Boston Evening Traveller, 3 June 1856.

Mr. Herman Melville is a very imaginative writer, and is so prone to travel into the mystic regions of fairy land, that it is very seldom he can be either appreciated or understood. The "Piazza Tales" are six in number; five of them, though gorgeous in their way, are all deeply tinged with this peculiarity; but it is of the sixth only, a sketch entitled "Bartleby," that we propose to speak; and we have no hesitation in saying that for originality of invention and grotesqueness of humor, it is equal to anything from the pen of Dickens, whose writings it closely resembles, both as to the character of the sketch and the peculiarity of the style. Bartleby is a silent old clerk in a lawyer's office, whose ghost-like taciturnity becomes at length such an annoyance to his master that he resolves to dismiss him; but Bartleby refuses to go, "prefers not to," and haunts the premises in spite of every attempt to get rid of him, till he has at length to be forced from the place. The quaint explanation of his extraordinary silence comes at length: he had spent nearly all his former life in the Dead Letter Office at Washington. It is a splendidly-told tale, which of itself renders the volume of value.