The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-06 00:00:00

LITERATURE

The Book of Perfumes. By Eugene Rimmel,
One Vol. Pp. 266. Chapman and Hall.
A delicious book—radiant to the eye, fragrant
to the nostrils—emblazoned, gilt-edged, illustrated,
odoriferous ! As Xavier de Maistre, in his quaint
little narrative of a Journey Round his Room, ob-
serves, that in the mere cutting of a lemon we have
a pleasant foretaste of acid—so might we say that
the mere look in print of the name of Eugene
Rimmel has long since become suggestive to
us of a perfumed breeze, or of the tinkling of
an aromatic • fountain. Insomuch, in truth,
that when we come to take up, as we do in
this handsome volume, " A Book of Perfume,
by Eugene Rimmel," we expect to find that
it is a Book of Perfume. And accordingly, in this
expectation we have been in no way disappointed !
A Book of Perfume this is, not merely in name but
in reality. As we turn the leaves, our senses are
greeted by a breath as from a flower garden ! The
work is what it affects to be—A Book, eh ? Why,
yes—and more than that—A Bouquet ? Mr. Rim-
nel justifies, by his present literary performance,
his reputation as a Perfumer, nay, it should be said
rather as the Perfumer, as the popular and Fashion-
able Perfumer of Nowadays, at once among Pari-
sians and among Londoners. He proves himself to
be, in truth, a perfect Master of his Art. He shows
that he understands it theoretically as well as he
carries it out practically. He lifts the curtain—and
conducts us into his wonderful laboratory ! He reveals
to us many of the secrets of hiS exquisite distillations !
He explains to us some at least among the countless
mysteries of his subtle and refined combinations.
By the time the exhilarated and refreshed reader of
this really lovely volume has got to the end of it—
exhilarated with anecdote and refreshed by a perpe-
tual sense of fragrance—he (the reader, that is)
knows, if not All About It—at any rate vastly more
than when he first opened the volume ! A pane-
gyric, by the way, that cannot be fairly pro-
nounced, we fear, over one volume in a thousand,
almost we had said, over one volume in a hundred
thousand I He feels, on closing this delectable
Book of Perfumery, as if he had been actually
handling the delicious materials of the perfumer's
craft of which it treats ! Carrying about with him
afterwards, for a while, so to speak, a suspicion of
having fingered the reddish-brown musk-pod of
the deer of Tonquin—of having toyed with a lump
of ambergris washed up upon the coast of Green-
land—of having been sprinkled by successive
douches of liquid perfumes distilled from all the
daintiest flowers that blow, the jessamine, the rose,
the crocus, the violet, the jonquil, the tuberose, the
narcissus ! Spices, one might say, seem showering
about us in the mere retrospect of the perusal of
the Book of Perfumes—clove, mace, nutmeg,
pimento, cinnamon ! We appear to have come
fresh, as it were, from a walk through a
field of the Tonquin Bean ! And, even if we
imagine ourselves to be reposing for a while
afterwards, it must needs be in a bower trellissed
and festooned by some odorous creeper like the
Vanilla ! The atmosphere we breathe all through
the book is an atmosphere of fragrance—and of a
fragrance that is ever fresh and ever new—a frag-
rance that never palls, or cloys, or faints away
exhausted by the mere process of evaporation.
" Ah, what can language do ?" exclaims our author
with the Poet of " The Seasons"—on first dipping his
pen (the quill of a ringdove surely ?) into his aro-
matic ink before inditing the very first sentence
of his very first chapter—
" Ah, what can language do ? Ah, where find words,
Tinged with so many colours ; and whose powers,
To life approaching, may perfume my lays,
With that fine oil, those aromatic gales,
That inexhaustible flow continual round?"
Yet—James Thomson did this, nevertheless, in his
poetry, and Eugene Rimmel has now done it again,
quite as unmistakeably, in his congenial prose. The
language almost despaired of being found by each
—by the Poet writing the ejaculation, and the Per-
fumer quoting it—has been found by both : by
Thomson in his " Summer," by Rimmel in his
" Book of Perfumes." The fine oil, the aromatic
gale, the fragrance, the aroma, flow here con-
tinually, inexhaustibly, through the whole current
of the narrative—thereof the Poet, here of the Per-
fumer ! Non cuique datum est habere nasum is the
quaintly chosen motto emblazoned upon the cover
of this Book of Perfumes, by Eugene Rimmel.
Happy the reader, however, to whom that gift is
given ! For once, he can do no better than just simply,
meekly, complacently--follow his nose ! It will
lead him, delightedly, on through all the fragrant
leaves of this really delectable Book of Perfumes—
as though the leaves were not so much, in truth,
the leaves of a book tlpt he was pursuing, as of
garden that he was traversing.

THE WILD GARLAND. Collected by Isaac Reeve.
Part I. F. Pitman.—ln the unpretending form of
a little sixpenny serial, there is here commenced one
of the most curious and delightful collections of
miscellaneous poetry that could be well desired, even
by students delighting most in the curiosities of
literature. We shall watch the continuation of the
work with lively interest. Small, cheap, unpre-
tentious as it is, the serial under notice is one
really worth buying for present perusal, and
worth binding up afterwards for future
consultation. Setting forth with the Rev.
B. Poulter's admirably-clever alphabetical ac-
count of " The Siege of Belgrade," written by
him in 1828, when he was Prebendary of Win-
chester, and beginning—
An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade ;
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction's desolating doom"—
the Wild Garland gives us already, in its first
number, a wonderful gathering together of Poetical
curiosities, Alliterations, Tautologies, Enigmas,
Acrostics, Macaronies, Chronograms, Lipograms,
Logograms, and Anagrams. The last of the ana-
grams here given—the final blossom on this first
sprig for the weaving of The Wild Garland—being,
as the collector truly says, the very finest Latin
anagram that was ever made : namely—the answer
to Pilate's question, What is Truth ? Quid est
Veritas ?—" Est vir qui adest !" meaning The man
who stands before thee, or who is Present Success
to Mr. Isaac Reeve, say we, and his very curious
poetical collection

PEARCE'S WEATHER ALMANACK FOR 1865.
Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.—A weather almanack
by the author of the " Weather Guide Book" is
welcome to us, and, we doubt not, will prove wel-
come to many others besides ourselves. It contains
Predictions of the Weather for Every. Day in the
Year, and marks out unhesitatingly beforehand the
Probable Storm Periods. Making his calculations,
as Mr. Pearce does, upon purely scientific principles,
his Almanack comes before the public with a trifle
more authority than any discoverable in the old-
world Weather Almanacks of the mere lucky
guessers—now of a sharp frost, now of some ter-
rible thunderstorm.

THE GARDEN ORACLE-1865. Groombridge and
Sons.—Shirley Ilibberd's Garden Oracle again
comes forth most seasonable. The present issue
makes the seventh annual appearance of this un-
rivalled Floricultural Year Book : and--so far as
the merit of completeness goes—the present imprint
of The Garden Oracle of Shirley Hibberd is beyond
the best of its half-dozen predecessors.

A young man named Requille was arrested a few
days since at Chambon, near Blois, for the murder
of his own mother. It appears that Requille was given to
drinking, and that his mother, on the day of the crime, re-
proached him for having spent all his earnings at the wine
shop. Irritated by this, he knocked her down with a heavy
stick, and beat her about the head till she was dead. Early
in the morning he threw the body into the river Cisse,
where it was soul afterwards found by some women who
went to fetch water. The son was at once suspected to be
the murderer, and when charged with the crime confessed
his guilt