[19] Being constantly almost an absentee from London, and very often from other great cities, so as to command oftentimes no favourable opportunities for overlooking the great mass of public journals, it is possible enough that other slanders of the same tenor may have existed. I speak of what met my own eye, or was accidentally reported to me--but in fact all of us are exposed to this evil of calumnies lurking unseen--for no degree of energy, and no excess of disposable time, would enable any one man to exercise this sort of vigilant police over _all_ journals. Better, therefore, tranquilly to leave all such malice to confound itself. NORTHERN LIGHTS. "It was on a bright July morning that I found myself whirled away by railroad from Berlin, 'that great ostrich egg in the sand,' which the sun of civilization is said to have hatched." In these words, and with this somewhat far-fetched simile, does a German tourist, Edward Boas by name, commence his narrative of a recent pilgrimage to the far north. Undeterred by the disadvantageous accounts given of those regions by a traveller who had shortly before visited them, and unseduced by the allurements of more southerly climes, he boldly sets forth to breast the mountains and brave the blasts of Scandinavia, and to form his own judgment of the country and its inhabitants. Almost, however, before putting foot on Scandinavian ground, Mr Boas, who, as a traveller, is decidedly of the gossiping and inquisitive class, fills three chapters with all manner of pleasant chatter about himself, and his feelings, and his fancies, and the travelling companions he meets with. His liveliness and versatility, and a certain bantering satirical vein, in which he occasionally indulges, would have caused us to take his work, had we met with it in an English translation, for the production of a French rather than a German pen.