delightful and engaging. His native purity, amiability, and generosity, which a life-long contact with slavery could not taint; his cordial scorn of Southern ideas; his fine and flawless instinct of honor; his warm-hearted courtesy and gentleness, and his gayety and wit; his love of his daughter and of mineralogy; his courage, modesty, and humanity,—these are the traits which recur in the differing situations with constant pleasure to the reader.
Miss Lillie Ravenel is as charming as her adored papa, and is never less nor more than a bright, lovable, good, constant, inconsequent woman. It is to her that the book owes its few scenes of tenderness and sentiment; but she is by no means the most prominent character in the novel, as the infelicitous title would imply, and she serves chiefly to bring into stronger relief the traits of Colonel Carter and Doctor Ravenel. The author seems not even to make so much study of her as of Mrs. Larue, a lady whose peculiar character is skilfully drawn, and who will be quite probable and explicable to any who have studied the traits of the noble Latin race, and a little puzzling to those acquainted only with people of Northern civilization. Yet in Mrs. Larue the author comes near making his failure. There is a little too much of her,—it is as if the wily enchantress had cast her glamour upon the author himself,—and there is too much anxiety that the nature of her intrigue with Carter shall not be misunderstood. Nevertheless, she bears that stamp of verity which marks all Mr. De Forrest's creations, and which commends to our forbearance rather more of the highly colored and stronglyflavored parlance of the camps than could otherwise have demanded reproduction in literature. The bold strokes with which such an amusing and heroic reprobate as Van Zandt and such a pitiful poltroon as Gazaway are painted, are no less admirable than the nice touches which portray the Governor of Barataria, and some phases of the aristocratic, conscientious, truthful, angular, professorial society of New Boston, with its young college beaux and old college belles, and its life pure, colorless, and cold to the eye as celery, yet full of rich and wholesome juices. It is the goodness of New Boston, and of New England, which, however unbeautiful, has elevated and saved our whole national character; and in his book there is sufficient evidence of our author's appreciation of this fact, as well as of sympathy only and always with what is brave and true in life.
Somewhere in the heart of the African continent, Mr. Du Chaillu, laying his head upon a rock, after a day of uncommon hardship, finds reason to lament the ungratefulness of the traveller's fate, which brings him, through perilous adventure and great suffering, to the incredulity and coldness of a public unable to receive his story with perfect faith. It is such a meditation as ought to reproach very keenly the sceptics who doubted Mr. Du Chaillu's first book; it certainly renews in the reader of the present work the satisfaction felt in the comparative reasonableness of the things narrated, and his consequent ability to put an unmurmuring trust in the author. Here, indeed, is very little of the gorilla whom we formerly knew: his ferocity is greatly abated; he only once beats his breast and roars; he does not twist gun-barrels; his domestic habits are much simplified; his appearance here is relatively as unimportant as Mr. Pendennis's in the "Newcomes"; he is a deposed hero; and Mr. Du Chaillu pushes on to Ashango-Land without him. Otherwise, moreover, the narrative is quite credible, and, so far, unattractive, though there is still enough of incident to hold the idle, and enough of information in the appendices concerning the characteristics of the African skulls collected by Du Chaillu, the geographical and astronomical observations made en route, and the linguistic peculiarities noted, to interest the scientific. The book is perhaps not a fortunate one for those who occupy a place between these classes of readers, and who are tempted to ask of Mr. Du Chaillu, Have you really four hundred and thirty-seven royal octavo pages of news to tell us of Equatorial Africa?
Our traveller landed in West Africa in the autumn of 1863, and, after a short excursion in the coast country in search of the gorilla, he ascended the Fernand Vaz in a steamer seventy miles, to Goumbi, whence he proceeded by canoe to Obindji. Here, provided with a retinue of one hundred men of the Commi nation, his over-