[5] Diary of Travels and Adventures in Upper India, from Bareilly, in Rohilcund, to Hurdwar and Nahun, in the Himalaya Mountains; with a Tour in Bundelcund, a Sporting Excursion in the Kingdom of Oude, and a Voyage down the Ganges.  By C.J.C.  DAVIDSON, Esq., late Lieut.-Col. of Engineers, Bengal.

The appearance of this work was heralded some three months since, as divers of our readers may possibly remember, by a species of puff-preliminary, for which even the annals of Great Marlborough Street afforded no precedent—­being nothing less than the appearance of Mr Colburn, in propria persona, at the bar of the police-office adjoining his premises, to answer the complaint of the gallant and irate author for what he was pleased to consider the unwarrantable detention of the MS. from which his narrative had been printed.  It was alleged, in extenuation, that “the gallant colonel’s MS. was so nearly undecipherable, that Mr Colburn had been put to considerable expense in revising the press;”—­and a mysterious and curiosity-provoking hint was further thrown out, that “it was the custom of the trade, that, until a work was published, the MS. should not be parted with by the publisher, as it might turn out that some part of it was libellous, and in such case the publisher must produce the MS.”  In the end the gallant colonel (whom the newspaper reports described as “very much excited,”) took nothing by his motion in regard to the recovery of the MS.; but though in this respect he may have been somewhat scurvily treated, we cannot equally sympathize with his complaints of the work not having been duly advertised; for surely all the little “neatly turned paragraphs” that ever proceeded from Mr Colburn’s laboratory, could not have been so effectual as the method struck out by the impromptu genius of the colonel himself, in intimating to the public that something quite out of the common way might be expected from the forthcoming production thus brought before its notice.

And verily those who have been prepared for a queer volume, will not be disappointed in the diary of our choleric and corpulent colonel.  If ever the assurance, which seems to be regarded as indispensable in the preface to works of this class, that the author “wrote the following pages purely for his own amusement,” bore the stamp of unequivocal truth, it is in the present instance; and, notwithstanding the asseverations of Mr Colburn and his literary employes, it is difficult to conceive that any revision whatever can have been bestowed on the rough notes of the writer, since they were first hastily committed to paper amidst the scenes which they describe.  The style is as rambling and unconnected as the incidents to which it refers; but wherever the author’s devious footsteps lead us, from the jungles of Bundelcund to the holy ghats of Hurdwar, the principal figure is always that of the colonel himself, who, in the portly magnificence