id they exist on the earth, or in the air, or in the waters
under the earth; were they spiritual or material, vegetable or mineral,
brute or human? Were they newly-discovered planets, nicknamed whilst
awaiting baptism, or strange fossils, contemporaries of the Megatherium,
or Magyar dissyllables from Dr Bowring's vocabulary? Perchance they were
a pair of new singers for the Garden, or a fresh brace of beasts for the
legitimate drama at Drury. Omoo might be the heavy elephant; Typee the
light-comedy camel. Did danger lurk in the enigmatical words? Were they
obscure intimations of treasonable designs, Swing advertisements, or
masonic signs? Was the palace at Westminster in peril? had an agent of
sure of Barbarossa Joinville undermined the Trafalgar column? Were they
conspirators' watchwords, lovers' letters, signals concerted between the
robbers of Rogers's bank? We tried them anagrammatically, but in vain:
there was nought to be made of Omoo; shake it as we would, the O's came
uppermost; and by reversing Typee we obtained but a pitiful result. At
last a bright gleam broke through the mist of conjecture. Omoo was a
book. The outlandish title that had perplexed us was intended to
perplex; it was a bait thrown out to that wide-mouthed fish, the public;
a specimen of what is theatrically styled _gag_. Having but an
indifferent opinion of books ushered into existence by such
charlatanical manoeuvres, we thought no more of Omoo, until, musing
the other day over our matutinal hyson, the volume itself was laid
before us, and we suddenly found ourselves in the entertaining society
of Marquesan Melville, the phoenix of modern voyagers, sprung, it
would seem, from the mingled ashes of Captain Cook and Robin Crusoe.

Those who have read M. Herman Melville's former work will remember,
those who have not are informed by the introduction to the present one,
that the author, an educated American, whom circumstances had shipped as
a common sailor on board a South-Seaman, was left by his vessel on the
island of Nukuheva, one of the Marquesan group. Here he remained some
months, until taken off by a Sydney whaler, short-handed, and glad to
catch him. At this point of his adventures he commences Omoo. The title
is borrowed from the dialect of the Marquesas, and signifies a rover:
the book is excellent, quite first-rate, the "clear grit," as Mr
Melville's countrymen would say. Its chief fault, almost its only one,
interferes little with the p