Quarterly Review (Volume 21) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. IV.?Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China, and of a Poyage to and from that Country, in the Years 1816 and 1817; containing an Account of the most interesting Transactions of Lord Amherst's Embassy to the Court of Pe- kin, and Observations on the Countries which it visited. By Clarke Abel, F.L.S. London. 1818. 1/"E are now in possession of three quartos, besides a goodly octavo, as the literary fruits of Lord Amherst's Embassy to China?how many more are yet hatching in the womb of time we venture not to conjecture; but we have heard that the same literary jobman who, under the guidance of Du Halde and Grozier, drovp /Eneas Anderson so successfully over the old ground, declares himself still able and willing to start with any other attendant of the embassy, notwithstanding the perils of the midnight procession round the walls of Pekin, and the horrors of the granite causeway. Seriously, we scarcely imagined that Mr. Abel would have succeeded so well in filling his pages, without a repetition of what we had already learned from Mr. Ellis and Mr. M'Leod; and in fact there is a good deal of the same kind of matter as was furnished by these gentlemen, and which can now hardly be considered as ' interesting transactions.' There if something, however, in Mr. Abel's book, which has no place in those of the other two; and there would have been more, but for the author's illness during the most interesting part of the journey through China, and the subsequent shipwreck of the Alceste; by the former he lost the opportunity of making his personal observations, and by the latter those collections of natural history which had been made partly by himself, but mostly by the exertions of others. Three hundred packages of seeds had been collected by the unremitting efforts of Mr. ...