University of Virginia Library

“The scene of the present story is laid in the city of New York, ere that metropolis had
encircled within her broad arms the extent of territory which now marks her limits. Fortunes
were made for men in those days while they were sleeping, in the rapid increase of
the value of real estate; and the author makes one of those vast accumulations the groundwork
of a plot of no common order. The time runs through some fifteen or sixteen years;
embracing the boyhood and early manhood of the hero. He has vividly portrayed the
baneful effects of avarice—the deep-dyed villany, the bartering of soul necessary to gratify
that passion by dishonest means—the one engrossing idea leading the miser, ignus-fatuus
like, step by step, till at last he sees that for which he has toiled and sinned, at the very
moment of fancied possession, fade like a vision from his grasp. He has depieted unrewarded
toil struggling for an honest subsistence; but while he has drawn a contrast between
worthy poverty, and the unblessed wealth of him who accumulates it for itself
alone; he has not drawn from the purlieus of over-grown cities those degrading pictures so
frequently found in modern literature, which shock the sensibilities, while they may not
fail to interest us. He has shown, what should be the prime object of all story-writers,
whose works reach directly the million, the complete triumph of virtue over duplicity and
crime—the utter fallacy of lasting success as the result of dishonest practices. The hero
is a creation—in which the author has shown himself no mere painter, but an artist. In
all our reading of fiction, or in every-day life, we do not remember to have seen his like
before; the meek, enduring youth; the forbearing, long-suffering, generous man—in short,
the practical Christian. The style of the author is graceful and highly polished, with no
marked attempts at fine writing, but equal throughout; and the incidents stirring and interesting—that
of the death of the hero intensely thrilling.”