GREYSLAER, A ROMANcE or TILE MOHAWK. HOFFMAN is "favourably known"

as a rather eloquent describer of American scenery and hunting life, as well as a pleasant sketcher of back-wood manners. The tales introduced by him into his nar- ratives of' adventure and excursion, were not however, of a nature to impress the critic with a high opinion of his qualifications as a writer of fiction ; and Greyslaer will not induce any change in our former estimate of his abilities in this line of' composition. Whatever interest this romance may possess, arises from the nature of the subject ; the landscapes, manners, and incidents, for European readers, although they cannot

having all a novelty be called positively new. But these lbatures, though neces- sary in a fiction, are not its main essentials,—which consist in the power of constructing a story at once surprising and congruous, and of creating characters consistent. with nature, themselves, and the circumstances of their lives, as well as of' truly developing them in conduct, narrative, and dialogue. This power Mr. Horcmax has not. Perhaps, too, those finniliar with his former publications, will trace some want of freshness, something like repetition, in Greyslacr; as if he had thrown the first fruits of his experience into works more congenial to his mind and the materials he had accumulated.

The time of Grryslaer is the American War of Independence ; the scene is laid in the interior of the state of New York, adjacent to the Canada frontier ; and the incidents of' the romance, so far as they refer to the general circumstances of' the period, em- brace the incidents of border war and border characters, as well as the effects of civil strife in a small community of' colonists, where personal feelings lend a fiercer exasperation to political strife. Mixed with these things, is the once celebrated Brant and his Mohawk bands ; together with an incidental sketch of the territorial aristocracy which was here and there established in the state of New York, as in other provinces of America, and whose total destruction in or after the Revolution was not perhaps so great a good as the Americans deem.

To these matters of historical interest is, of course, added a love- tale. Greyslaer is a day-dreaming student, incited into a cou- rageous and prudent patriot leader by the necessities of the times ; and is by this means improved into the good graces of his high- spirited mistress. But the lady has been formerly abducted by the villain of the tale, and forced into a fraudulent marriage : whence distress enough. It is however further thickened by a second abduction, and a confinement in a cave ; and when the marriage is proved to be fictitious, the lady's character is attacked by her enemy ; and her lover, accused of' his murder, in conse- quence of' an attempt at vengeance, is put on trial for his life.

It may be questioned whether a subject of this kind, where the distress originates in mere violence unaccompanied by any mental II:eitkuess or fault, is proper fer fiction. But waving this, the mate- rials are not well worked up by Mr. HOFFMAN. lie has half a, dozen objects in view, each presented almost independently. So.menmes the primreval landscapes of America's woods and moun- tains are the principal feature ; then, the adventures and man- ners of hthiters and Indians: then, the character and persons of the Period, as preserved by tradition or the historians of the border wars ; anon, the whole story is stopped whilst a battle is transferred bodily from the pages of the annali:t to those of the novelist. No doubt the fbrtunes of Greyslaer and Alida de Boos are generally hooked on in some way or other to these extraneous subjects ; but the connivance is too forced to escape notice. The scenes, too, in which the pair appear, are melodramatic and improbable. There is indeed a constant struggle between the author's experience of life and his notions of the romantic ; so that whilst his persons in general are such as the coarseness and lawlessness of' a colonial border life would be likely to engender, his hero and heroine stand out from the rest in all the contrast of spangle finery. From this cause, and a want of skilful arrangement, matter, which really has a value in itself, produces less eflect than it would have done if Presented singly as descriptions of nature or historical reminis- cences. Here is a sample of the latter kind.

COLONIAL MIL WARS.

In the province of New York, hundreds were from time to time suddenly

and secretly torn from among their friends, and carried away to captivity or death. Nor was there any feature of the civil war during that painful seven years' struggle, more appalling than this ; the boldness of the act, for it was frequently practised in the most populous districts in an armed neighbourhood, in the very capital of the province itself; struck dismay into the families of those who were thus abducted, and the cruel doubt and mystery which shrouded their fate was not less frightful ; for while some, with shattered constitutions and spirits broken by confinement, returned from the prisons of Canada after the war was over, yet many were never heard of by their friends from the moment of their disappearance, and their destiny is enigmatical to this day. Nor was it only the influential partisan or his active adherent that was thus subjected to this hideous because secret danger, the hostages, as they were called, time victims, as they were in reality, were taken, like those of the secret tribunal in Germany, from either sex amid from any class of society. The homes of the aged and infirm, of the young and the lovely, were alike subject to the terrible visitation.

