The Alps of Arabia : Travels in Egypt, Sinai, Arabia,
and the Holy Land. By William Charles Maughan. (Henry S. King and Co.)—This is one of those, unfortunately numerous, records of travel for which it is not possible to say a good word. Laboriously, no doubt conscien- tiously, written, and elaborately got up with every propriety of map and type, of preface and arrangement, it is so dull, so dreary, so super- fluous, that nothing but a sense of duty, stimulated by the irre- sistible fascination which the mere names of the places visited by Mr. Maughan exercise, could sustain one in the labour of reading it right through to the end. Unfortunately, too, the only unusual or out-of-the- way portion of the journey is over the same ground—Abakah and Petra —which M. Lenoir described so brightly and amusingly in his "Artists in Egypt," last year, and the contrast between him and Mr. Maughan is melancholy. To find this book readable, it would be necessary to have no previously-formed notion of the places, the people, the customs, and the experiences which it describes ; then their intrinsic interest and the curiosity of ignorance would palliate its baldness, and its com- mon-place, which are too much for the well-read in the literature of travel. There is an amusing naivete about the preface, in which the author recommends his readers to make a tour to Mount Sinai, and "if possible, and provided that they care to encounter the trouble, risk, and expense involved," to "attempt " the journey to Petra. In that case, he "assumes" that the travellers "have a certain amount of tact and coolness," and he is of opinion that "one of the party should know something of geology, so that the remarkable and unique features of the rocks and mountains may be appreciated." The trite moralising and indiscriminate outbursts• of effusive piety which interrupt the nar- rative, without adorning the style or edifying the reader, are precisely what sound literary judgment would have avoided. If the facts and associations of the Holy Land fail to impress travellers and their readers, the lessons they ought to teach will hardly be conveyed by such plati- tudes as those in which Mr. Maughan endeavours to enforce them. One cannot part with cordial feelings from a book whose closing sen- tence refers to Mount Sinai, as the place whore "Jehovah himself condescended to talk with sinful man." No more inappropriate word was ever misused to express the relation between the Eternal Father and his children.
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