If the reader wishes to learn how he journeyed through the desert to Mecca, and afterwards to Medina, how he drank of the waters of Zem-Zem, kissed the Black Stone, and visited the tomb of the Prophet, he must refer to Captain Burton's narrative itself. It was a most remarkable achievement, anticipated by Burckhardt, but accomplished by no one else belonging to the present generation.

Not less daring was his journey to Harar, an African Mecca situated in the Somauli country. Here he was absolutely without European predecessors, and he considers it himself the boldest of all his undertakings.

Shortly after his return from the Somauli country, he was placed at the head of the expedition, already alluded to, for exploring the Lake Regions of Central Africa, and received gold medals from the Geographical Societies of London and Paris. When the second expedition was sent out, Captain Burton, for some reason as yet unexplained, was passed over, and Captain Speke was placed in command. The former was appointed Consul at Fernando Po, and, having spent his holidays in a visit to Utah, he went there in 1861. Though not precisely a roving consulate, he was afforded facilities for making many excursions (to call them by a very modest word) into the interior. He was the first to ascend the Cameroons Mountain, a dormant volcano rather higher than the Peak of Teneriffe (which he has also ascended), and on the summit of which he discovered snow, although it is on the African equator. He made trips to the Gaboon, to the Congo, to Loanda, explored the river Volta, and paid a visit to the King of Dahomey. He is now Consul at Santos, Brazil, and has just obtained from the Brazilian government the concession of a lead mine which he discovered at Iporanga.

Captain Burton is not only a great explorer; he is a scholar and a man of the world. He is one of our leading Orientalists, gained a scholarship in a native university in India, has taken

his degree as Master in Sufism, the parent philosophy of Free-Masonry, and obtained a diploma as dervish; for he is learned in all the theology of the Mohammedans. He has considerable knowledge of botany, medicine, and geology; earned a brevet du point in France, for skilful swordsmanship; is a first-rate shot, horseman, and athlete; is acquainted with most of the European languages, and with all European literature, ancient and modern; can sketch cleverly; can forge horseshoes; and is translating Camoens into English verse. In conversation, he is almost omniscient. I have never yet heard a subject started in his presence on which he had not something to say worth remembering. To sit next to him at dinner is to enjoy a banquet of the brain. It is amazing that he should be gifted with so many various and opposite qualities of mind, — still more amazing that he should have found time to do so much. But what is there that a steady, unslacking will, supported by a good physical constitution, cannot achieve? During his Indian years he worked usually fourteen or sixteen hours a day. He is fond of society, but it is that he may absorb knowledge from minds as he does from books. He never throws time away; when not reading, writing, or observing, he is either listening or talking. He does not play at billiards or cards; and these are the devouring elements of young men's lives. Our other pleasant vices take up less time, and we generally learn something from them,— though it is an expensive method of education, and not to be recommended; but these devour the mind, and yield nothing to it in return.

How is it, then, it might be asked, that this man of many attainments has not won a mightier reputation? In the East, it is true, his name is a household word; in Europe and America, he is admired by a cultivated fragment of the public; to the outside masses he is almost entirely unknown.

To this I reply, that a man is known widely only by his books, and Captain

Burton's books do not do him justice. In the first place, they lack sentiment; there is nothing in them that appeals to the emotions and the sympathies; all is cold and hard. He represents only the base or ludicrous side of the human beings with whom he is brought in contact. There is no spark of the man in his books; he hides himself away in a prickly shell. He tells the story of his sufferings, his dangers, and his triumphs, but all in a diaryentry, business-like kind of way; he does not reveal the anguish and the transports with which they must have been accompanied. We look in vain among his writings for those painful and touching scenes which make our hearts bleed for the narrators. We find there no Mungo Park, sitting alone and helpless in the desert, yet saved from despair by the contemplation of a beautiful moss which reveals to him the hand of the Creator; no Samuel Baker, hanging over the bed of his delirious wife; no David Livingstone, returning to find his home desolate and strewn with the leaves of his beloved books. Captain Burton is too proud to lay bare his heart to the public eye; and while we can admire this dignity and reserve, we maintain that it is almost fatal to the success of a personal narrative. The traveller writes an Odyssey, of which he himself is the Ulysses; he should, therefore, artistically speaking, lay all modesty aside, and render the Ego as attractive a personage as he can; which, in Burton's case, would be accomplished by simply putting himself down on paper. If unwilling to do this, he must attempt to interest the reader in his subordinate characters, or by displaying powers of description. But this Burton will not or cannot do; he never warms into eloquence; he is not a lover of nature; he does not as an author cultivate Part de plaire; and, indeed, so far from striving to please his reader, he appears to regard him as a natural foe, and seldom neglects an opportunity of trampling on his prejudices or of sneering in his

face.

