, the lake city of Mexico--all this is as strange, as
unlooked for, as any story of adventures in a new planet could be. No
invention of fights and wanderings in Noman's land, no search for the
mines of Solomon the king, can approach, for strangeness and romance,
this tale, which is true, and vouched for by Spanish conquerors like
Bernal Diaz, and by native historians like Ixtlilochitl, and by later
missionaries like Sahagun. Cortes is the great original of all
treasure-hunters and explorers in fiction, and here no feigned tale can
be the equal of the real. As Mr. Prescott's admirable history is not a
book much read by children (nor even by 'grown-ups' for that matter),
the editor hopes children will be pleased to find the 'Adventures in
Anahuac' in this collection. Miss Edgeworth tells us in _Orlandino_ how
much the tale delighted the young before Mr. Prescott wrote that
excellent narrative of the world's chief adventure. May it please still,
as it did when the century was young!

The adventures of Prince Charlie are already known, in part, to boys and
girls who have read the _Tales of a Grandfather_, for pleasure and not
as a school book. But here Mrs. McCunn has treated of them at greater
length and more minutely. The source, here, is in these seven brown
octavo volumes, all written in the closest hand, which are a treasure of
the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh. The author is Mr. Forbes, a bishop
of the persecuted Episcopalian Church in Scotland. Mr. Forbes collected
his information very carefully, closely comparing the narratives of the
various actors in the story. Into the boards of his volumes are fastened
a scrap of the Prince's tartan waistcoat, a rag from his sprigged calico
dress, a bit of his brogues--a twopenny treasure that has been wept and
prayed over by the faithful. Nobody, in a book for children, would have
the heart to tell the tale of the Prince's later years, of a moody,
heart-broken, degraded exile. But, in the hills and the isles, bating a
little wilfulness and foolhardiness, and the affair of the broken
punch-bowl, Prince Charles is a model for princes and all men, brave,
gay, much-enduring, good-humoured, kind, royally courteous, and
considerate, even beyond what may be gathered from this part of the
book, while the loyalty of the Highlanders (as in the case of Mackinnon,
flogged nearly to death) was proof against torture as well as against
gold. It is the Sobieski strain, not the Stuart, that w