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 humour. Excepting perhaps in one instance, and of that I am so doubtful, that I shall leave the reader to find it out, I here is no violation of nature or probability. The country is an island, and therefore the better calculated for the scene of the transactions he has assigned to it. The rivers, for the most part, rise in such situations, and flow in such directions, as they would in reality assume. Their course is marked out with reference to the position of principal towns, and other objects of general convenience. The map is therefore not so much to be looked at for the neatness of its appearance, and the symmetry of its proportions; but as an exercise of the mind comparing the propriety of its own nascent ideas and inventions, with the performances of adult artists, founded on observation and authority.

The history of Allestone is ushered in with so pompous a "Prospectus," that I suspect its phraseology to have been partly copied from the Proposals of some periodical publisher, which might happen to have