the whole, we can scarcely admire What between the Consul's gardens, their matrimonial tactics. We found and the old Greek, and the little bit that we were among a family of of business we had upon our hands, Hádjis. Miss Dúdù was a Hadji, and we managed to get through the time so were her father and mother. In their pleasantly enough. We saw that we · case the place of pilgrimage is Jerusa- had here a good specimen of the lem, a visit to which confers on them variety of life commonly described as the respectable title of Hadji for life. deadly-lively. Were it not that they This old gentleman had made a pious have such a lot of strangers conuse of some of his money, by promot- stantly passing through the place, ing the cause of pilgrimage among his they might seem to be in danger of a less opulent brethren. The desire to moralanchylosis—of falling into a state tread the holy soil is common to them of mind so rusty, as to be incapable of all ; not only to the religious. These direction to any object, save such have their motives ; but so also have as lay before them, in the way the disorderly and wicked, who think of immediate physical requirement. that a world of cheating and ill-living The few days that we remained is covered over by the wholesome there did not afford time enough cloak of prilgrimage. There are also for the disease to make much head certain less considerable places of with us. Indeed, for us it was pilgrimage, invested with considerable a variety of experience, sufficiently sanctity, though inferior in character stirring for the time, to mark the to the one great rendezvous of the ways of a people so deeply buried in religious. Health to body seems imperturbability and incuriosity. often the expected result of visits to I think we were not sorry when at these secondary places, to which re- last the messenger returned from the course will frequently be had when Caimacan, and we found we were in medical aid has failed to be available. condition to leave the place. The Dúdù's father had made himself Consul was set on his legs again, and highly popular by chartering a vessel, the English name in better odour than and conveying, for charity's sake, as The attachés of the consulate many devotees as chose to go on one of had taken care that our visit should these minor expeditions. The island fail in no degree of its wholesome inof Cyprus has a convent of peculiar fluence, for want of their good word ; sanctity, a visit to which is highly and I fancy that the town's people esteemed as an antidote to bodily ills. thought themselves rather well off He gave a great number the oppor- that we left their town standing. We tunity of testing the truth of the left, too, with the full reputation for tradition.

merciful dealing ; as we had spared It was not bad fun, after all, tarry- the poor soap-rioters the infliction ing a few days in Adalia : only, by of the bastinado. choice, we would hardly choose that And so we sped on our way to particular season for the excursion. Rhodes.

ever.

PACIFIC ROVINGS. *

more

We were much puzzled, a few styled gag. Having but an indiffe· weeks since, by a tantalising and un- rent opinion of books ushered into

intelligible paragraph, pertinaciously existence by such charlatanical manreiterated in the London newspapers. cuvres, we thought no

of Its brevity equalled its mystery ; it Omoo, until, musing the other day consisted but of five words, the first over our matutinal hyson, the volume and last in imposing majuscules. itself was laid before us, and we sudThus it ran :

denly found ourselves in the enter“ OMOO, by the author of TYPEE.”

taining society of Marquesan Melville,

the phonix of modern voyagers, With Trinculo we exclaimed, “What sprung, it would seem, from the have we here? a man or a fish?

dead mingled ashes of Captain Cook and or alive?” Who or what were Typee Robin Crusoe. and Omoo? Were things or creatures Those who have read Mr Herman thus designated? Did they exist on Melville's former work will rememthe earth, or in the air, or in the ber, those who have not are informed waters under the earth ; were they by the introduction to the present spiritual or material, vegetable or one, that the author, an educated mineral, brute or human ? Were American, whom circumstances had they newly-discovered planets, nick- shipped as a common sailor on board named whilst awaiting baptism, or a South-Seaman, was left by his vessel strange fossils, contemporaries of the on the island of Nukuheva, one of Megatherium, or Magyar dissyllables the Marquesan group. Here he refrom Dr Bowring's vocabulary? Per- mained some months, until taken off chance they were a pair of new singers by a Sydney whaler, short-handed, for the Garden, or a fresh brace of and glad to catch him At this point beasts for the legitimate drama at of his adventures he commences Drury. Omoo might be the heavy Omoo. The title is borrowed from elephant; Typee the light-comedy the dialect of the Marquesas, and camel. Did danger lurk in the enig- signifies a rover: the book is excelmatical words ? Were they obscure lent, quite first-rate, the clear grit," intimations of treasonable designs, as Mr Melville's countrymen would Swing advertisements, or masonić say. Its chief fault, almost its only signs ? Was the palace at West- one, interferes little with the pleaminster in peril ? had an agent of sure of reading it, will escape many, Barbarossa Joinville undermined the and is hardly worth insisting upon. Trafalgar column ? Were they con- Omoo is of the order composite, spirators' watchwords, lovers' letters, a skilfully concocted Robinsonade,

