Brazil and the Brazilians ; Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive
Sketches. By Rev. James C. Fletcher and Rev. D. P. Kidder, D.D. Ninth Edition, Revised. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Much as Brazil has been bewritten of late, the standard work on the subject is still the well-known book of Mr. Fletcher and Dr. Kidder. No better proof of this could be given than the appearance of a ninth edition. Containing a hundred pages of new matter, commercial, historical, and geographical, with admirable index and appendices, and with numer- ous and well-executed Must stens, this is now, beyond comparison, the book of Brazil, such a book as Sydney Smith would have revelled in reading and reviewing, as a relief to the castigation of a perse- cuting Bishop or a noodle in high place. The writers, however, at this time of day might have weeded out a few of tho flowers of the rhetoric of the first edition. No doubt the land of "mighty rivers and virgin forests, palm trees and jaguars, anacondas and alligators, howling monkeys and screaming parrots, diamond-mining, revolutions, and earthquakes," tempts to fine-writing. But such sentences as this, in their panoply of adjectives, are strenuous rather than strong:—" On the Heights of St. Elmo I have drunk in as much of beauty from that curvilinear bay of Southern Italy, upon whose bosom float the isles of Capri and Ischia, and upon whose margin nestle the gracefully-shaped Vesuvius, the long arm of Sorrento, and the proverbially-brilliant city of Naples."
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