“The sketches are not only replete with entertainment, but useful, as affording an accurate and vivid description of scenery, and of life and manners in the West Indies.”—Boston Traveller.
“We think none who have read this work will deny that the author is the best nautical writer who has yet appeared. He is not Smollett, he is not Cooper; but he is far superior to them both.”—Boston Transcript.
“The scenes are chiefly nautical, and are described in a style of beauty and interest never surpassed by any writer.”—Baltimore Gazette.
“The author has been justly compared with Cooper, and many of his sketches are in fact equal to any from the pen of our celebrated countryman.”—Saturday Evening Post.
“A pleasant but a marvellously strange and wild amalgamation of water and earth is ‘Tom Cringle;’ full of quips and cranks, and toils and pranks. A fellow of fun and talent is he, with a prodigious taste for yarns, long and short, old and new; never, or but seldom, carrying more sail than ballast, and being a most delightful companion, both by land and sea. We were fascinated with the talents of Tom when we met him in our respected contemporary from the biting north. His Log was to us like a wild breeze of ocean, fresh and health-giving, with now and then a dash of the tearful, that summoned the sigh from our heart of hearts; but now that the yarns are collected and fairly launched, we hail them as a source of much gratification at this dull season. Tom Cringle and a Christmas fire! may well join in the chorus of ‘Begones dull care!’—The ‘Quenching of the Torch’ as one of the most pathetic descriptions we over read. The ‘Scenes at Jamaica’ are full of vigour. As a whole, we have no hesitation in pronouncing ‘The Log’ the most entertaining book of the season. There has been a sort of Waverley mystery thrown over the authorship of these charming papers; and though many have guessed the author, yet we take unto ourselves the credit of much sagacity in imagining that we only have solved the enigma:—there are passages in ‘Tom Cringle’ that we believe no living author except Professor Wilson himself could write; snatches of pure, exalted, and poetic feeling, so truly Wilsonian, that we penciled them as we read on, and said, There he is again, and again, and again; to the very last chapter.”—New Monthly Magazine.
THE CRUISE OF THE MIDGE.
By the Author of “Tom Cringle’s Log.”
In Two Volumes, 12mo.
THE MAN-OF-WAR’S-MAN.
By the Author of “Tom Cringle’s Log.”
“No stories of adventures are more exciting than those of seamen. The warrior of Tom Cringle’s Log is the most popular writer of that class, and those sketches collected not long since into a volume by the same publishers, in this city, were universally read. A large edition was soon exhausted. The present is, we believe, an earlier production, and has many of the same merits.”—Baltimore Gazette.