For desultory reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably adapted.

There is not a page of it vacant or dull.

But he who takes it up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the incidents of his own narrative.

"How good it is, even as it is!--but if he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This, I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_.

The author's mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is; but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master, till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth been encountered..