iously with certain conventionalities of
the metropolis. He overthrows, by his indomitable will, a great many
social follies. He eats soup with a knife and fork; wears no more than
one shirt a week; forces his way into ladies' chambers at unseemly
hours, to cure them of timidity; and introduces sundry other reforms,
all of which are recorded as evidences of glorious independence and a
true nobility of spirit. Sometimes he goes farther,--farther than we
care to follow him. It would be easy to show wherein he is offensive,
not to say disgusting; but we are not so disposed. It is not considered
necessary for the traveller who has dragged his way over a muddy road to
prove the nastiness of his pilgrimage by imparting the stain to our
carpets.

In this book, as in most of its class, the Yankee dialect is employed
throughout, the author evidently believing that bad spelling and bad
grammar are the legitimate sources of New England humor. This shows that
he mistakes means for ends,--just as one who supposes that Mr. Merryman,
in the circus, must, of necessity, be funny, because he wears the motley
and his nose is painted red. The Yankee dialect is Mr. Jonathan Slick's
principal element of wit; his second is the onion. The book is redolent
of onions. That odorous vegetable breathes from every page. A woman
weeps, and onions are invoked to lend aromatic fragrance to a stale
comparison. In one place, onions and education are woven together by
some extraordinary rhetorical machinery; in another, religion is
glorified through the medium of the onion; until at last the narrative
seems to resolve itself into a nauseating nightmare, such as might
torture the brain of some unhappy dreamer in a bed of onions.

Why such works are ever written at all, it is difficult to imagine; but
how it is, that, when written, they find publishers, is inconceivable.

* * * * *

_Great Auction-Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia_. New York:
Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society.

This little pamphlet, reprinted from the columns of the "New York
Tribune," possesses a double interest. It furnishes the best and most
minute description of an auction-sale of slaves that has ever been
published; and it admirably illustrates the enterprise and prompt energy
which often distinguish the journalism of America above that of any
other country.

The slave-sale of which it is a record took place on the second and
third