“Benjamin Latrobe was a man of the world and a clever commentator on what he saw going on around him. One of the best pen pictures of Washington is Latrobe’s account of a visit to the Father of his Country at Mt. Vernon in 1796.”—Review of Reviews.
“Mr. Latrobe was a keen observer, and his notes of travel in the South are valuable in an attempt to picture the life of a century ago.—Chicago Tribune.
“Benjamin Latrobe visited Washington at Mt. Vernon and recorded what he saw very fully. Then, late in life, he went to New Orleans by sea and wrote full notes of his voyage and his impressions. Both diaries are full of interest. Between them are placed in this volume papers relating to the building of the Capitol. Prefixed to the volume is a biographical introduction written by his son thirty years ago. The illustrations are curious and interesting.”—New York Sun.
“With what has been said of the volume it should be evident that it is curious, interesting, and instructive to an unusual degree. To speak of ‘The Journal of Latrobe’ without mention of its illustrations would be an unpardonable oversight.”—San Francisco Chronicle.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
VIVID, MOVING, SYMPATHETIC, HUMOROUS.
A Diary from Dixie.
By Mary Boykin Chesnut. Being her Diary from November, 1861, to August, 1865. Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary. Illustrated 8vo. Ornamental Cloth, $2.50 net; postage additional.
Mrs. Chesnut was the most brilliant woman that the South has ever produced, and the charm of her writing is such as to make all Southerners proud and all Northerners envious. She was the wife of James Chesnut, Jr., who was United States Senator from South Carolina from 1859 to 1861, and acted as an aid to President Jefferson Davis, and was subsequently a Brigadier-General in the Confederate Army. Thus it was that she was intimately acquainted with all the foremost men in the Southern cause.
“In this diary is preserved the most moving and vivid record of the Southern Confederacy of which we have any knowledge. It is a piece of social history of inestimable value. It interprets to posterity the spirit in which the Southerners entered upon and struggled through the war that ruined them. It paints poignantly but with simplicity the wreck of that old world which had so much about it that was beautiful and noble as well as evil. Students of American life have often smiled, and with reason, at the stilted and extravagant fashion in which the Southern woman had been described south of Mason and Dixon’s line—the unconscious self-revelations of Mary Chesnut explain, if they do not justify, such extravagance. For here, we cannot but believe, is a creature of a fine type, a ‘very woman,’ a very Beatrice, frank, impetuous, loving, full of sympathy, full of humor. Like her prototype, she had prejudices, and she knew little of the Northern people she criticised so severely; but there is less bitterness in these pages than we might have expected. Perhaps the editors have seen to that. However this may be they have done nothing to injure the writer’s own nervous, unconventional style—a style breathing character and temperament as the flower breathes fragrance.—New York Tribune.