Days in North India
BY , D. D., Author of “ Wee Davie,” “Eastward,” etc., and Editor of “Good Words.” Profusely illustrated. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott & Co.
DR. MACLEOD was of course justified in writing of what interested him most in North India, but at first thought it seems not quite fortunate for his readers that it was the memories of the Sepoy mutiny which most interested him there. It is hard to have that story circumstantially rehearsed again in a book where you had a right to look for fresh speculations, if not fresh information, about Indian life; though the sense of loss proves not so great as it would have been if, in the few passages the author gives to his own experiences, he had shown himself a better observer than he does. He is not a good observer, we should say, nor a good philosophizer of his facts ; and for a thoroughly earnest book we do not know of one more entirely trivial and empty than this. The humor is of the kind that we are glad to get from the pulpit, but that we do not find it so easy to smile at on week-days, and the eloquence has the loose texture of sermons. Neither the past nor the present of India is sufficient to make the author say anything not perfectly expected and commonplace ; but with the help of the beautiful pictures of Saracenic and Hindoo architecture, the descriptions of certain tombs and temples becomes agreeable reading. What is the oddest thing is, that in the vast empire, which we have always supposed to be teeming with millions of native population, Dr. Macleod seems to have seen only three or four Indians.