on the history of Cataline, a work which must be classed with the most remarkable of those specimens of literary art in which it has been attempted to illustrate classical scenes, characters, and manners.

In romantic fiction, besides the above works, Mr. Herbert has written for the magazines of this country and Great Britain tales and sketches sufficient to make twenty to thirty stout volumes. The subjects of his best performances have been drawn from the middle ages and from southern Europe, and they display besides very eminent capacities for the historical novel, and a familiarity with the institutions of chivalry and with contemporary manners hardly equaled in any writer of the English language.

In 1839 Mr. Herbert commenced in the New-York Turf Register a series of papers, under the signature of "Frank Forester," from which have grown My Shooting Box, The Warwick Woodlands, Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces, and Fish and Fishing in the United States and British Provinces-works which by the general consent of the sporting world are second to none in their department, in any of the qualities which should distinguish this sort of writing. The principal distinction between these and all other sporting works lies in this, that such works in general treat only of game in the field and flood, and the modes of killing it, while these are in great part natural histories, containing minute and carefully digested accounts of every specie of game, beast, bird, and fish, compiled from Audubon, Wilson, Giraud, Godman, Agassiz, De Kay, and other authorities, besides long disquisitions into their habits, times of migration, breeding, &c., from the personal observation and experience of the author. Any person is at once enabled by

them to distinguish between any two even closely allied species, and to adopt the proper nomenclature, with a knowledge of the reason for it. The sporting precepts are admitted, throughout the western country especially, to be superior to all others, as well as the papers relating to the breaking and the kennel and field management of dogs, &c. The same may be said of what he has written of guns and gunnery. Mr. Herbert has hunted, shot, and fished during the last twenty years in every state of the Union, from Maine to Maryland, south of the great lakes, and from below Quebec to the Sault St. Marie northward of them. Not having visited the southern or south western states, the accounts of sporting in those regions are collected from the writings or oral communications of their best sportsmen, and on these points much valuable new information, especially as to the prairie shooting and the sports of the Rocky Mountains, will be contained in the new edition of the Field Sports to appear in the coming autumn.

Besides his contributions to romantic and sporting literature, Mr. Herbert has written largely in criticism, he has done much as a poet, and his capacities in classical scholarship have been illustrated by some of the finest examples of Greek and Latin translation that have appeared in our time. In the aggregate his works would now make scarcely less than fifty octavo volumes.

As we have intimated, the portrait at the beginning of this article is remarkably good. Mr. Herbert is about five feet ten high, of athletic habits, and an untiring and fast walker; fond, of course, of all field sports, especially horsemanship and shooting, and priding himself upon killing as much if not more game than any other gentleman in the country out of New-York.

curs the following description of Trenton Falls:

"Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature which bears the name is a tremendous torrent, whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into the earth-a roaring and dashing stream, so far below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that you would think, as you come suddenly upon the edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer circle of the firmament,) and laid open by some Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust of this shallow earth.' The idea is rather assisted if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness.

"They showed me at Eleusis the well by which Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual visit to the plains of Thessaly-but with the genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared axle of the earth in the bed of this American river, and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton. I confess I have had, since my first descent into those depths,

globe

can

such a crack in its bottom!

"It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery that could be laid to the charge of the moon, for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver. It was a night in which to wish it might never be day again-a night to be enamored of the stars, and bid God bless them like human creatures on their bright journey-a night to love in, to dissolve in-to do every thing but what night is made forsleep! Oh heaven! when I think how precious is life in such moments; how the aroma-the celestial bloom and flower of the soul-the yearning and fast-perishing enthusiasm of youth-waste themselves in the solitude of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air; when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath influences that could inspire me with the elevation of a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity of devotion-when I think this, and feel this, and so waste my existence in vain yearnings-I could extinguish the divine spark within me like a lamp on an unvisited shrine, and thank Hea ven for an assimilation to the animals I walk among! And that is the substance of a speech I

made to Job as a sequitur of a well-meant remark of his own, that it was a pity Edith Linsey was not there.' He took the clause about the 'animals' to himself, and I made an apology for the same a year after. We sometimes give our friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our rhapsodies!

"Most people talk of the sublimity of Tren

ton, but I have haunted it by the week together for its mere loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of the thousand forms and shapes of running water that I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like a black rim on the inclosing precipices; the bed of the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock, and, with the tremendous descent of the stream-forming for miles one continuous succession of falls and rapids-the channel is worn into curves and cavities which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of half twilight below, with here and there a long beam of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating and changing echoes:

"Like a ring of bells whose sound the wind still alters,' maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying at every step with the varying phase of the current. Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet), occur frequently as you ascend; and it is from these that the place takes its name. But the falls, though beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequaled rapidity with which the waters come to the leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering down into the abysm from trees apparently painted on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it, you would think the vault of the steadfast heavens a flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of beauty that I

best remember is a smooth descent of some hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above, there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the angel that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his pocket, and had a natural redolence of 'Paradise Lost' in his conversation.)

"Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink), I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible when she borrows drapery of water; and Fire is so staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight; but water! soft, pure, graceful water! there is no shape into which you can throw her that she does not seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant as her own spray pearls and emeralds; Fire has no rubies like what she steals from the sunset; Air has no robes like the grace of her finewoven and ever-changing drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to WATER!

"Who is there that did not love some stream in his youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood, a spring or a rivu