This volume sparkles with the raciest qualities of the author’s voluble and brilliant mind, and whatever may be its reception among old salts, it will be sure of success with the reading public generally. It has passages of description and narration equal to the best that Melville has written, and its rhetoric revels and riots in scenes of nautical adventure with more than usual glee and gusto. The style is dashing, headlong, strewn with queer and quaint ingenuities moistened with humor, and is a capital specimen of deliberate and felicitous recklessness, in which a seeming helter-skelter movement is guided by real judgment. The whole work beams with the analogies of a bright and teeming fancy—a faculty that Melville possesses in such degree that it sometimes betrays his rhetoric into fantastic excesses, and gives a sort of unreality to his most vivid descriptions. The joyous vigor and elasticity of his style, however, compensate for all faults, and even his tasteless passages bear the impress of conscious and unwearied power. His late books are not only original in the usual sense, but evince originality of nature, and convey the impression of a new individuality, somewhat composite, it is true, but still giving to the jaded reader of every-day publications, that pleasant shock of surprise which comes from a mental contact with a character at once novel and vigorous. * * * * * _The Land of Bondage; its Ancient Monuments and Present Condition: Being a Journal of a Tour in Egypt. By J. M. Wainwright, D. D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 8vo._ This volume, one of the most sumptuous in external appearance of the season, beautifully printed and profusely illustrated, has many peculiar excellencies also as a book of travels. Dr. Wainwright is both an eager and acute observer, and his volume bears continual evidence of the patience with which he investigated for himself, his disregard of discomfort and danger, and his desire to see with his own eyes what any eyes had seen. The book is full of information, much of which is valuable, and all of which is entertaining. The illustrations, twenty-eight in number, are exceedingly well executed, and are important aids to the author’s descriptions. The volume is one of the most elegant that ever the Appletons have issued. * * * * * _Sixteen Months in the Gold Diggings. By Daniel B. Woods. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo._