in the facts and details of her spirited and
agreeable narrative.

The volume of Mr. Sturge, herewith presented, is unlike any of its
predecessors. Its author makes no literary pretensions. His style, like
his garb, is of the plainest kind; shorn of every thing like ornament,
it has yet a truthful, earnest simplicity, as rare as it is beautiful.
The reader will look in vain for those glowing descriptions of American
scenery, and graphic delineations of the peculiarities of the American
character with which other travellers have endeavored to enliven and
diversify their journals. Coming among us on an errand of peace and good
will--with a heart oppressed and burdened by the woes of suffering
humanity--he had no leisure for curious observations of men and manners,
nor even for the gratification of a simple and unperverted taste for the
beautiful in outward nature. His errand led him to the slave-jail of the
negro-trafficker--the abodes of the despised and persecuted colored
man--the close walls of prisons. His narrative, like his own character,
is calm, clear, simple; its single and manifest aim, _to do good_.

Although this volume is mainly devoted to the subject of emancipation,
and to his intercourse with the religious Society of which he is a
member, yet the friends of peace, of legal reform, and of republican
institutions, will derive gratification from its perusal. The liberal
spirit of Christian philanthropy breathes through it. The author's deep
and settled detestation of our slavery, and of the hypocrisy which
sustains and justifies it, does not render him blind to the beauty of
the republican principle of popular control, nor repress in any degree
his pleasure in recording its beneficent practical fruits in the free
States.

The labors of Mr. Sturge in the cause of emancipation have given him the
appellation of the "Howard of our days." The author of the popular
"History of Slavery," page 600, thus notices his arduous personal
investigations of the state of things in the West India Islands, under
the apprenticeship system. "The idea originated with Joseph Sturge, of
Birmingham, a member of that religious body, the FRIENDS, who have ever
stood pre-eminent in noiseless but indefatigable exertions in the cause
of the negro; and who seem to possess a more thorough practical
understanding than is generally possessed by statesmen and politicians,
of the axiom that the shortest communication between two given points,