A Jaunt in a Junk. (Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—The
" junk " was really not a junk, but an Indian harbour-boat, which two brothers hire at Bombay and take for a cruise along the coast southwards. This account of their voyage is written rather, we may conjecture, for the purpose of setting forth views of certain ques- tions, social, political, and theological, than of describing what the voyagers did and saw. Now and then a suspicion crossed us as we reads that the "ten days' cruise," as it is called, is only the setting of the dialogues which occupy so ranch of the volumes, in the same way in which the prison scene in the " Phaedo" is the setting of the argument on immortality. The most picturesque description in the book is that of the fishing for sharks. If it is an imagination, it has certainly all the vividness of reality. Bat here a doubt is suggested by the curious incident of the books used for bait. The voyagers are unwilling to use for this purpose the solitary fowl which is to serve for their dinner, and they have recourse to their stock of literature. The particular books used are some of the volumes in Mr. Morley's series of "English Men of Letters." First they try "Macaulay," but the sharks will not have anything to say to it. Then they pin on to the hooks " Goldsmith ;" this tempts a huge monster to bite. Is all this a parable ? Into his disquisitions on the various matters on which his dramatis personx deliver themselves we do not care to follow the author. There is some talk about missions and their results, which seems to us very rash and crude--jast the superficial kind of thing which comes readily to the lips of persons who really have no kind of title to talk about the subject. Does the writer really know the facts about the missions in Southern India ? Is it possible, in the face of these facts, to say that "when a convert is made, judge him by any conceivable moral standard, and he will be found a worse man in every sense than he was in his ancient unregenerated (?) state " ? (What a strange notion this, of marking your emphasis by italics and your irony by notes of interrogation !) All the talk is not down on this level, though it is generally characterised by a certain rashness and rawness of judgment. The best of the interlocutors is Hurri Rims a Hindu fisherman, whose caste forbids him to eat on the water,—a curiously infelicitous arrangement.
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