e twin continents for much larger books with much smaller titles.

It must be said, in justice to the writer, that the pretentiousness of
his book is only skin-deep. It "thunders in the index," but disappears
after the front page. He makes no claim to profundity, and is satisfied
to be an authority among Nimrods rather than with statesmen and
philosophers. The rod and gun suit his hand better than the pen, and he
takes not the least trouble to disguise the fact. Style is the very
least of his cares: we should almost judge, indeed, that he likes to
parade his contempt for it. The pronoun _who_ he constantly applies to
animals, from a sheep to a shellfish. Of the Uruguayan thistles he
notes: "The abundance of this weed was quite surprising, and consisted
chiefly of two kinds." The gentleman of color he invariably mentions as
a _nigger_--a word as strange to ears polite in America, and perhaps as
natural to them in England, as _nasty_. He plucks at Sir G. Wolseley's
laurels won in "licking a few miserable niggers in Ashantee."

But literary vanities can be despised by a man who drops a prong-horned
antelope at one thousand and ninety yards; overtakes by swimming, and
captures, a turtle in mid-ocean; finishes with a single ball a grizzly
_who_ had put to flight the settlers of half a county in Idaho; stalks a
guanaco in Patagonia nine feet high to the top of the head; and catches
in one day's fishing, "the only day I really worked hard, twenty-seven
California salmon, weighing three hundred and twenty-four pounds." The
majesty of the facts utterly overshadows any little blemishes in the
method of stating them. Truth so grand might well afford to present
itself quite naked, as Truth poetically does--much more somewhat
defective in the cut of its garments.

Sir Rose Price is a cosmopolitan sportsman, having hunted the jungles of
India, the swamps of Eastern Africa and China, the fjelds of Norway, and
most other fields of "mimic war." As usual with persons of that taste,
he enjoys perfect health, and, like most persons who know that great
blessing, he is full of bonhommie and looks on the rosy side of things.
Mosquitoes he dislikes: he denounces also the modern Peruvians. But his
chief bitterness is reserved for the unhappy gunboat, the Rocket, which
took eight months to get him to San Diego, and spent half an hour in
turning round. Whether or not that particular segment of England's
wooden walls was built in the eclipse, no