Here and there it seems to us
a little too personal, and the public is made the confidant of matters
in which it has properly no concern. This, perhaps, is more the fault
of the present generation than of the author; but it is something we
feel bound to protest against, wherever we meet it. In other respects,
the book is one which we may thank not only for entertainment, but for
instruction. In its vivid picturesqueness, it furnishes the complement
to Mr. Dana's "To Cuba and Back." Mrs. Howe has the poet's gift of
making us see what she describes, and she is as lively and witty as a
French _Marquise_ of the seventeenth century, when a _De_ in the name,
petticoats, and Paris were an infallible receipt for cleverness. Toward
the end of her volume, Mrs. Howe enters a spirited and telling protest
against a self-constituted censorship, which would insist on a
traveller's squaring his impressions with some foregone theory of right
and wrong, instead of thankfully allowing facts to rectify his theory.
A traveller is bound to tell us what he saw, not what he expected or
wished to see; and it is only by comparing the different views of many
independent observers that we who tarry at home can arrive at any
approximate notion of absolute fact.
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