whale, a fierce battle of sharks ensued under the water, the fins and tails of the combatants being seen as they 'lashed with idle rage' the disturbed sea. Sometimes a huge shark would leap quite out

of the water like a salmon or a porpoise. There was generally a negro up to his middle in the bowels of the whale, assisting to sever the masses of blubber; and now and then a hungry shark would make a grab at some morsel close to the man, when he would give it a blow over the nose with the fletching-knife, much as one would thump an over-greedy dog. Habit renders these people callous. Upwards of fifty sharks had been lanced that morning, but plenty were still left. Sharks will eat a quarter of a whale in one night, and therefore it is of course an object with the whalers to strip the body of the leviathan as quickly as possible. The sea was red with blood, and the crews of the surrounding boats were patiently waiting their lumps of whale beef to cook for their dinner. All this, though curious enough to a novice, was, after the first glance, revolting. Everybody seemed to be running about with knives in their hands or carrying away beef to be cooked; and the smell was so disagreeable, that I could not muster up resolution enough to taste the marine viand."

A woodcut follows, of a seven-foot shark, which Mr Day gave a negro a dollar to fish up for him, and took its likeness whilst still living, holding his nose the while. The creature was hoisted out of the sea by the tackle and fall. Sharks are brisk and vigorous amongst those islands. Going home, Mr Day saw one leap out of the water high in the air, and thought how awkward it would have been had the monster alighted in his boat. A strange tale was told him that day by one of the whalers, to the effect that whales, whilst feeding at the bottom of the sea, sing beautifully.

"Often,' said the narrator, 'have I, on a calm still night, whilst on the watch in a boat, heard them, whilst feeding, sing below me, by which sounds I detected their whereabout, and could always tell where they would ascend to respire, by their short asthmatic breathings like that of a man out of breath ;' and here he imitated the sounds, which proved to be octaves. The puffings were like those of a steam locomotive on its first coming into play. This reminded me of the legendary songs of the mermaids."

If, whilst reading Mr Day's volumes, we have felt mistrustful, and inclined to suspect him of painting with too black a brush, it has been by reason frequently makes kindly mention of of the universality of his censure. He

individuals-seldom or never of races.

We

Yankees and negroes, mulattoes and white creoles, all come under his lash, administered with no sparing hand. Whilst coinciding with portions of his censure, we still think it would have lost nothing in force or severity had it been more temperately and less sweepingly expressed. His descriptions of the different races he encountered during his abode beyond the Atlantic, are far more vivid and amusing than complimentary. would not advise him to go back to the West Indies, nor yet to the United States, where he had lived for three years before starting for the Tropics. We have our doubts whether his reception on his next visit to Guadaloupe will be flattering to his feelings, at least if he carries out the intention intimated upon his title-page of producing a French translation of the book. In the second line of the first volume the inhabitants of the States are set down as collectively disagreeable. A little farther on, Mrs Trollope's account of the Americans is praised as religiously and unexaggeratedly true, and meanness, villany, and dirty tricks, are attributed to our across-the-water cousins en masse. Presently, "I thought of Connecticut," says our author, "and of the cold selfish Yankees-slimy serpentlike knaves." Many such, unquestionably, have been, and again will be, raised in the peddling state, as well as in other provinces of the Union; but Christian charity, surely, Mr Day, forbids us to doubt that the exceptions are numerous. Let not those Yankees, however, to whose indignant eyes this book is presented, through the medium of one of Harpy and Co.'s cheap reprints, take umbrage overmuch at the author's strictures, or imagine for an instant that he treats his fellow-subjects more tenderly than the foreigner. "The white male creoles of the British West Indies are a wretched set, ludicrously proud and vain, and miserably ignorant." In the British West Indies, he elsewhere

says, "I am sorry to say that respectability of character is held but in little esteem. Bad repute never seems to affect social position, and I incurred much odium as a proud man, who thought no one good enough for him,' simply because I avoided the acquain tance of public defaulters, and of persons universally spoken of as unprincipled dishonourable men." Upon the poor Bimms (vulgar for Barbadians) he is down like a sledgehammer. They are "a miserably mean, narrow-minded race, who think of nothing but making sugar, eating pork and sweet potatoes, and riding about in a buggy;"-occupations, so it appears to us, of a particularly pastoral and blameless nature, by no means calling for such extremity of scorn. At Guadaloupe he discovers that there is something very savage and lowering in the eye of a French soldier," and that "you rarely see an open countenance in the French ranks." There is also "a superciliousness of manner in the officers, that shows they were never born to command." We might quote plenty more of such passages, but content ourselves with one-a sort of circular excommunication addressed to all creation, or nearly so. "An EngJishman of any reflection," Mr Day opines, "is very unfitted to reside in any other part of the world than his own country." The same thing has been sometimes said by foreigners, although their reasons for English "unfitness" have been different from

