Among the list of passengers who perished by fire on board the Amazon steamer, we find the name of Mr. Eliot Warburton, the author of “The Crescent and the Cross,” a book of Eastern travel—“Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers”—and the novels “Reginald Hastings” and “Darien.” Mr. Warburton, says a correspondent of the Times, had been deputed by the Atlantic and Pacific Junction Company to come to a friendly understanding with the tribes of Indians who inhabit the Isthmus of Darien: it was also his intention to make himself perfectly acquainted [pg 572] with every part of those districts, and with whatever referred to their topography, climate, and resources. “To Darien, with the date of 1852 upon its title-page,” says the London Examiner, “the fate of its author will communicate a melancholy interest. The theme of the book is a fine one. Its fault consists chiefly in the fact that the writer was not born to be a novelist. Yet, full as it is of eloquent writing, and enlivened as it is with that light of true genius, which raises even the waste work of a good writer above the common twaddle of a circulating library, Darien may, for its own sake, and apart from all external interest, claim many readers. External interest, however, attaches to the book in a most peculiar manner. Superstitious men—perhaps also some men not superstitious—might say that there was a strange shadow of the future cast upon its writer's mind. It did not fall strictly within the limits of a tale of the Scotch colonization of Darien, to relate perils by sea; yet again and again are such perils recurred to in these volumes, and the terrible imagination of a ship on fire is twice repeated in them.”
M. Thiers, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, several newspaper editors, and other literary men of France, are now at Brussels. Thiers is said to be working hard at his History of the Consulate and of the Empire, and Hugo is represented to entertain the intention of again seriously returning to literary pursuits, in which, one would think, he must find more pleasure, as well as more fame and profit, than in the stormy arena of politics. Dumas, who works like a cart-horse, and who, as ever, is in want of money, has, in addition to his numerous pending engagements at Paris, undertaken to revise, for a Belgian publishing firm, the Memoirs of his Life, now in course of publication in the Paris Presse; and he is to add to them all the passages suppressed by Louis Bonaparte's censors. Another new work is announced by Dumas, called Byron, in which we are promised the biography, love adventures, journeys, and anecdotic history of the great poet.
M. de Lamartine has resigned the editorship, or, as he called it, the directorship, of the daily newspaper on which he was engaged at a large salary, and in which he published his opinions on political events. He has also put an end to his monthly literary periodical, called Les Foyers du Peuple; no great loss, by the way, seeing that it was only a jumble of quotations from his unpublished works, placed together without rhyme or reason; and, finally, he has dropped the bi-monthly magazine, in which he figured as the Counsellor of the People. But he promises, notwithstanding the sickness under which he is laboring, to bring out a serious literary periodical, as soon as the laws on the press shall be promulgated.
Among the novelties that are forthcoming, there is one which promises to be very important, called Lord Palmerston—L'Angleterre et le Continent, by Count Ficquelmont, formerly Austrian Ambassador at Constantinople and St. Petersburg, where he had occasion to experience something of Lord Palmerston's diplomacy. It is, we are told, a vigorous attack on English policy.
La Vérité, a pamphlet containing the true history of the coup d'état, is announced in London, with the production of authentic documents which could not get printed in France. This coup d'état has set all servile pens at work. Mayer announces a Histoire du 2 Decembre; Cesena, a Histoire d'un Coup d'État; and Romieu, the famous trumpeter of the Cæsars—Romieu, who in his Spectre Rouge exclaimed, “I shall not regret having lived in these wretched times if I can only see a good castigation inflicted on the mob, that stupid and corrupt beast which I have always held in horror.” Romieu has had his prediction fulfilled, and he, too, announces a History of the event.