His books, then, appeal solely to the brain, and this at once reduces him to a select circle of admirers; but these even have many reasons to complain. He is decidedly difficult to read. His weapons are so numerous that he overarms himself, and does not wield them with sufficient skill. He does not possess the gifts of selection and arrangement. His works contain innumerable gems, but piled pages on pages without method, huddled up in so obscure a heap that the ordinary reader yawns past them with half-closed eyes. It is only the man of knowledge who can detect the precious thoughts among the rubbish, and who can comprehend the richness of the mind whence they are drawn. One would imagine that his method of composition was simply to empty out his Lett's pocket-book upon foolscap paper, and send the manuscript to the printers without further elaboration. There is always abundance of good raw material, but then it is so very raw,— half-developed ideas crawling about on all fours, unpeeled witticisms, and a heterogeneous mass of scientific facts, which ought to be neatly labelled and put away in an appendix, or cunningly introduced into the body of the text. In short, Captain Burton's mind is represented in his books as the zoological collections of the British Museum are represented in the glass cases of that establishment,nothing is seen to its best advantage, and half of the specimens are not seen at all.

It is evident that his style has been corrupted by his Oriental studies; but since he possesses these immense stores of information, with considerable powers of original thought, humor, and observation, why does he not study the science of book-making, in which there is so much that is mechanical, but which cannot be mastered without brainsweat and patient thought? No writers accumulated facts with greater industry than Balzac and Macaulay; but they exercised yet greater labor upon their style, till they had so perfected it that the common eye, dazzled by the

beauty of the fabric, often fails to observe the materials of which it is composed. How was this done? By scrupulous self-criticism and unremitting toil. Macaulay would sometimes write a sentence over half a dozen times before it would read smoothly to his ear; and Balzac wrote the Peau de Chagrin sixteen times. Thus drudged the great masters of two great languages. No genius, however splendid, can afford to dispense with style. Style is structure, without which a book is not a building, but a quarry, style is voice, without sweetness of which there can be no true eloquence, style is art, which adorns the nakedness of human thought, and composes symmetry of sentiments and of ideas.

I have said much upon this subject because I am convinced that, if Captain Burton chose, he might become an agreeable writer. But I am aware that it is not true criticism to demand neat literary manipulation in the works of men who spend the greater portion of their lives away from their own language, and who are usually forced to write hurriedly, that the book may appear before the discovery has died from the public mind. Sir Samuel Baker is a literary artist, as well as a gallant explorer; but we have no right to expect this double talent in travellers, and

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to blame them if we do not find it. They are great authors, though in another way, they perform poems instead of writing them; and some day, perhaps, from the deeds of these heroes of Central Africa a Camoens will rise to put them into words.

"What is there new out of Africa ? ” Livingstone is no longer by the waters of the Lake Nyassa. Some of his men have returned sick, but he has gone on. He has raised the curtain which hangs before the portal of the unknown world; it falls behind him, and we hear of him no more. Yet, though lost, he is not forgotten; he has a place in the heart of all who read these pages, and of thousands more besides.

These words were penned two months ago: how altered is their meaning now! I borrowed an image from death, and death makes it a reality; I wrote an adieu, and it becomes an epitaph.

Another name in the long calendar of African martyrology, Ledyard, Ritchie, Mungo Park, Burckhardt, Clapperton, Lander, Laing, Vogel, Baikie, and many more. But this last name, LIVINGSTONE, is the most glorious of all. Glorious as a missionary of the Gospel, glorious as a geographical discoverer, he died gloriously as a warrior, fighting to the last.

The Twin Records of Creation; or Geology and Genesis: their Perfect Harmony and Wonderful Concord. By GEO. W. VICTOR LE VAUX. London : Lockwood & Co.

