esole, through a path skirted with
wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the door of the
Doccia, and sate on the pretty melancholy platform behind it,
reading, or looking down to Florence."

This is all very charming, yet hear what the author says further:--

"Some people, when they return from Italy, say it has no wood,
and some a great deal. The fact is, that many parts of it,
Tuscany included, has no wood to _speak of_: it wants larger
trees interspersed with the small ones, in the manner of our
hedge-row elms. A tree of a reasonable height is a god-send.
The olives are low and hazy-looking, like dry sallows. You
have plenty of these; but to an Englishman, looking from a
height, they appear little better than brushwood. Then there
are no meadows, no proper green fields in June; nothing of
that luxurious combination of green and russet, of grass, wild
flowers, and woods, over which a lover of nature can stroll
for hours, with a foot as fresh as the stag's; unmixed with
chalk-dust, and an eternal public path, and able to lie down,
if he will, and sleep in clover. In short--saving, alas! a
finer sky and a drier atmosphere--we have the best part of
Italy in books; and this we can enjoy in England. Give me
Tuscany in Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies
between Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow.... To me, Italy had a
certain hard taste in the mouth: its mountains were too bare,
its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too
loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in
the grassy balm of my native fields."

As a whole these volumes are full of interest and variety. They
introduce us to numerous famous people, and leave us with a most
agreeable impression of their author.

* * * * *

THE MORMONS.

THOMAS L. KANE, of Philadelphia, distinguished himself very honorably
a year or two ago by the vindication of the Mormons against calumnies
to which they had been subjected in the Western States, and by
appeals for their relief from the sufferings induced by unlooked-for
exposure in their exodus to California. We are indebted to him for
an interesting discourse upon the subject, delivered before the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He concludes this performance with
the following observations, which we believe to be altogether just.
Mr. KANE is a m