HORSE-SHOE ROBINSON: a Tale of the Tory Ascendency, was published by John Pendleton Kennedy in 1835 with a dedication to Washington Irving, whose 'Bracebridge Hall) Kennedy had already followed in his charming and truthful 'Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion) (1832). Cooper, not Irving, however, furnished the model for the later book, with the difference that whereas Cooper relied largely upon invention for his plots, Kennedy took plot as well as topography, and costume almost directly from fact. In deed, he founded the career of Horse-Shoe Robinson upon that of an actual partisan, one Galbraith Robinson, a blacksmith, whom he had met in South Carolina in 1819, ,and who later approved the record as authentic —"excepting about them women, which I disremember," he said. The love affair thus referred to is, as in. most historical romances of the period, pale and conventional, but it is overshadowed by stirring adventures drawn boldly upon a broad canvas. The story opens with Charleston in
British hands and carries the account excitingly through all the fratricidal violence of Whigs and Tories to the crucial, decisive battle of King's Mountain, which in 1835 already be longed to the folklore of the Carolinas. Ro mance as it is, 'Horse-Shoe Robinson) has genuine historical value for its representations of Revolutionary manners in the South. The leading personage, though full of the simple virtues with which the early republic endowed. its heroes, just misses greatness by the lack of the touch of genius and poetry which made Leather-Stocking supreme in the class to which,, however, Horse-Shoe Robinson also be longs.