14 NOVEMBER 1863, Page 21

A Ramble through North Wales. By Damon. (Hamilton, Adams, and

Co.)—This would be a very agreeable and sensible little book if there were less wit and less fine writing. During the first half of his tour the author was accompanied by a friend whom he is pleased to call Pythias. This is all very well, if they did not choose to give their names—one assumed name is as good as another. But why, when Pythias went home and the author's wife joined him, he could not call her my wife, instead of Xantippe, we are at a loss to understand. Not only, however, is she Xantippe, but she is further distinguished by comic epithets, such as the "agile," the " gentle," the "disconsolate," and the "drenched." The reader must also be prepared to laugh when a pudding is called " an indigenous article of farinaceous, saccharine, and frugiferous composition ;" and not to laugh when the ascent of Snowdon is described as follows :—" Hitherto our way, though fatiguing, had been perfectly safe, but having arrived at the termination of the zigzag part, the real terrors and dangers of the path beset us. . . . For about 300 yards the pathway here, about two feet wide, skirts between heaven and earth along the steep sides of a rounded eminence. Looking above, we cannot see the top, turning to gaze below, an eternity yawned to receive us. . . . This ridge is certainly sublime, awakening in the mind uncontrollable emotions." Perhaps very few people who have walked up Snowdon had any adequate idea, before Damon described it, of the magnitude of their achievement. The book is, nevertheless, readable, and even pleasant, and his scheme for a tour is not beyond the ideas of ordinary people. He does not propose to walk twenty miles a day, or anything of that sort ; so that it would make a very good guide-book for quiet people, with the addition of Collins' sixpenny map of North Wales.