A Nile Journal. By T. G. Appleton. (Macmillan.)—Mr. Appleton modestly
says in his dedication that his is " like a thousand other journals, full of trivial details, and without learning or eloquence." Our impression is that, if it has a fault, it is sometimes a trifle too eloquent. But it is decidedly interesting, and remarkably successful in giving a certain freshness to descriptions that have been done before times without number. If it is success in a traveller to make his readers wish to follow his steps, Mr. Appleton has succeeded. He gives one a strong sense of the delightfulness of life on the Nile, though he is honest enough to confess that there, as here, there is an east wind, or something just as disagreeable.
NEW Eorriows.—We are glad to see a second edition of a really humorous book, full of good drawing and fan. Mrs. Mundi at Home, Lines and Outlines. By Walter Crane. (Marcus Ward and Co.)—Mr. 'Walter Crane has almost John Leech's art of making a pretty face with two or three strokes of the pen. What an admirable picture, to name one out of many, is that which is illustrated in these lines !- "Dame Europe was there, in the last Paris passion,
Miss America, too, in identical fashion; With Asia and Africa picking their crumbs, And Australia melting her gold sugar-plums."
The ox-eyed beauty of Asia and the chubby infancy of Australia are capital. —We have also a new edition of Mr. Timbs's very entertaining book of anecdotes, Doctors and Patients (Bentley and Son); of Mr. Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (Smith, Elder, and Co.) ; of The Naggletons, 'and Miss Violet and her Offers, by Shirley Brookes (Bradbury, Agnew, and Co.)—In the " new cheap edition " of Mr. Nicholas Mitchell's poetical works, we have Famous Women and Heroes (Tegg), and a a people's edition " of Spiritual Songs, by John S. B. Monsell (Longmans), a little. volume to which a melancholy interest attaches, from the fact that the sheets were passing through the press during the fatal illness which terminated the life of its estimable author.—Messrs. Sampson Low and Co. publish M. Jules Verne's popular books in "an authorised, illustrated edition." We have before us The Blockade-Runners, Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, A Floating City, Five Weeks in a Balloon, From the Earth to the Moon, and its sequel, Around the Moon. —The Devil's Chain, by Edward Jenkins, M.P. (Strahan), has reached a tenth thousand.
Messrs. Marcus Ward and Co. have sent us a box of very pretty Easter Cards. The 'institution of pictorial missives of this kind is getting, perhaps, a little overdone; but if such cards are to be issued at all, it would be difficult to find more skilfully executed ones than these.
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