By the
assistance of a wily barber-vizier he succeeds in the attempt, and
listens with greedy credulity to the marvellous histories herein set
forth.
On one occasion an English sailor is dragged into the august presence,
and demands, with all the dogged independence of his race, the reasons
for such treatment.
"You must tell lies, and you will have gold," replies the vizier.
"Tell lies," says Jack Tar, "that is, spin yarns. Well, I can do that."
The volume before us could not be more suggestively described. It is a
collection of admirable short stories of intrigue and adventure,
traveller's wonders narrated with a perfect air of good faith and no
regard for truth or probability. All the countries on the globe, and
many existing only in the imagination, are called into requisition to
produce a brilliant phantasmagoria of manners and customs. The stories
move rapidly and defy criticism by the very occasion of their being,
invented to amuse and astonish a jaded autocrat.
Hence we feel no shock in reading of an island where the commonest
utensils are made of gold, a nursery of whales, five months in the
interior of an iceberg, or a journey among the clouds during a
thunderstorm. The demand for brevity strengthens Marryat's style, and
saves him from padding. He is very happy in contriving expediences, and
evinces considerable wit in the conception, for instance, of Yussuf the
water-carrier. Some of the stories, again, are really dramatic, and the
"Second Voyage of Huckaback" (p.
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