s, and men to be
branded in history. Do they suppose that such a revolution as this--a
revolution of human rights and free labor against the last great form of
tyranny--is going _backward_? Do the events of the last thirty years
indicate that Southern aristocracy and Copperhead ignorance and evil are
to achieve a final victory over republicanism? Yet it is in this faith,
that demagoguism will be stronger than a great principle, that such men
as Mahoney write and live.

WILD SCENES IN SOUTH AMERICA; or, Life in the Llanos of
Venezuela. By DON RAMON PAEZ. New York: Charles Scribner, 124
Grand Street.

The work before us takes the reader not only through all the adventures
and chances of the desperate life of the llaneros or herdsmen of South
America, but also gives many startling scenes from the revolutions of
Colombia, embracing an excellent biography of the truly great general
Paez, the friend and colleague of Bolivar. But when we remember that it
contains such a mass of valuable historical material, from the pen of a
son of General Paez, aide-de-camp to his father, and an eyewitness of,
or actor in, some of the bloody scenes of a civil war, and that even the
description of herdsman's life is filled with deeply interesting
scientific records of the natural history and botany of our southern
continent, it seems strange that such a volume could appear under a
title smacking of the veriest book-making for the cheap Western market.

The writer, Don Ramon Paez, who was born among the people whom he
describes, and was afterward well educated in England, was probably the
best qualified man in South America to depict the life of the llaneros,
of whom his father was long the literal chief. Half of his pages are
occupied with the account of a grand cattle-hunt, involving sufferings
and adventures of a very varied and remarkable description, giving the
world, we believe, the best account of wild herdsman American-Spanish
life ever written. A very curious study of the character of the writer
himself is one of the many interesting traits of this volume. A love of
literature, of science, of much that is beautiful and refined, contrasts
piquantly with occasional glimpses of true Creole character, and of a
son of 'the best horseman in South America,' who is too much at home
among the fierce people whom he describes to fully assume the tone of a
foreigner and amateur. In this latter respect Don Ramon seems to have
been influenced b