PIERCE FALCON.
TILE best features of this novel are the goodness of its style, anti a certain elevated tone of composition, apparently caught from a careful study of the best modern fictions. In other respects, it is but a thing of shreds and patches : the story improbable ; the in- cidents borrowed, and so changed that their parents would scarcely recognize their offspring; the characters treated in a similar way. Pierce Falcon himself is an exaggeration of that most exagge- rated person the mail-coach-robbing nephew in the Nowlans ; with this difference against the imitation, that B ANI NI'S man figured in Ireland, whilst Pierce Falcon plans his robberies, carries on his in• trigues, and, in gipsy guise, evades the police-officers, in matter-of- fact England. Mr. Morton, the benevolent humorist, who acts the part which the ancient machinery assigned to the gods, of rescu- ing the actors from difficulties which were insuperable to common mortals, is, perhaps, taken from the Antiquary, though smacking more of the wonder-working old men of a lower style of novels. The gipsy mother is an inferior Meg Merrilies ; and the other charac- ters show as little either of original observation or skilful borrowing. Yet, with all these defects, there is a natural power about the writer, which seems to show, that with a snore extended expe- rience of life, an imitation of nature instead of books, and a care- ful eschewing of the vulgar romantic, she may yet produce a work of fiction of no mean rank.
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