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NOTICES OP BOOKS. 317
salutation in Sweden, The little girls and young women always
dip a curtsey to every one in the company ; even the youngest boys
never omit to take off their hats separately to each person. ' I was
struck when I first saw her,' writes Liunsus to his friend Haller,
' and felt my heart assailed by new sensations and anxieties.
Nature is nature wherever you find it,' whether in the land of
Komeo or Linnteus. Elizabeth, too, seems at once to have felt the
strange power of eyes made to discover truth ; and here was a truth
entirely new to him—that the charm of a beautiful maiden is the
most exquisite thing in the world. He who had counselled the
young men, his companions, to keep their heads free of love
was science all-sufficient for him now?" But we must stop,
and refer our readers to the work to read the graphic account of
the stormy course of true love in the conduct of the stern father,
the hard terms, and so on. Mrs. Caddy has certainly made
a most readable book. The incidents of her journeyings and the
events of last century are sometimes curiously interwoven, but, as
becomes the authoress of such a work, she is devoted to her hero,
and she makes him live to her readers.
Mr. Alberg's volume derives its chief value from his being able
to incorporate in it and to give for the first time in English dress
some of the results of the Linnean studies of the lamented Ahrling.
Mr. Alberg's style is somewhat flowery, and he writes English as
if it were his mother-tongue. As a specimen of the work, the
paragraph narrating the birth of Linnjeus may entertain our
readers:— "At last spring returned, and what joy did it bring to
her yearniug heart ; for not only is spring in Sweden the most
beautiful season of the year, when nature in a few days wakes from
wintry sleep from under the snowy cover, and the soil gratefully
absorbs the remaining snow to fertilize the earth, whole masses of
ice, dissolving into water, hasten away in merry little rills, as if
afraid of being hid in the earth, and rush to swell the tributaries of
the many rivers, which all make for the cool, clear sea ; and when
every twig and pond is covered with eager-budding leaflets, kissed
to life by spring, and inquisitive to look abroad—at this delightful
season, when all nature rejoices at the spring-time of our existence,
'just when the cuckoo w'ith mystic notes heralded the advent of the
floral season,' the curate and his young wife, on the 18th of May.
the old Gregorian style, anno 1707, were supremely blest by the
seasonable advent of a young cherub, for to them was that day born
a son and heir, and alighting upon earth, as he did, in the joyous,
verdant spring, in such a happy floral home, it seemed as if the
pretty little flowers of the curate's garden had enticed him there
from the first to become their playmate, and subsequently to become
their most ardent lover."
Mr. Alberg is equally fluent in dealing with his own English
and Ahrling's Swedish, but when he prints Latin words or quotations,
and specially when he tries to translate from the Latin, he is
singularly unfortunate, and a Greek word which he tries to repi-oduce
pi'esents a liopeless stumbling-block : no one would rrcogiiize
Jiauhin's niNAH in "I3auhinus's K.l. L'.A.E." On one opening of