New Zealand. By the Hon. William Pember Reeves. "Story of
Empire Series." (Horace Marshall.)—As an outline this book of one hundred and eighty pages is admirable. No important sec- tion of the fascinating story is left out. Proportion, moreover, has been well kept. And as the author was born in New Zealand, educated in its best public school, a prominent Minister in the Seddon Cabinet, and is now the Agent-General for the Colony, he was the fittest person to write the book. The style also has movement and lucidity, though modelled a little too much after Macaulay's. A man, we are told, is known by the adjectives he uses, and certainly Mr. Reeves can employ them with accuracy and effect—the result of keen observation and a practised pen. Thus, the New Zealand islands "are high, slender, irregular ;," the Sounds are "deep, calm, winding ; " the plains are "open, grassy, almost treeless ; " the forest flowers—" the white con- volvulus, the starry clematis, the feathery, blood-red rata "—are, indeed, lovely and abundant. The very fitness of the epithets is their charm, especially to those who, as well as the author, have seen the things described. Many of the headings to the eighteen chapters are singularly happy,—e.g., "The Fortunate Isles," "No Man's Land," "A Ship of War without Guns," "Good Governor Grey." Occasionally the writer has not allowed him- self to do full justice to some of the statesmen in the opposite school to himself, and the suppression of the last Maori rebellion is scarcely presented in its true colours. But, as a whole, the little book is wonderfully well written, and will serve as a capital " primer " for this section of the Empire.
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