The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-21 00:00:00

tures of things that we don't know must inevitably
mislead, and can only very briefly divert. Mr.
Sala affects to make a humorous complaint that
he is doomed to be unlike everyone else. It is
unfortunate that his destiny should have made
an exception when it despatched him on his Rus-
sian mission. On that occasion he was fated to

" chaff " very much like every one else, indeed—
very much, we mean, like the whole tribe of
contemporary small jokers, whose taste is vitiated
by their professional exigencies. For, as a distin-
guished Latin scholar once confessed that his
judgment of a new poem was now always affected
by its adaptability to Latin verse,—a considera-
tion that he never for the life of him could pre-
vent being uppermost in his mind,—so arc these
gentlemen's views of existence generally adulter-
ated from the source by the necessity of consider-
ing how best to cut it up into funny paragraphs.
We willingly admit that Mr. Sala's fun is a
very favourable specimen ; so favourable, indeed,
that we regret the tone of his book all the more.
But Mr. Sala was not required to write "A
Journey due North" to convince the world of
his abilities. We are indebted to him, we believe,
for many most delightful papers in the work
from which this volume is republished. And,
however much we may regret some of the results
of periodical-writing, it would be ungrateful in
the extreme to deny its many charms. Mr. Sala,
then, is a gentleman not only of quaint wit, but
also, we should surmise, of considerable intellec-
tual power; a person, in fact, well qualified, had
he set about the task in a different spirit, to give
us a really good idea of Russia and the Russians.
Unhappily for our information and his own fame,
he has chosen to write as a wag ; and as a
specimen of waggery, accordingly, the present
volume must be judged. And here let us anti-
cipate an objection that gentlemen of Mr. Sala's
class are in the habit of raising to such criticism.
Their favourite retort is that an amusing book may
be instructive as well as a dull one, and that if you
do not think so you are a fogy and a bore. Now,
it is very far from us to deny the Horatian pre-
cept concerning the useful and the pleasant;
but there is a pleasantry that encumbers a sub-
ject as well as a pleasantry that adorns it.
Readers of " Eothen " will understand at once
what we mean by the latter. We shall now give
an extract from Mr. Sala to show what we mean
by the former. Mr. Sala wishes to describe a
Russian bazaar :

I can imagine no better way of conveying a polpfible
notion of things I have seen in this strange land than to
institute comparisons between things Russian. which my
reader will never kuow, 1 hope. save through the medium
of faithful travellers, and things familiar to us all in London
and Paris. So. If you take one avenue of the glorious
Palms Royal, say that where the goldsmith and jeweller'
stops are, and with this non-Mine the old colonnade of the
ItegenVe Quadrant; if to title you add a dwarfed semblance
of the Piorzt in Covent-garlen—especially as regards the
coffee•stalls at early morning; if you throw in a dash of the
Cloisters of Westminster Abbey—taking care to U routinize
all the Gothic, but keeping all the chequered effects of
chiaro-oscuro ; if, still elaborating your work, you piece on
a fragment of that musty little colonnade out of Lower
Regent-street, which ought to belong to the Italian Opera-
house, but doesn't, and at who-e corner Mr. Seguin's
library used to be ; if, as a final architectural effort, you
finish off with a few yards of the dark entry in Canterbury
Cathedral yard, and with as much as you like (there is, not
much) of that particularly grim, ghostly, and mildewed
arcade at the Fields corner of Great Queen-street, Lincoln's-
inn : if you make an architectural salmagundy of all these ;
spice with a flavour of the delightful np-and-down, under-
the-basement and over-the-tiles streets of Cheater ; garnish
with that portion of the peristyle of the Palace of the
Institute in Paris, where the print stalls are: and
serve up hot with reminiscences of what old Exeter
'Change must have been like; you will have something of
a skeleton notion of the outward appearance of the
Gostinnui-ilvor.
To people who had seen it this might be a laugh-
able, possibly a vivid, sketch. But what kind
of impression does it convey to any one else ?
Would not a few lines of simple description, by
a writer who can really describe, have been in-
finitely preferable? Yet two-thirds of the work
are written in this kind of fashion. As, how-
ever, we only wish to do Mr. Sala full justice,
we shall confine our subsequent extracts to pas-
sages that possess real merit, and show his pic-
torial power very strongly. Here we have the
Russian cabman :
Here is the portrait of the lochvostchik in his habit as
he lives. He is a brawny square-built fellow, with a broad
bully-beef face, fair curly air cropped round his bead in
the workhouse-basin fashion, blue eyes, and a bushy beard.
I have seen some specimens of carroty whiskers, too, among
the Ischrostcbiks, that would do honour to the bar of Eng-
land. His face is freckled and puckered into queer