in America as St. Patrick’s spells did on the vermin of Ireland.  Unfortunately, it will not.  Mr. Dickens attempted the same thing in a much better manner,—­excepting where Mr. Mackay has copied him exactly, as he has once or twice,—­and even the novelist’s efforts were fruitless.  On the other hand, the main source of annoyance will be found in the needless elevation of minute evils, and the determination to form general judgments from isolated experiences.  But of this we do not much complain.  Rome derived some benefit from the cackling of a goose.  Possibly we may be made in some respects a wiser and a better nation through Mr. Mackay’s influence.  For ourselves, however, if our aspirations ever turn toward a literary Paradise, we shall pray that it may be one where travellers cease from troubling and dull tourists are at rest.

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1. The New and the Old; or California and India in Romantic Aspects.  By J.W.  PALMER, M.D.  New York:  Rudd & Carleton. 1859.

2. Up and Down the Irawaddi; being Passages of Adventure in the Burman Empire.  By the Same.

It has passed into a scornful proverb, that it needs good optics to see what is not to be seen; and yet we should be inclined to say that the first essential of a good traveller was to be gifted with eyesight of precisely that kind.  All his senses should be as delicate as eyes; and, above all, he should be able to see with the fine eye of imagination, compared with which all the other organs with which the mind grasps and the memory holds are as clumsy as thumbs.  The demand for this kind of traveller and the opportunity for him increase as we learn more and more minutely the dry facts and figures of the most inaccessible corners of the earth’s surface.  There is no hope of another Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, with his statistics of Dreamland, who makes no difficulty of impressing “fourscore thousand rhinocerots” to draw the wagons of the King of Tartary’s army, or of killing eight hundred and fifty thousand men with a flourish of his quill,—­for what were a few ciphers to him, when his inkhorn was full and all Christendom to be astonished?—­but there is all the more need of voyagers who give us something better than a census of population, and who know of other exports from strange countries than can be expressed by $——.  Give us the traveller who makes us feel the mystery of the Figure at Sais, whose veil has a new meaning for every beholder, rather than him who brings back a photograph of the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying granite story for all.  There is one glory of the Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the Poet with his variable quantities of fancy.  The fixed fact may be unfixed next year, like an almanac, but the hasty sketch of the true artist is good forever.