a signals concerted between the robbers where fictitious incident is ingeof Rogers's bank? We tried them niously blended with genuine inanagrainmatically, but in vain : there formation. Doubtless its author has was nought to be made of Omoo; visited the countries he describes, but shake it as we would, the O's came not in the capacity he states. He is uppermost; and by reversing Typee no Munchausen ; there is nothing imwe obtained but a pitiful result. At probable his adventures, save their last a bright gleam broke through the occurrence to himself, and that he mist of conjecture. Omoo was a

should have been a man before the book. The outlandish title that had mast on board South-Sea traders, or perplexed us was intended to per- whalers, or on any ship or ships plex; it was a bait thrown out to whatever. His speech betrayeth him. that wide-mouthed fish, the public; His voyages and wanderings coma specimen of what is theatrically menced, according to his own account,

* Omoo; A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. By HERMAN MELVILLE. London : 1847.

at least as far back as the year 1838; Melville's avuncular relative, and, for aught we know they are not yet until certified of his corporality, shali at an end. On leaving Tahiti in 1843, set down the gentleman with the he made sail for Japan, and the very Dutch patronymic as a member of an book before us may have been scrib- imaginary clan. bled on the greasy deck of a whaler, Although glad to escape from Nuwhilst floating amidst the coral reefs kuheva, where he had been held in a of the wide Pacific. True that in his sort of honourable captivity, Typeepreface, and in the month of January the alias bestowed upon the rover by of the present year, Mr Melville hails his new shipmates, after the valley from New York ; but in such matters whence they rescued him—was but we really place little dependence upon indifferently pleased with the vessel him. From his narrative we gather on which he left it, and whose articles that this literary and gentlemanly he signed as a seaman for one cruise. common-sailor is quite a young man. The Julia was of a beautiful model, His life, therefore, since he emerged and on or before a wind she sailed from boyhood, has been spent in a like a witch ; but that was all that ship’s forecastle, amongst the wildest could be said in her praise.

She was and most ignorant class of mariners. rotten to the core, incommodious, and Yet his tone is refined and well-bred; ill-provided, badly manned, and worse he writes like one accustomed to good commanded. American-built, she European society, who has read books dated from the Short war, had served and collected stores of information, as a privateer, been taken by the other than could be perused or British, passed through many vicisgathered in the places and amongst situdes, and was in no condition for the rude associates he describes. a long cruise in the Pacific. So These inconsistencies are glaring, mouldering was her fabric, that the and can hardly be explained. A reckless sailors, when seated in the wild freak or unfortunate act of forecastle, dug their knives into the folly, or a boyish thirst for adventure, dank boards between them and sometimes drives lads of education to eternity as easily into the try life before the mast, but when moist sides of some old pollard suited for better things they seldom oak. She was much dilapidated and persevere ; and Mr Melville does not rapidly becoming more for seem to us the manner of man to rest Black Baltimore, the ship's cook, long contented with the coarse com- when in want of firewood, did not pany and humble lot of merchant scruple to hack splinters from the

Other discrepancies strike bits and beams. Lugubrious indeed us in his book and character. The was the aspect of the forecastle. train of suspicion once lighted, the Landsmen, whose ideas of a sailor's flame runs rapidly along. Our mis- sleeping-place are taken from the givings begin with the title-page. snow-white hammocks and exquisitely “Lovel or Belville,” says the Laird of clean berth-deck of a man of war, or Monkbarns, " are just the names which from the rough, but substantial comyoungsters are apt to assume on such fort of a well-appointed merchantman, occasions." And Herman Melville can form no conception of the sursounds to us vastly like the harmo- passing and countless abominations nious and carefully selected appel- of a South-Sea whaler. The “ Little lation of an imaginary hero of Jule," as her crew affectionately styled romance. Separately the names are her, was a craft of two hundred tons not uncommon; we can urge no valid or thereabouts ; she had sailed with reason against their junction, and yet thirty-two hands, whom desertion had in this instance they fall suspiciously reduced to twenty, but these were too

