378 Pages. Complete and Unabridged. This is a smart and lively volume, with which everyone will have faults to find, but which will afford considerable pleasure to Anglo-Indian, if not to home readers. It assumes all those jauntish airs for which ninety-nine light books of travel out of a hundred are now distinguished, and there is a rapidity of transition from caricature and badinage to sober narrative, which rather does violence to good taste; yet we can safely recommend it both for the amusement and information which it affords. Our author left Bombay to visit, on sick certificate, the Neilgherries, which word he translates, for the benefit of English readers, and calls "the Blue Mountains." At starting he is unreasonably severe upon our harbor of Bombay. To compare with the Bay of Naples all that comes under the eye of a passenger when his ship sails down to her anchorage at Bombay would certainly be absurd; perhaps it would be absurd to compare any single view here with beautiful Parthenope, and its classic associations. But he who has been so fortunate as to enjoy the interior scenery of our harbor, and to sail up to Ghorebunder, well knows that for variety and boldness of outline, and for richness of coloring, the beauties of the view are unrivalled. The description of Goa is rather meager; we hoped to find some details of those imposing edifices about which Buchanan first excited our curiosity, but we were doomed to disappointment, and were obliged to be content, instead, with the account of a rapscallion English Officer's adventure. -The Bombay Quarterly Magazine and Review, Vol. 2 [1852]
