But we doubt whether Christianity should be vulgarized to give jaded
nobles a new "sensation," or in order to be made a fit "gospel for
the poor."
* * * * *
_Roumania: the Border Land of the Christian and the Turk.
Comprising Adventures of Travel in Eastern Europe and Western Asia_.
By JAMES O. NOYES, M. D. Surgeon in the Ottoman Army. New York: Rudd &
Carleton, 310 Broadway. 1857.
Dr. James Oscar Noyes, the author of this book, is an American all
over. He has the rapidity and eagerness of mind that the champagny
atmosphere of our northern hills gives to those who are stout enough
not to be wilted by our hot summers. For briskness, thriftiness,
energy, and alacrity, it is hard to find his match. He has made a
book of travels, and will make a hundred, unless somebody finds him
a place at home where he will have an indefinite number of
labors-of-Hercules to keep him busy,--or unless some African prince
cuts his head off, or he happens to call upon the Battas about their
Thanksgiving-time.
Here he has been streaming through Eastern Europe and Western Asia,
so hilarious and good-tempered all the time, so intensely wide-awake,
so perfectly at home everywhere, so quick at making friends, so
perfectly convinced that the world was made for American travellers,
and so apt at proving it by his own example, that his friends who
missed him for a while not only were not astonished to find that he
had been a Surgeon in the Ottoman Army, during this brief interval,
but only wondered he had not been Grand Vizier.
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