Italian Rambles. By James Jackson Jarves. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Mr.
Jarves loves the old world, especially so old a part of it as Italy, with a fervour which Americans are particularly apt to feel, and describes it with a corresponding sympathy. He has made himself acquainted with regions that the ordinary traveller, even of the more careful sort, does not visit,—with nooks in the Apennines, for instance, and cities decaying or decayed in Tuscany. And he has learnt something not only of the country, but of what takes far more time and trouble to know, the people. He has other chapters, too, of special interest,—that on ancient and modern glass of Venice, for instance. Ou the "Pursuit of Bric-a-brac" he has some shrewd advice to give and instructive experiences to record. His" Lessons for Merchant Princes" are as mach needed on our side of the Atlantic as on his, and there are some of us, certainly, who may take to heart something, at least, of what he says in " New and Old-World Manners." Here are some sentences about the Italians which it is the more pleasure to quote because all observers are not so well disposed :— " The Italian populations remain kindly dispositioned and sagaciously conservative, modest, cautious, rather self-depreciating than self- laudatory, yet not without enterprise, but with abundant tact in all things, qualities which may yet give them the leadership of the Latin races in their struggle for regeneration. The rough ' is still an un- known quantity in Italian progress. A people which goes ahead' without him, entertains its masses without intoxicating them, with no restrictions on the sale of liquors, which keeps out of sight the most disreputable features of civic life, and is so well behaved in its festivals that little children and maidens may safely participate in them; always clean, sober, polite, pleasant-tempered, helpful in its aims ; a people of this stamp is worthy of imitation by races of coarser instincts and habits."
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