Travels. By Umbra. (Edmonston and Douglas.)—This volume consists of two
parts, a tour in Iceland and in Switzerland. The former is supposed to have taken place twenty years ago, and the tourists are six in number. We imagine the facts to be substantially true, and the persons under considerable disguise to be real. At least the persiflage of the narrative is essentially that of a clique. There is a buoyancy of animal spirits which will carry rather frivolous readers along, but the fun is commonly mere levity and extravagance, and the wit is perilously like flippancy. We can easily bslieve that the six tourists will be delighted with the volume, just as one often sees a family convulsed by something which sounds simply stupid. The fact is it is a family joke. Or he who can go back to his college days will recollect how his set had a regular standing system of chaff against each of its members, the slightest allusion to which had more effect than epigrams. Such a circle, too, always has a butt, and so have the travelled six in the shape of Mr. X.. the M.P. In the second part, the description of the watering- place in the west of England is good, though not very new, but the travels proper have the faults and merits of the tour in Iceland. Still one may say this much, that one does know where the travellers are in the second part, whereas in the first it is very difficult to do more than remember that they are in Iceland. A more minute curiosity would probably be baffled. The book has been over-praised.
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