CURRENT LITERATURE.
My Journey Bound the World. By Captain S. H. Jones-Parry. 2 vols. (Hurst, and Blackett.)—The public has some reason, we think, to be obliged to the discriminating friends who wanted to have a fair copy of the author's diary, and to the " injudicious " relative who carried that fair copy to the publisher. The "grand tour," as the nineteenth century uses that word, will not easily become a stale subject ; and even where places and people described aro becoming almost familiar to us, readers will always be glad to have the experi- ences of a shrewd, kindly, and humorous observer. There is a cer- tain novelty, for instance, in the information that a notorious female lecturer and her still more notorious book have supplied names to Cairo donkeys. We get other more valuable and more agreeable pieces of information. Those who follow Captain Jones-Parry's foot- steps will be thankful to him for putting them on their guard against the sinister ingenuity of Ceylon jewellers, who, among other things, manufacture excellent rubies out of hock-bottles. Let us hope that the Peninsular and Oriental Company, on whose management ho passes a severe censure, will profit in another way by what he has written about them. Captain Parry visited New Zealand, and gives a capital description of it. Japan left very favourable impressions upon him. He speaks better of the majority of the people than travellers before him. Modesty, as we understand the word, they seem to know little of ; but their morals are better than they seem. What does the writer say ef his own country ? He returns to Liver- pool :—" That evening, I took a stroll out, and I can safely assert that I heard more bad language, and saw more drunken men and women, than I had heard or seen in all my travels." Altogether, this is a very pleasant book of travel, not likely, perhaps, to survive for very long, but well worth reading now.
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