ts.

S. AE.

* * * * *

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF _NEW WORKS_.

* * * * *

LADIES AND DWARFS.

One of the oddest of all odd books that ever fell into our hands is
Captain Colville Franckland's _Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of
Russia and Sweden_, in 1830 and 1831. It is one of the hop-step-and-a-jump
tours that your fashionable folks make for making acquaintances and then
making books. The gallant author does not stay long enough in a place to
be dull; for he is lively and flippant in every page, and throws a dash of
_the service_ into every chapter. He feels that Dr. Granville has left him
nothing to say which may not be found in his two great big books; yet the
Cholera and the Polish war have supplied him with two topics throughout
the whole book; and, dull as these subjects are in themselves, they have
enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of
seven or eight hundred pages. His attentions to the softer sex sparkle
every where. At Hamburgh, "we dined at a most excellent table d'hote, but
thought the ladies plain and dowdy." "We laughed much at the Holsteiner
peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, and men like
merry-andrews." Again,--

"One of the most pleasing characteristics of Hamburgh, is the neat little,
rosy-faced, fair-haired soubrette, tripping along the Yungferstieg, with a
basket under her right arm, covered with a handsome shawl of glowing
colours. These enticing damsels look as happy and as coquettish as you can
well imagine, and might induce many a traveller to pass a few weeks in
Hamburgh who had time to dedicate to the pursuit of the fair nymphs of the
Alster.

"But, alas! no good is unaccompanied by evil; hideously deformed dwarfs
haunt the streets and promenades of the good town, and the eye of the
observer, after having rested with complacency on the round and
well-turned form of the smart soubrette, reverts with horror to the
miserable Flibbertigibbets which abound in a frightful proportion to the
whole population."

At Hamburgh he finds fun in every thing.

"I was a good deal amused to-day by the funeral cortege of some citizen of
consequence. The bier was surrounded by men dressed in the old Venetian
costume of black, with ruffs, well-powdered wigs, and swords by their
sides. I regret to say that I must quit Hamburgh without seeing the Schoene
Marianna; but I hea