IN making the Lion of Geology and the Lamb of Genesis lie down together in the same Procustean bed, Mr. Le Vaux has naturally found it necessary to clip somewhat the claws, mane, and tail of the lion, and to somewhat elongate the lamb. And, after all, there is not so great a family resem

blance between the two, we think, as to suggest the idea of twinship to anybody but Mr. Le Vaux. The process of adaptation itself is not exactly novel, but there is something original in our author's spirit, if not his method, which gives his book a peculiar interest. He has always had, he confesses, a passion for geology; and he enters into a description of the different geological periods which correspond in his theory to the days of the Scriptural history of creation - with the greatest delight in the marvels of his theme. He revels in the sea of prime

val fire; he floats enchanted on the waves of the shoreless ocean; his fancy feeds fat upon the gigantic grasses and ferns of the era of large vegetables; he is the intimate acquaintance of the Ichthyosaur, the Iguanodon, and the Pterodactyl. With all this, it cannot be said that he develops more, than an elementary knowledge of the science he loves, or that he appears to be in any respect a learned or wise man. He writes his book with the aid of profuse quotation from the poets, and when their fancy does not supply him with facts he draws upon his own; and he believes in the sea-serpent. He does not always quote correctly, and he attributes Pope's "Messiah" to Steele. He imagines that "betimes " is identical in meaning with at times; and his immense megalosauric sense becomes occasionally entangled in the mammoth vegetation of his tropical language; as, for example, when he says, in a description of the Oolitic world:

"Far, far below, the base of the hill on which we stand is washed by the swelling billows of the Western main, the white crested waves breaking betimes over the rocks and shallows, as they roll to or recede from the shore. Boundless prairies, decked with an ocean of gorgeous verdure, spread out, far as the eye can reach, towards the mid-day sun. The eastern horizon is bounded by forests of gigantic pine and fern, which are woven together by thick luxuriant underwood, and the intervening plains are studded, at intervals, with circular groves of palm and shrubs."

This colossal passage is preliminary to an account of an awful Oolitic mill between the Megalosaur and the Iguanodon, the champions being respectively twenty and twenty-seven yards in length, and of proportionate height and bulk. Mr. Le Vaux, in his character of special reporter, says: "But terrific cries are wafted towards us on the breeze, - cries which reverberate through the mountains like the rumblings of thunder on the distant hills,the cries of monsters about to engage in mortal combat, the war-whoop' of the huge Megalosaur and colossal Iguanodon. As the waves of a thousand hurricanes roll to the rock or assault the shore, so the farmer advances; as a huge rock meets the

ty waves of a thousand tempests, so the latter meet the former. As a hunstorms of winter, gloomy and dark, down from frowning mountains, as a dred torrents from the hills meet, mix,

and roar in the valley, so dark, so loud, impetuous, and terrible is the deadly encounter of these primeval monsters. Their roaring, their groans, resound through the vales and forests, spread over the hills, and re-echo from rock to rock. Nature seems to be hushed in fear and amazement,-every living creature flies away from the scene of encounter in confusion and terror. But lo! the monsters have rolled over and over on the plain, - Death has raised his voice, — the tumult ceases, - one of them (the Iguanodon) has fallen a victim to the ferocious strength and superior activity of the other, and soon is his carcass partially devoured by the voracious victor."

The fate of another champion of the primeval P. R. - the Pterodactyl - is portrayed in strokes quite as bold and massive as these:

"But hark! crashing sounds resound in the brushwood; the dumb noise of ponderous footsteps strikes the ear; when, lo! a gigantic animal, far larger than the largest elephant, emerges from the forest and appears on the scene. His snout is narrow and long, but of immense power, and his mouth is furnished with prodigious and terrific teeth, shaped or serrated like the teeth of a saw, those of the lower and upper jaws fitting exactly into each other. His neck is long, and his huge body is as large as the wooden horse of Troy, as a ship of ancient times; his legs and feet are proportionately massive and thick, like the trunks of some gigantic oaks which have braved, in triumph, the storms of a thousand years; and, as a whole, his dimensions are enormous beyond all conception. Onward, however, comes the king of the prairies; forward he rushes, and with one stroke of his terrible foot-with one thrust of his powerful claws - the unwieldy teleosaurian crocodile is struck dead on the mud, and immediately devoured."

