Recollections of Four Years in Venezuela. By C. D. Dance.
(Henry S. Ring and Co.)—This volume, we learn from the preface, has already accomplished one good thing. The author began it during a time of illness, and it so absorbed his attention that he recovered. We cannot honestly say that it is likely to work any more cures by absorbing the attention. Yet it is sufficiently readable. Mr. Dance does not make it clear enough what ho did in Venezuela. That he had some land, and at least began to cultivate it, we see, but he does not make it clear whether it would be worth while for others to take land and cultivate it. On the whole, indeed, he leaves on his readers the impression that though Venezuela is, as he says in his preface, "too little known to English readers," it is quite as well known as it has any claim for being to English settlers. The people have an awkward tendency to "pro- nounce" in favour or disfavour of various governments or personages, and the security which is the first postulate for prosperity is wanting. Mr. Dance, of course, daring his four years came in for a civil war, which, in this instance, seems to have been complicated, so to speak, with an earthquake. He did not " assist " at the earthquake, but he was a resident in Maturin when that town was taken by Sotillo, and confesses to a feeling of not unnatural alarm when .that distinguished person, in making his triumphal entry, uttered the ominous words that "the foreigners who came to the country to earn bread should be ashamed to encourage the natives in their disaffection to a patriotic government, and that they deserved, every one of them, to have short work made with them." We are glad to have made Mr. Dance's acquaintance, but we do not feel more desirous than before to make, except at the safe distance which paper allows, the acquaintance of Venezuela and the Venezuelans.
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