A Cruise in Northern Seas, by Lord Dufferin ; In
the Forests of Brazil, by A. W. Bates ; A Trip up the Nile and Days in the Golden East, by Eliot Warburton ; The Land of the Lamas, by the Abbe Hue ; Redman and Buffalo, by W. A. Bell. (H. Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton. is. each.)-It was a good idea to publish extracts from some of the best books of travel in this series called "The Romance of Travel," and thereby to turn the attention of new readers to the original classic works. In themselves these volumes are rather too "snippety," and whoever edited them has gone to the extreme of self-effacement. While we commend this quality as a rule, it is a pity not to give even the dates of the writers. For
instance, there is no hint as to his period given in the very brief preface to the two volumes taken from Eliot Warburton's works. Doubtless it was thought that even the modern photographs would not deceive the most unwary reader into thinking that this delightful writer was describing the Egypt or Palestine of to-day. Again only on the last pages of the
extracts taken without acknowledgment from Hazlitt's trans- lation of the Souvenirs &um Voyage dans la Partarie, &c., do
we learn the date of the journey. Even the Abbe Hue may not be known by the readers of these little books, and the younger ones might be deceived when they read that "the
unicorn really exists in Tibet." Likewise maps would have been very useful; there is a chart of the Foam's cruise in the extract from Lord Dufferin's light-banded and excellently descriptive Letters from High Latitudes, and there is a bare representation of the course of the Amazon in the chapters taken from Bates's The Naturalist on the Amazons : but there are no others. The last book is the least exciting, and it is perhaps not quite fair to reproduce only the non-essential portions of a writer's work : the natural history is almost all omitted, and Bates did not intend the accounts of his river voyaging to be more than incidental. Mr. Bell, the author of .New Tracks in North America, is happily still alive, though he tells of his surveying for railway pioneers in 1867. To go up the Nile to Wady Haifa or to range over Palestine in Warburton's days, or to visit Iceland and Spitsbergen with Lord Duiferin in 1856, should whet the appetite for fuller travelling in such company. The Abbe Hue has his fame as an explorer and a writer, and the other authors justify the choice of the publishers.
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