those assigned in the present book. Go where he will, out of his own country, the "Englishman of reflection," according to Mr Day, is too good for his society. Sympathy and association with the foreigner are for him alike impossible. "The Frenchman is too tête montée; the German of education is too mystical; the Italians are ignorant and vulgar; the Americans, as well as being ignorant and vulgar, are ludicrously conceited, and for the rest far below the standard in knowledge and education." All, all barren, from Dan to Beersheeba, from the Adriatic to the Pacific, save and except those favoured isles which British seas encircle. Certainly no one can impute cosmopolitan tendencies to the author of Five Years in the West Indies. Our chief reason for regretting the great vivacity and occasional fierceness of his demonstrations against alien and colonial populations, is our apprehension lest readers should think that by temper or temperament Mr Day is more ready to blame than to approve; to expose vices and failings than to discover virtues and amiable qualities. He himself tells us of the irritability of system produced by West Indian climate and good living. To the former he was inevitably exposed; of the latter we trust he made no abuse, and that neither “rattleskull" nor any other tempting but treacherous nectar, indigenous to the Antilles, have had aught to do with the petulant and censorious tone of his book.

is almost thankful she was never troubled with so fleeting a possession. Talent she despises as a qualification only requisite for people who have their way to make. Accomplish ments are only fit for governesses and performers on the stage. What beauty has done for a lovely young Lavinia-what talent and accomplishments have done for opera singers and actresses, must be done for her by dint of hard cash. She knows she has an immense amount of it; she calculates its power-and, standing tip-toe on piled-up barrels of golddust, she looks down on all the peerage below the degree of a duke. Avoid her by all means. She has too much money to have much romance; and is too vulgar to have any feeling. Poverty and wealth, like other extremes, are sometimes not very different in their effects. The mind is narrowed as much by superfluous millions, as by a paucity of shillings. The reason is, that in both cases the thoughts rest too constantly on money -the most debasing subject of contemplation on which they can be employed. In the one case, the heart is like an over-furnished drawingroom, where sofas, chairs, cabinets, tables, and articles of vertu, so block up the apartment that there is no room for a visitor in the midst of all that wealth; in the other, the room is so empty that there is no temptation for the visitor to stay, no chair to sit on, no carpet to warm the feet, and chill winds blowing in at window and door. I should say the affections begin to expand at four hundred a-year; and cease to blow at five thousand. Under the lesser sum, a woman makes you her victim, and hates you; above the larger, she makes you her slave, and despises you. I made up my mind to the medium, and was contented with either three thousand acres of arable land, or a hundred thousand pounds in the three per cents.

The instructions I received, before fairly opening shop, if conveyed in Greek, would have qualified me for a professor. "My boy," said my father to me he assumed a solemnity of look on these occasions, and a proverb-like terseness of expression, which always reminded me of Solo

mon-" my boy, whenever you think of matrimony, beware of falling in love. Don't make up to rich girls who are positively ugly. They know it themselves, and appreciate your motives. Don't look out for beauty in the object of your choice. Don't object to it if it comes; but by all means prefer a person with no distinguishing characteristic, one way or other. Laying siege to beauty seems like building on another man's foundation. She has heard all about her eyes and dimples before. Be the creator of new feelings in the unsophisticated heart of the dowdy. Make ber proud of her flat nose. If she puts an extraordinary amount of fire into her little, half-shut, colourless eyes, propose on the instant. You have a right of possession to the land of which you are first discoverer. But, above all things, my dear boy, beware of having one spark of feeling, or of what fools call sentiment, and I call folly, in your own heart. Pass the port.' This is a syllabus of many a lecture delivered with the greatest earnestness. A sort of harshness mingled in the tone of his voice when he spoke of the possibility of my having any affection, even when I was most desperately in love. He himself had been a sufferer. He had courted my mother, who, in spite of great beauty, endeared herself to his eyes by possessing an aunt, of about fifty, from whom she expected an immense estate. He married on this expectation; and in a few months the aunt married an Irish captain of his own age-in a pique, as she herself confessed, at having been jilted for a penniless creature like her niece. "Sir, I lost four thousand a-year by neglecting the old lady. And that comes of falling disinterestedly in love."

But these introductory remarks are not the result only of lectures and the paternal advice. They are confirmed by my own observation and experience. Two years in London, and a diligent reconnoissance from the lower parts of Brompton to the acclivities of the Regent's Park, showed me that all was barren. I forgot, in my eagerness to secure a comfortable home by a walk through the church, that there were thousands of fair aspirants for the honours of matrimony,