The "bubbles" are blown into being by a gentleman who represents himself as having been sentenced, in the cold evening of his life, to drink the mineral waters of Nassau; and who, upon arriving at the springs, found that, in order to effect the cure designed by his physicians, the mind was to be relaxed as the body was being strengthened. The result of this regimen was the production of "The Bubbles," or hasty sketches of whatever chanced for the moment to please either the eyes or the mind of the patient. He anticipates the critic's verdict as to his book--that it is empty, light, vain, hollow and superficial: "but then," says he, "it is the nature of 'bubbles' to be so." He describes his voyage from the Custom House Stairs in the Thames, by steamboat to Rotterdam, and thence his journey to the Nassau springs of _Langen-Schwalbach_, _Schlangen-bad_, _Nieder-selters_, and _Wiesbaden_. Here he spends a season, bathing and drinking the waters of those celebrated springs, and describing such incidents as occurred to relieve the monotony of his somewhat idle life, in a most agreeable and _taking_ way. To call this work facetious, as that term is commonly used, were not perhaps to give so accurate an idea of its style as might be conveyed by the adjective whimsical. Without subjecting the "old man" to the imputation of _copyism_, one may describe the manner as being an agreeable mixture of _Charles Lamb's_ and _Washington Irving's_. The same covert conceit, the same hidden humor, the same piquant allusion, which, while you read, place the author bodily before you, a quiet old gentleman fond of his ease, but fonder of his joke--not a broad, forced, loud, vacant-minded joke, but a quiet, pungent, sly, laughter-moving conceit, which, at first stirring the finest membranes of your _pericardium_, at length sets you out into a broad roar of laughter, honest fellow as you are, and which you must be, indeed, a very savage, if you can avoid. Our bubble-blower observes everything within the sphere of his vision, and even makes a most amusing chapter out of "The schwein-general," or pig-drover of Schlangen-bad, which we wish we had space for entire. As it is, we give some reflections upon "the pig," {340} as being perfectly characteristic of the author's peculiar style. There exists perhaps in creation no animal which has less justice and more injustice done to him by man than the pig. Gifted with every faculty of supplying himself, and of providing even against the approaching storm, which no creature is better capable of foretelling than a pig, we begin by putting an iron ring through the cartilage of his nose, and having thus barbarously deprived him of the power of searching for, and analyzing his food, we generally condemn him for the rest of his life to solitary confinement in a sty.