A NINETEENTH CENTURY ULYSSES.* THE author of this interesting volume
started on his year's zigzag journey round the world from Liverpool, made his way across America by Chicago to San Francisco—taking a trip over the Canadian Pacific as an interlude—thence by the odd mid-ocean Monarchy of Hawaii to Australia, turning north- wards to wonder at pig-tailed China and top-hatted Japan ere he began his return journey through India.
The book may be described as a tour round the great cities of the world, and one loses nothing by skipping the pages that narrate the often-told story of an Atlantic passage. The two objects which strike the traveller who approaches New York by sea are characteristic of the American people in their present phase of admiration of the grotesque and big, and insensibility to the ugly and ridiculous. One of these objects is an enormous hotel on Coney Island built in the form of an elephant; the other is the monstrous and monstrously unbeauteous statue of Liberty on Bedloe's Island, presented by the half-sham, half-real Republic of France to the more genuine one of America. Of the ugliness, confusedness, and shabbiness of New York, nothing new can be said; but full justice is done to the Central Park, which in another generation will be the most beautiful public resort in the world. It would, however, be altogether unfair to judge of America, by New York; no other town in the Union can vie with it in dirt, inconvenience, and meanness of appearance. Philadelphia is a thoroughly respectable-looking town ; Boston responds outwardly to its great product, " culture ; " and Balti- more is an altogether charming city, " which," as our author justly remarks, "no traveller ever leaves without wishing to return to it." The country in America, away from prairie and forest, has for the most part a ragged, unkempt look ; and the shabby villages and unpicturesque homesteads of New England must lack almost every charm that makes life worth having.
Of Canadian cities, Quebec, one of the only two regularly fortified towns in North America, is much the most interesting, at least to the European traveller :—
" It is built upon a wedge of high land in the angle between the rivers (the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles), and is defended by ramparts, gates, marten() towers, and ancient batteries. The streets are steep, narrow, and quiet, and the tin tiles with which many of the houses are roofed, give them a quaint and medfieval appearance. The churches, convents, and other religions buildings would not be out of place in a country town of Northern France [we should have rather said Western France], and the citadel towers above all like the fortress at Luxemburg. French is
spoken almost universally Here and there the civilisation of the nineteenth century has intruded, but not sufficiently to destroy the individuality of the place."
We cannot, however, even on paper, put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and must hasten on. In Australia, our traveller was struck by the difference between the three
• Tha Modern Odyssey : or, Ulysses Up to Date. With 31 Illustrations in Collo- type. London : Cassell and Co. 1891.
principal Colonies. South Australia is dismissed with a con- temptuous reflection on its want of " go ; " New South Wales
is characterised as the feminine member of the projected con-
federacy ; while to Victoria is awarded the palm of virility. There is some justice in these distinctions; but Victoria owes most of her pre-eminence to the original attraction of her gold deposits. Melbourne is a handsome town, though not picturesque, and displays none of the slovenly disregard of outward form characteristic of so many American cities. Very few traces of poverty are to be seen, and a good many of wealth, which, however—now that the " digger" is a rarity—is not ostentatiously displayed. Between Victoria and South
Australia, owing to an error in the Government survey, lies a belt of No Man's Land, which the Privy Council has not yet seen its way to allot to either Colony. " Under what laws, Bezonian P" must be a query often present to the mind of the dwellers in this tract, if there are any. At the border town of Albany—destined, perhaps, to become the Washington of the future Confederacy—a break of gauge occurs on the Inter- colonial Railway which is not without its significance. The Victorian gauge is the Irish one of 5 ft. 3 in.; that of New South Wales keeps the English dimension of 4 ft. 8i in. The latter Colony is altogether more English than its neighbour, whicl., however, in no wise follows the American type. The railways afford one proof, among many others, of the superiority of Australia to America. They are solidly made and well- equipped, and the stations are neat and commodious. Capital meals are served at extremely cheap rates.—you get a bee:- steak, with bread, butter, and cheese, and half-a-pint of Colonial wine, for a shilling. The fares, too, are lov-, and, with a quite singular liberality, free passes are often given to visitors, to British officers above the rank of Subaltern as a matter of right, and even to Subalterns on sick-leave from India. Sydney is scarcely ao fine a town as Melbourne, and a much less busy one. It is a far gayer place, however, and is dubbed by our traveller the " Vanity Fair of Australia." Here " social life is an operetta,"—an endless round of picnics, lawn-tennis, and rink-skating, parties during the day, and dances at night, dances where everybody dance. , even the old women. The scenery in Southern and Central Australia is not impressive, save where the Blue Mountains reveal their wonderful ravines and broad valleys, deep water- worn depressions bordered by lofty, precipitous rocks, and covered with dense forests, half-hidden by drifting veils of violet vapour, whose recesses are known only to the wallaby and the cockatoo. Of the Australian democracy at work no very pleasing picture is drawn. There is a good deal of noise and.vulgarity, and probably some corruption and jobbery as well, out of all which, nevertheless, emerge results that do not appear, on the whole, to be unsatisfactory. Perhaps the social picture is still less attractive. Of Victoria the popula- tion is about a million, and they have three hundred race- meetings every year,—on a rough calculation, one to every seven hundred adult men. To a European, Colonial life seems poor and meagre in the extreme ; Colonial politics present. none but petty, often paltry, issues ; there is nothing dramatic, picturesque, or stirring in their history, nothing in their past, and little in their present or future, to make men aim at any- thing higher than the development of material well-being.
Of the great Indian cities, a brief but graphic account is given, to which, however, we must refer the reader. At. Athens, the author was disappointed with the town and people. The public buildings are commonplace or pretentious ; the men show no trace of the nobility of their (alleged) ancestry ; a beautiful or even a pretty woman is rarely seen (but we have seen many fine Greek faces in Alexandria, and some are visible even in Manchester); while the language of Demosthenes and Sophocles has become "a vapid, careless dialect." The last pronouncement will shock the Philhellenes of the day, but the fact remains that modern literary Greek is a mere imitation, without force and without grace. The charm of Athens lies in its vestiges of a glorious past, and of these an interesting general account is given,—in particular of the results of recent excavations made on the site of the Cerameicus quarter of old Athens. A sneer at Lord Elgin might have been omitted. But for him many of the finest monuments of ancient Greece would have perished. One of the bas-reliefs on a tomb- " Represents a young and lovely girl gazing at a ring taken
from a casket of jewels which a slave holds before her the elegiac picture of a dead girl cut off before her time looking
at the gems which, when living, she had made more dazzling. Though many centuries have passed since Hegeso was beautiful in Athens, tears are still drawn into the eyes by the touching contrast of life and death."
Not more than a fourth of the volume need be skipped,— high praise in these days of book-making. The remainder shows that the author is aoAvrporoc enough, so far as the pen is concerned. He has seen the cities of many men, and his impressions of their minds are interesting and not uninstruc- tive, it being remembered always that they are only the impressions of a passing, but observant, traveller. Nearly all the funny paragraphs, and most of the sneers, might with advantage be excised, although it is quite the fashion for the (British) recording traveller to spice his pages with flings at his countrymen and countrywomen. Of the collotype illus- trations, most are helpful, and a few are good—especially the architectural ones—the rest call for no remark, except a very characteristic one representing a "cattle mob " feeding in the Australian Bush.
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