Letters of a Sentimental Idler, From Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and the Holy Land
By . With a portrait of the Author, engravings of Oriental Life, etc., etc. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
SUPPOSE a young man of more reading than taste, with a facility for writing somewhat in excess of his ideas, and you have our Sentimental Idler as he portrays himself in these letters. As to the countries through which he passes, it is quite a secondary affair : it is the traveller rather than the travel which he has to tell us of. If it were otherwise, we feel that he might sometimes entertain us better than he does, for he is not without habits of observation, and he does not wholly lack the art of philosophizing his experiences ; though it must be owned that generally he sees only the things which have been seen before, and that he is apt to think thoughts already become literature. He quotes, of course, Kinglake, Dixon, Lamartine, Dumas, Gautier (he refers to Gautier simply as “ a feuilletonists ”); he makes occasional quotations, at second-hand, from Oriental poets ; and he does not scruple to give quite elementary historical information. On the whole, the book is sufficiently tedious to have been much more useful than it is. There is humorous intention in it and flippant performance, but above all, there is affectation. The particular affectation in the title is very wearisomely insisted upon throughout: the author cannot call himself a Sentimental Idler often enough.
We hardly know what to say of his presentation of his portrait to the reader, who here makes his acquaintance for the first time, unless we say that it is more than we had any right to expect, and that we do not think the author has given it out of vanity. The face itself forbids the injurious suspicion.