The gay guest who waved a blithe adieu to the friends who were but now planning some merry meeting for the morrow, was seen to mount his horse and turn sonic angle of the road in safety ; but the steed and his rider were never traced afterward. The hospitable, festive host, who left the revel for a moment to cool his temples in the evening air, and whose careless jest, as he passed to the porch without, still rung in the cars of his impatient friends, never again touched with his lips the glass that had been filled for him in his absence. The waking infant cried vainly for the nursing mother, who had left it to be watched by another for a moment.

The distracted bridegroom and fierce brother sought vainly for the maid, whose bridal toilet seemed just to have been completed, when, by invisible hands, she was spirited away from her father's halls.

INDIANS ARRAYING.

SIIII had got low in the heavens by the time the warriors were all in-rayed for battle, and the important task of putting on the war-paint was concluded. His level beams shot through the tree-tops on the opposite shore, and glancing luridly upon the broad stream that flowed in front of the Iroquois camp, lighted

a grotesque array of forms and times mirrored, in every variety of attitude, in the tranquil river.

" Good! " said an Indian, who had just completed his barbaric toilet, and still lingered, surveying the result with childish gratification in the tide that rolled at his feet, " Very good : Squinandosh is a great man. The Sacondaga is a happy stream to reflect a face so terrible as las. (3o, river, and bear his image in thy current, vi bile men tremble along thy shores as they see it float by. Go, river, and tell the great lake into which thou poorest that thou hast seen Squinandosh." " Who is greater than Kan-au-gon," cried another, rising with solemn gravity

from the position in which he had crouched, " the bravest of the men, who surpass all others, paints not, he, to make his features terrible, but to hide the countenance from which, if seen, his enemies would fly so fast his bullets would never overtake tlivni."

" Behold, Au-neli-yesli : look well upon the tall one," said a third warrior,

with the same Homeric diffidence of self-praise. " It is the blood of fifty White warriors that besprinkle his forehead. 1 hear their widows and childremi howling after their scalps, which shall dry in the smoke of his lodge ; but what hand can ever reach up to the scalp of him who walks with his head among the clouds."

One youth, more.sentimentally given, seemed to regret only that there were

none of the softer sex present to yield their admiration to the gallant figure that he made in his own eyes. Rejoicing in the possession of a bit of broken looking-glass, this animated personage paused ever and anon to elaborate his toilet with some additional grace as lie strutted about like a bantam-cock,

" Where are the maids of the :Mohawk, who love to look upon such

it man as Le Petit Soldat ? Where is Tze-gevinda, the fawn-eyed girl of the Unadilla ? And she whose feet move like a rippling brook, when the hawks' bells tinkle around her slender ankles in the dance, the laughing Ivalette ? Where Waneka, of the willowy form, and Ch'erie, whose eyes outsparkle those of' Ononthio's daughters at Montreal? Where is she, whose foot-falls leave no print behind them in the greensward or snow-drift ; she who steals upon men's hearts they know not whence or how ? Where is the Spreading Dew ?' Let each of them come, look upon Le Petit Soldat, and sigh to be the squaw of such a warrior."

" The little Opossum is a great painter," added yet another of these heroic

worthies; " none but a medicine can find out his secret for mixing colours. Owanego has not yet breathed in the nostrils of the man that is meant to kill him. This island lias but one such warrior. Who but 'the little Opossum ' can kill the little Opossum ? "

As the night closed in they lighted their torches, formed of the pitchy knots

of the yellow pine ; ana their barbaric boasting grew still more extravagant as they tossed them wildly in the war-dance. But here the demoniac forms, their distorted features, and ferocious gesticulations, as they moved in savage mea- sure to the deep roll of the Indian drum, gave at least a fiendish dignity to the scene in the eyes of the European. It seell)C(1 its if the yawning earth had released a troop of daemons from below to practice for a while their mad antics in the uppur air ; and the Briton shuddered as he thought of such a hellislt crew being let loose to work their will upon his rebellious CUUDIryttlell.

A FOREST SCENE.

It was midsummer: the bright green of June had departed from lea and meadow, and the brooks, even where their coarse lay through some grassy orchard half sheltered by the spreading fruit-trees, had shrunk and dwindled in their channels ; lout here, tinning the dank shadows of primieval woods, their currents still danced along tvith all the freshness of spring time. Here, too, the shrubs upon their hanks still wore flue delicate tints of early summer; for the canopy of dense fbliage above the!» shut out the scorching heat. The birds of song, which in the opening and closing year are seldom heard in our deep forests, had now left the clearings, which tiler delighted with their warblings in the mating season, and flitted through the cool and verdant aisles that opened around on every side; now glancing sportively around the seamed and columnar trunks of the 'missed trees, and now skimming high in air, but still sheltered by the clustering architrave of interlacing boughs above them. It win; noolaitle ; but the freshness of early dawn, and the mellow gloom of deep- ening twilight were commingled in those forest glades.