The Quarterly Review (Volume 127) (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: been to increase the strength and authority of Government: Liberals, because, now that the Government truly represents the people, it is obviously the people's best instrument for doing the people's work, and because, now that they choose their rulers, they ought certainly to be able to trust them. Art. !!!.?1. Travels in t/ic East Indian Archipelago. By Albert S. Bickmore, M.A., andc. London, 1868. 2. The Malay Archipelago: the Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise. A narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. By A. R. Wallace. London, 1869. HAD the atlas of an old Greek geographer approached in any degree to the completeness and accuracy of a modern scientific atlas, we should without doubt have found the ' Islands of the Blessed' placed at a very different part of the compass from that Far West, to which their local habitation was popularly assigned by the ancients. Not amidst the waters of the Atlantic, with its mighty tides and fierce tempests?though sunny Madeira offers its health-giving skies, and from over the Mare del Sargasso come spicy breezes, which deceived that grand old sailor, Cris- toval Colon, into believing that he had wellnigh circumnavigated the world?but rather in those Eastern Seas, where Nature puts man's language to shame when it tries to describe her beauty, where birds vie in brilliancy with the ruby and the emerald, where Nature scatters her choicest treasures with lavish prodigality, would they have placed their earthly paradise. Somewhere amidst those islands of romance and adventure they might well have imagined the summit of earthly happiness could be attained. Any new work on these lovely regions would have been acceptable. A hearty welcome will be willingly accorded to the two very remarkable and most interesting boo...