Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/488



had we heard of "Nile Notes" or its author, when our eye was "fixed" by a collection of mottoes imprinted on the fly-leaf. Anon we were fain to construe "Nile Notes" as signifying promissory notes, issued by a capitalist of substance, and paying something more than simple interest. The traveller who had chosen epigraphs of such a kind, was himself likely, we inferred, to indite a noticeable autograph. The bush he had hung out was so unlike the dry scrubby stump commonly in use, that, in spite of the adage, we drew up at his door, in the assurance of finding good wine within. Indeed, so fond is our admiration of Sir Thomas Browne, and so susceptible our ear to the musical pomp of his rhetoric, that we should probably have been won to read "Nile Notes" had its title-page glistened with none other motto than the old knight's stately, sonorous, mystically solemn sentence: "Canopus is afar off; Memnon resoundeth not to the sun; and Nilus heareth strange voices"—a sentence, by the way, which reminds us of the assurance of a lady-friend, that she has often, in reading Sir Thomas, "felt a sense from the organ-like mindeur of his style, before she fully comprehended it." Then again, there are mottoes from the Arabian Nights, and from Death's Jest Book, and the Sphinx Unriddled, and Browning's Paracelsus, and Werne's White Nile, and—not unaptly, for Mr. Curtis sometimes mouths it in almost imitative parade—from Ancient Pistol himself, who

Nor did a perusal of "Nile Notes" break its word of promise to the hope. It made us acquainted with a writer sometimes laboured and whimsical, but on the whole, rich in fancy, and lavish of his riches—master of a style glowing with the brilliancy of the region he depicts, and attuned to Memnonian resonances and the "strange voices" of Nilus. The stars of midnight are dear to him; to his spirit there is matter in the "silence and the calm of mute insensate things;" his ear loves to lean "in many a secret place;" and albeit a humorist and a "quiz," with the sharp speech at times of a man of the world, and a dash of the cynic in his composition, he is no stranger to that vacant and pensive mood when past impressions, greater and deeper than he knew, "flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude."

Sarcasm and rhapsody are so interfused in "Nile Notes," that one division of readers admires or abhors just those particular chapters or pages which another division abhors or admires. Lydia Languish is in ecstasies with the sentimental paragraphs, "love-laden with most subtle sweetness," or "fringed with brilliant and fragrant flowers," and