The Athenæum, that—
"The author of Nile Notes, we may now add, is richly poetical, humorous, eloquent, and glowing as the sun, whose southern radiance seems to burn upon his page. An affluence of fancy which never fails, a choice of language which chastens splendor of expression by the use of simple idioms, a love for the forms of art whether old or new, and a passionate enjoyment of external nature such as belongs to the more poetic order of minds—are the chief characteristics of this writer."
The Literary Gazette—
"The genial and kindly spirit of this book, the humor and vivacity of personal descriptions, redeemed by an exquisite choice of expression from the least taint of the common or the coarse; the occasional melody and music of the diction, cadenced, as it were, by the very grace and tenderness of the thought it clothes, or the images of beauty it evokes; the broad, easy touches, revealing as at a glance the majestic and tranquil features of the Eastern landscape, and the ultimate feeling of all its accessories of form and hue; the varied resources of learning, tradition, poetry, romance, with which it is not encumbered but enriched, as a banquet table with festal crowns and sparkling wines—all these, and many other characteristics, to which our space forbids us to do justice, render these 'Nile Notes' quite distinct from all former books of Eastern travel, and worthy 'to occupy the intellect of the thoughtful and the imagination of the lively.' Never did a wanderer resign his whole being with more entire devotion to the silence and the mystery that brood, like the shadow of the ages, over that dead, dumb land. A veritable lotus-eater is our American Howadji!'"
And a dozen other London journals might be quoted to the same effect. But critics disagree, as well as doctors, and the Boston Puritan Recorder comes down on the Howadji in the following exemplary manner:
"This is a much-vaunted book, by a young American, but one in which we take no pleasure. In the first place, it is written in a most execrable style,—all affectation, and verbal wriggling and twisting for the sake of originality. The veriest sophomore ought to be "rusticated" for such conceited phrases as "beautiful budburstiness of bosom,"—"her twin eyes shone forth liquidly lustrous"—and innumerable expressions in the same namby-pamby dialect. But dellacruscan folly is but a trifle compared with the immoral tendency of the descriptions of the gahzeeyah, or dancing girls of Egypt, and the luscious comments on their polluted ways and manners. We thought the Harpers had done publishing this indecent trash."
D. M. Moir, the "Delta" of Blackwood's Magazine, has just published in Edinburgh, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century, in six Lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution.
The Rev. Satan Montgomery, otherwise called Robert Montgomery, is not dead, as some have supposed, but is still making sermons and verses—probably sermons and verses of equally bad quality; and we see with some alarm that the Rivingtons advertise, as in preparation, a complete edition of his Poetical Works [we never saw any works by him that were poetical] in one octavo volume, similar in size and appearance to the octavo editions of Southey, Wordsworth, &c., &c., and including the whole of the author's poems—Satan, Woman, Hell, and all the rest,—in a revised form, with some original minor pieces, and a general preface. We don't suppose he will take our counsel, yet we will venture it, that he make use of Macaulay's reviewal of his poems, instead of any "general preface" of his own.