5 JANUARY 1889, Page 34

To Gibraltar and Back in an Eighteen - Tonner, by "One of

the Crew" (W. H. Allen and Co.), deserves some special attention as being superior in style to most accounts of pleasure trips. Its author and one or two other friends accepted, in the spring of 1885, the invitation of a common friend to take a cruise in his yacht along the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and this book de- scribes the voyage that actually took place in consequence. There is in it quite enough of animal spirits, and perhaps a superabund- ance of essentially undergraduate fun, as, for example, in such a sentence as this : "Tangiers boasts a first-class English doctor, an English clergyman, and an English consul ; so while the first two gentlemen take care of your body and soul between them, the last will take care of your property ;" or in such a statement as : "We never knew the moment we might not see the bows of some adjectived collier towering above us." Apart from the fun of the book, which, though it might have been spared, is quite harmless, there are many passages in it of graphic and trustworthy description, and the narrative flows on smoothly enough.