other hand, might impair their truthfulness. He is the least of a grumbler, too, of all the travellers that we know. The untoward incidents and mishaps of his journeys he receives with a sort of imperturbable complacency that shows the true philosopher. There are men who could not go from Bond street to the Battery without being ruffled in temper a dozen times; yet he circumnavigates the earth, and we do not discover a single instance in which he loses his self-command. It must be a delightful serenity that he enjoys; or, is he too wise to put the smaller miseries of his adventures in books? Even the fleas and bugs which swarm in the narratives of other travellers, do not seem to have the power to bite and sting him into asperity. Has he travelled so much as to get casehardened? We should like to extract several passages from the Journey, but have no space.

-Quite a different style of traveller from B. T., is our countryman, Pliny Miles, whose Nordurfari; or, Rambles in Iceland, we have been reading, while Fahrenheit has been above 90 in the shade, by way of a refrigerant. Our last acquaintance with Iceland was made through Miss Cooper's translation of Madame Ida Pfeiffer, whom Mr. Miles attacks in a very ungallant manner, calling her "the old Austrian dame-that Madame Trollope, the conceited Ida Pfeiffer- the woman that runs all over the world, and writes books about what she sees, and much that she does not see; and, because the Governor of Iceland would not be bored by her shallow Highness, then she pens all manner of false and libellous stories of the most kind, hospitable, unoffending race of people that the sun shines upon. The best comment that can be made on her book is, that she describes her journey to Mount Hekla, and her ascent to the summit, when the people here tell me she never put her foot on the mountain at all."

The Icelanders are Mr. Miles's pets; his memories of that hyperborean region, which has always presented itself to our imagination as one of eternal frosts and snow, are altogether sunny and pleasant, and he will permit no other traveller to pen a word to its discredit. It is only against Madame Pfeiffer the Icelandic traveller whom he directs his angry shafts, and not Madame Pfeiffer the intrepid lady, to whom he would resign his seat in an omnibus, like any other American. Two of a trade, even when of different

sexes, cannot agree even in Iceland. Bating this little outburst of irritability, Mr. Miles is anything but an ill-natured traveller; his fault lies in the opposite direction, and his jokes are so incessant that they become wearisome. His Icelandic experiences and reports give one a strong desire to visit that outer verge of civilization, to look into the crater of Mount Hekla, and pic-nic among the Geysers. Excepting that the sun rises at two o'clock in the morning, that forest trees are only three or four feet high, and that the earth produces no fruits, Iceland is like any other place. The people smoke tobacco, drink coffee, read novels, and talk politics, like other Christians; and Mr. Miles tells us that on his return from Mount Hekla he was met by his reverend friend, president of the college in Reykjavik, who addressed him in the following remarkable manner :-The old gentleman was a drinking of his wine" at the hotel, it appears—“My dear Yankee friend, how are you; and how is old Mount Hekla, and the big Geyser, and all the little Geysers; and how are my friends, the Sulphur Mountains?" A greeting like this from the president of an Icelandic university rather unsettles one's notions of the gravity of the Norsemen. "Well, you are one of the boys," continued the president, "and I wish I could go across the Atlantic and see Niagara with you."

Mr. Miles's book is rather an entertaining one, as well as instructive; but it is open to criticism as a literary production. It is dedicated to the author of Festus, and plentifully embellished with quotations from that strange poem. One of the chapters has a quotation from Shakespeare, which is credited to "The Ghost of Old Mr. Hamlet," and there are many more such niaiseries which do not give us a high idea of the author's gravity and seriousness of purpose. Such instances of flightiness tend to diminish our confidence, and leave us in doubt whether certain parts of the book be truth or fiction. But we ust confess our indebtedness to Mr. Miles for giving us a clearer and more familiar account of what Iceland actually is than any we have ever read before. If he does not always write with good taste, he is never dull; and, for our own part, we freely forgive him all his attempts at fun, for the sake of the information we have gained from his good-natured and rollicking narrative.