Egypt and Iceland in the Year 1874. By Bayard Taylor.
(Sampson Low and Co.)—Mr. Bayard Taylor is always an agreeable writer, though he seldom has anything novel to say. In the present instance, his work has less novelty than usual, for even its form has been anticipated by Count Goblet d'Alviella's "Sahara and Lapland," and its contents add nothing to what M. Lenoir's Fayoum, or Artists in Egypt," and several of the last year's tourists in Iceland have respectively told us. The most interesting portion of the Egyptian section of the book is a rendering into English of some of M. Marietta's translations of Egyptian inscriptions into French. The Icelandic section is dull and uninteresting in the extreme. We cannot point to an incident or an observation worth noticing, except indeed a description of how briskly the King of Denmark ran down a hill-side on a false alarm of a con- tiguous geyser being about to boil over. This seems to have surprised Mr. Bayard Taylor ; to us it conveys an assurance that his Majesty has useful legs and good sense.
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