy of the Six Nations; and for many years after, in his capacity of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, he continued to exercise an unparalleled power over the tribes of the interior, soothing their jealousies, composing their quarrels, and protecting them with equal justice, benevolence, and ability from the fraud and outrage of encroaching whites.