We are similarly im- many for the cramped and putrid nook pressed by the dedication. Of the in which they slept, ate, and smoked, existence of Uncle Gansevoort, of and alternately desponded or were Gansevoort, Saratoga County, we are jovial, as sickness and discomfort, or wholly incredulous. We shall com- a Saturday night's bottle and hopes of mission our New York correspondents better luck, got the upper hand. to inquire as to the reality of Mr Want of room, however, was one of

as

seamen.

the least grievances of which the own domestic opportunities of obserJulia's crew complained. It was a vation. That were unjust to the crew mere trifle, not worth the naming. They of the Julia, and would give no adecould have submitted to close stow- quate idea of their sufferings. As a age, had the dunnage been decent. But purring tabby to a roaring jaguar, so instead of swinging in cosy hammocks, is a British black-beetle to a cockthey slept in bunks or wretched roach of the Southern Seas. We pigeon-holes, on fragments of sails, back our assertion by a quotation from unclean rays, blanket-shreds, and the our lamented friend Captain Cringle, like. Such unenviable accommoda- who in his especially graphic and attraetions ought hardly to have been tive style thus hits off the peculiarities disputed with their luckless posses- of this graceful insect. When full sors, who neverthless were not allowed grown,” saith Thomas, “it is a large to occupy in peace their broken-down dingy brown-coloured beetle, about bunks and scanty bedding. Two two inches long, with six legs, and races of creatures, time out of mind two feelers as long as its body. It the curse of old ships in warm lati- has a strong anti-hysterical flavour, tudes, infested the Julia's forecastle, something between rotten cheese and resisting all efforts to dislodge or asafætida, and seldom stirs abroad exterminate them, sometimes even when the sun is up, but lies concealed getting the upper hand, dispossessing in the most obscure and obscene the tortured mariners, and driving crevices it can creep into; so that, them on deck in terror and despair. when it is seen, its wings and body The sick only, hapless martyrs unable are thickly covered with dust and to leave their cribs, lay passive, if not dirt of various shades, which any culresigned, and were trampled under prit who chances to fall asleep with foot by their ferocious and unfragrant his mouth open, is sure to reap the foes. These were rats and cockroaches. benefit of, as it has a great propensity Typee-we use the name he bore to walk into it, partly for the sake of during his Julian tribulations-records the crumbs adhering to the mastia singular phenomenon in the noctur- cators, and also, apparently, with a nal habits of the last-named vermin. scientific desire to inspect, by accurate “ Every night they had a jubilee. admeasurement with the aforesaid anThe first symptom was an unusual tennæ, the state and condition of the clustering and humming amongst the whole potato-trap." A description swarms lining the beams overhead, worthy of Buffon. Such were the and the inside of the sleeping-places. delicate monsters, the savoury sexiThis was succeeded by a prodigious pedes, with whom Typee and his coming and going on the part of those comrades had to wage incessant war. living out of sight. Presently they all They were worse even than the rats, came forth; the larger sort racing over which were certainly bad enough. the chests and planks; winged mon- “ Tame as Trenck's mouse, they stood sters darting to and fro in the air ; and in their holes, peering at you like old the small fry buzzing in heaps almost grandfathers in a doorway;" watchin a state of fusion. On the first alarm, ing for their prey, and disputing with all who were able darted on deck; the sailors the weevil-biscuit, rancid while some of the sick, who were too pork, and horse-beef, composing the feeble, lay perfectly quiet, the dis- Julia's stores; or smothering themtracted vermin running over them at selves, the luscious vermin, in molasses, pleasure. The performance lasted some which thereby acquired a rich woodten minutes." Persons there are, cock flavour, whose cause became weak enough to view with loathing manifest when the treacle-jar ran and aversion certain sable insects low, greatly to the disgust and conthat stray at night in kitchen or in sternation of the biped consumers. pantry, and barbarous enough to cir. There were no delicate feeders on cumvent and destroy the odoriferous board, but this saccharine essence coleopteræ by artful devices of glass of rat was too much even for the traps and scarlet wafers. Such per- unscrupulous stomachs of South-Sea sons will probably form their ideas whalers. A qneer set they were on of Typee's cockroaches from their board that Sydney barque. Paper