There can be no doubt about the disappointment of those persons who open _The Pillars of Hercules_ in expectation of finding what the title promises—a narrative of travel in Spain and Morocco. These countries are certainly mentioned here and there in the two bulky octavos, but quite subordinately to a variety of other matters which had perhaps better been treated elsewhere than in the professed book of travels they cumber and overload. Mr Urquhart, who has published volumes and pamphlets on innumerable subjects, social and political, foreign and domestic, appears to have had by him a heterogeneous mass of essays and dissertations, which he has now strung, pretty much at random, upon the slender thread of his Spanish-African ramble. Wearisomely discursive and desultory, he continually canters off to distant regions, and to subjects foreign to his text. Thus we have a chapter on the invention and antiquity of glass; another concerning the magnetic needle; a third and fourth, in which we are taken to America, Ceylon, China, and other remote places; one about the celebrated drug hashish, which temporarily transports its votaries into paradise. This is presently succeeded by a dissertation on buttered muffins; and shortly thereafter we arrive at a long essay on the early races of Spain and Mauritania, which we take for granted to be exceedingly learned and important, and which we are quite sure is awfully heavy and uninteresting. Etymology is a hobby of this author’s, and the portions of his work devoted to it would, of themselves, make a good-sized volume, by whose separation the book would be greatly lightened and advantaged. On the subject of corporal purification he grows positively eloquent and impassioned; and so minute are his descriptions of the scrubbing and scraping processes, by which alone men become fit to live, that he very rightly deems a prefatory apology essential. On this head more anon. We pause, for a specimen of solemn trifling, at Chapter Nine, Book the First, Volume the First. Nominally an “Excursion round the Straits,” it is actually an essay on costume, commencing with Spanish petticoats, giving a passing glance to the history and origin of lace, asserting the identity of the Moorish and Highland garb, and closing with an argument in favour of the importance and moral influence of a national dress. The chapter opens with praises of Cadiz, a city so long accustomed to rhyme with “ladies,” that it will hardly feel surprise or annoyance at Mr Urquhart’s attributing its charm less to the beauty of its buildings than to the “swarm of women,” with “fluttering eyes,” and “silk blonde tresses,” covering the floor of the cathedral. From tresses to dresses the transition is easy, and he proceeds to discourse upon the mantilla: not a very novel subject certainly, but one upon which he, nevertheless, contrives to cast some new lights—lights that would, we suspect, rather