FOREIGN.
Der Reichspostreiter in Ludwigsburg, Novelle auf geschichtlichem Hintergrunde. Von Robert Heller. 1858.
A very interesting novel indeed, sketching life at the little court of the Duke of Wurtemberg at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the overthrow of the government of a famous mistress of the Duke, the Countess Würben. The main points of interest in the story are historical, and the tissue of fiction interwoven with these is remarkably well arranged. Herr Heller belongs to the school of German novelists who, like Hermann Kurz, and others of minor mark, make a copious and comprehensive use of historical facts in Art. Their object and aim seem to be rather to illustrate and embody the historical facts in the flesh and blood of tangible reality, than merely to amuse by transforming history into a material for poetical entertainment. With all that, the abovenamed little volume is amply worth reading.
Une Eté dans le Sahara, par Eugene Fromentin. Paris. 1857.
A painter describes here a summer journey through the Desert of Sahara, as far south from Algiers as El Aghouat, in the year 1853. There is not much that is new in this book, considering the many later and far more comprehensive and extensive illustrations of life in the Great Desert, since published by Bayard Taylor, Barth, and others; but it is a very interesting picture of this life, as seen and drawn by a painter. His descriptions contain many landscape and genre pictures, by means of which a vivid idea of the scenery and life are conveyed to the imagination of the reader.