Whatever may be thought of the direct result achieved for the reconciliation of science and revelation by Mr. Le Vaux, we imagine all his readers must agree that he has at least effected a negative good by rendering geology much more incredible than Genesis.

Famous Americans of Recent Times. By JAMES PARTON. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

THE favor done to this age and generation by Mr. Parton in taking eminent pub

lic men out of the keeping of panegyric and abuse, and giving them to popular knowledge in some appreciable human quality, is scarcely to be over-estimated, and it has certainly not till now been valued enough. Mr. Parton did not begin by pleasuring the critics, and his recognition was tardy and cool, though he had long been one of our most popular writers. He wrote at once for the people, and, while preserving perfectly his self-respect, made the people his sole judges. He paid them also the highest compliment in his power, by refusing to seek their favor through flattery of their prejudices. His heroes, in spite of his great popularity, are not the popular heroes; he who honors his readers so greatly does not at all honor their idols. It must be said of Mr. Parton that each person of whom he writes is the man at whose character he has arrived by the most diligent study of all his words and acts. It may result sometimes that Mr. Parton is mistaken; but we feel that he has never willingly deceived himself, nor suffered himself to be deceived. We cannot believe that he has ever written carelessly. These delightful stories, which hold us with the charm of romance, are not only the work of a very skilful artist, but of a very honest man, not less conscientious as to why he shall say a thing, than as to how he shall say it. We need scarcely add, that it is the work also of a generous and liberal spirit, having no more sympathy with successful meanness than with mere baseness of purpose.

The biographical studies which make up this volume present the same general characteristics observable in Mr. Parton's more extended works. In respect of style and all points of literary execution, they are the best things he has done; for his artistic growth has been continuous, and these studies are his latest productions. That it has been of use to Mr. Parton to write for the scholars and critics who read the North American Review is evident enough to any one who contrasts the articles taken from that publication with his earlier work. The difference is to be felt in quality of thought, as well as in manner, though there is not much fault to be found with Mr. Parton's way of thinking in any of them, for it is always manly and humane.

As a whole, the present volume has a peculiar merit in its variety. It deals with the kinds of greatness usually achieved by Americans, — political, mercantile, inventive, social, and deals with them all in a

very fresh and fearless way, insomuch that we should be willing to wait for Mr. Parton to write of our theological and literary worthies, and our military heroes, before we read much about them. It seems to us that our author writes of inventors with the most heart, and he certainly contrives to interest his reader very deeply in their lives and works. The sketch of Charles Goodyear in this book is as delightful as the story of any adventurous discoverer of the sixteenth century; but in fact the inventors are the discoverers of our time, and it is they who carry forward, in their true spirit, the magnificent enterprises of other days. There is little of their heroism and devotion in the great merchants whose stories our author rehearses, but there is still, in the lives of such men as Girard, Vanderbilt, and Astor, the fascination of that daring which in our country makes business a drama full of strong situations and startling effects. These men rank in their claims upon our remembrance and respect with such politicians as Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Randolph,—all men of marked individuality, and each representing different political theories, — who in Mr. Parton's book are not less interesting than the great traffickers, because, unlike the great traffickers, they were each a failure in his way.

The articles on Henry Ward Beecher and Theodosia Burr are to be esteemed as studies of our social life at two widely distant and widely different epochs. Mr. Beecher represents no new ideas in religion. He is the leading thought and speech of the strong, earnest, self-reliant element- -not refined to intellectual subtilty or morbid doubtwhich is perhaps the most hopeful element in New York, and which is the beginning of a social rather than a religious regeneration. It is American and good; it has sound sense and wholesome impulses; if it errs, it is not too perfect and great to repent and amend. Mrs. Alston preserves the memory of an America long past away, of a vanished reflection of philosophical France,

of a polite and well-bred coloniality. We are afraid that Mr. James Gordon Bennett is as representative in his way as either of these others, and we must class the article devoted to his career with those on Mr. Beecher and Theodosia Burr. Such a man and such ideas could exist nowhere but in America, and it appears to us that the New York Herald is published because there is an unpublished New York Herald in the