THE AFRICAN SKETCH-BOOK.* IF Mr. Win wood Reade's two volumes
had been reduced to one, and that one had been severely revised, everything which does not relate to Africa rejected,.and all that does arranged with some- thing like system, his African Sketch-Book might have been pleasant reading. As it is, it is wearisome to the last degree, and belongs to no order of composition except the higgledy-piggledy. It has almost as much to do with ancient Greece, or at least with Mr. Winwood Reade's notions about ancient Greece, as with his ex- periences in modern Africa, and is; in fact, a collection of very round-about papers indeed. The author lays great stress upon the "immense labour" which he has bestowed upon the book, and no doubt it has been very great, but unhappily ill directed. He fears that his readers may not give him credit for all this hard work, " as they are apt to suppose that if a book of this kind is light, it cannot be solid." Mr. Reade's work is very solid indeed, but his best friend could not conscientiously pro- nounce it to be light. This is all the more provoking, because the table of contents is very attractive. "A Carthaginian Log- Book " looks well, " The Coast," " The Forest," " The Witch," " The Tornado," " The Cannibals," " The King of the Rembos," "The Gorilla," look, respectively, very well indeed, quite as if the pudding were rich in plums. But they are delusive in the extreme, the pudding is "stick-jaw," and the plums so few and far between that one gets tired of the intervals. Mongilomba, the negro dragoman who accompanied Mr. Reade in his expedi- tion to the gorilla country, among other places, is an amusing personage, and would have brightened up the book considerably, if we had been allowed to see and hear more of him, but Mr. Reade must needs drag Pericles even into his otherwise droll description of Mongilomba ; indeed, the Greeks generally are as great a nuisance to his readers as Cicero was to the friends of Mrs. Blimber, in Donabey and Son :-
"Like many men of genius " [so runs the description, omitting Pericles, of Mongilomba], 'he was indolent, but an excellent story- teller, an ornithologist, and a rhetorician. When he lost, or more probably stole, my best scalpel, he proved to me that it had glided from his hand in such a stealthy and unexpected manner that no one in his place could possibly have interrupted its escape. Again, when I directed him to dry my Shetland stockings, and he brought them back to me in ashes, he explained that the fire had done it, and that mortals were unable to control the fury of the elements. When enraged by some negligence of this Ethiopian philosopher, I assaulted him with words, he remained imperturbable, and gave me those soft answers which do not turn away wrath. But if be saw that I was not quite sure of my ground, he would deliver majestic soliloquies in 3Ipongwe, looking at me sternly from head to foot. But indeed he was always rather haughty, and only shook hands with me in the morning when he awoke in a good humour."
Mongilomba is the only really agreeable person in the book, which
• The African Sketch-Book. By Winwood Beade. London • Smith, Elder, and Co. includes descriptions of very horrid savages indeed, who deserve Mr. Reade's epithet, "connoisseurs in cruelty;" and of some people,. not savages, who were quite as bad ; the captain of a -certain barque, for instance, on board which Mr. Reade was carried when he caught an African fever, which caused him to write a lament- able amount of nonsense. As Mr. Reade was being helped into the boat, Mongilomba crept up to him, and whispered, like a black and tragic Bailey Junior, " Sir, if that captain give you medicine, just ask him to drink a little first himself !"
Occasionally Mr. Reads gives us interesting accounts of the animals in the districts which he explored, but he goat off so suddenly and so widely, at such numerous tangents, that there is no comfort, no sense of reasonable security, in reading his book. The most important journey which he describes was to the Niger, on whose uppermost course he claims to have thrown more- light than any other traveller ; and he bitterly comments upon the- absence of interest with which his exploration has been received. We confess that though the facts are important and interesting, we cannot greet them with enthusiasm ; he contrives to make- them so deadly dull. Whenever he alludes to the subject of religion, he is a singularly unpleasant writer, because he hates it with an impatient hatred, which does not exclude what Mrs. Malaprop called a " nice derangement of epitaphs," indicative of an amazing ignorance of the very alphabet of Christianity.
One of the most interesting chapters in this book is a descrip- tion of Assinie, on the Gold Coast, where Mr. Reads stadia/ animal and insect life carefully. He gives a curious account of the driver ants, which emigrate by millions, and before whose myriad forces the inhabitants of huts and houses fly. " Yet," he says, "they are not too many for the task which nature has• assigned them to perform. The forest is a charnel-house ; in its dark shades, where no sunlight penetrates, the ground is covered' with putrid vegetation, and did not the ants act as scavengers,. its atmosphere would be fatal to mankind." Once, when he was watching an army of drivers crossing a path, some of them carry- ing their young ones in their mouths, Mr. Reade, to his great surprise, saw a small snake go past in the procession. The natives- told him this was the "king of the ants," and was going with them to make a new town. The " king " is a kind of slow-worm, which dwells among the ants, and is supposed to be useful in some way or other to the commonwealth ; nevertheless, when the animal is opened, ants are found in its stomach. Negroes eat white ants, which they consider a great dainty. Here is a curious- anecdote :— " There is a kind of ant-lion which assumes a singular disguise, Taking dry leaves, it gums them on its back, so that its body is entirely- concealed, and the ants approach it without suspicion. I kept some of those ant-lions in captivity, and stripping off their leaves, left them naked in a box, and then put in some bits of brown paper, which they at once put upon their backs."
An interesting chapter on Senegambia is illustrated by an•ex- traordinary drawing, for the accuracy of whose details the author vouches. It represents one of the floods which are of frequent occurrence when the Senegal rises and overflows the lowlands. In these floods the wild beasts are often driven to strange straits. Swimming in all directions, they take refuge on floating trees or on the island hills. Too much alarmed by the flood to follow their amiable interests, and dine on one another, lions, leopards, jackals, serpents, antelopes, and monkeys are often found huddled together as depicted in the illustration. The group, crowded on a small patch of land, which surrounds a solitary tree, is equally striking and absurd,. terrified and lachrymose; the lion in dignified grief, the lioness with her blunt head jammed between his breast and the hind- quarters of a jackal ; a fat and unwieldy leopard clinging to the trunk of the tree, which is much too slender for the purpose ; and a cluster of monkeys, with arms interlaced and pendent tails comfortably swinging on the topmost bough, out of harm's way.
There is nothing new in Mr. Reade's account of Dahomey -and the Praetorian guard of women, as he calls the Amazons, bat there are some amusing anecdotes in the story of his visit to the Portuguese in Angola. The book will bear dipping into, but we. advise experimentalists to dip with a judicious avoidance of the " character " stories with which Mr. Reade has interspersed this most motley of sketch-books.
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