The Land of the Viking, and the Empire of the
Tsar. By E. Fraser Blackstock. (Putnam's Sons, New York.)—This is rather a matter-of-fact American book of travel in familiar regions,—and that although among the dramatis persona there is one " whose letters to the Press won golden opinions, and whose courage sur- mounted all difficulties." The reflections that occasionally rise to the surface are rather commonplace, such as that " the strangely powerful influence that Nature exerts over human beings was never more potent than when we stood upon the North Cape." Occasionally, also, globe-trotters' English has a startling effect upon the nerves, as when we read : "Thence we went to Cologne, with its traditional smells, grand cathedral, and church of eleven thousand virgins, where the bones of the slaughtered maidens are arranged on the walls in grotesque designs." Yet whoever may wish to read an account of Stockholm and Bergen, St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Hermitage and the Kremlin, written in chatty English of the kind favoured by boarding-school girls, could hardly do better than read this little book.
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