Armenians, Koords, and Turks. By James Creagh. (S. Tinsley and
Co.)—These two volumes are a provoking specimen of bookmaking by a partisan, absolutely the worst kind of man to engage in such work. No doubt, at the present, and for some time to come, a man who has tra- velled in Asia Minor, and has spent about a year in Armenia, can hardly fail to have something to say. But Captain Creagh is blinded by his admiration for the late "patriotic and Conservative Govern- ment," and so his manifest wish to speak the truth, on the one hand, and his equally manifest wish to make the troth square with his theory about that Government, on the other, get him into a hopeless muddle. It is im- possible to say whether it is the Rtnntiane or the Turks, in their connection with Armenia that he detests the more; at the same time, there " never was" such an administration as the " patriotic" one of Lord Beacons- field. Captain Creagh is evidently one of those military Jingoes who were certainly brought into prominence, and even into power, during the
"late Conservative regime; but whose " natural leader " is not the ex- Premier, but Captain Burnaby, and whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer does not, perhaps, err in attributing to "the athletic mania." They have now lost what power they had, and their books, like their other performances, count for nothing. The best thing in these volumes is what, in others of less pretensions, would be the worst,—the historical and second-hand part. Captain Creagh also tells some queer stories, such as a rather coarse one about "fleas," but in such a singular way, that it is difficult to tell whether they are or are not emanations of a peculiar faculty which he obviously considers to he humour.
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