Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), May 10, 1845, vol. 1, no. 19, p. ??

[page 298, column 1, continued:]

EOTHEN.

THE editor of the Buffalo Journal has started an ingenious thought in respect to this brilliant book of travel, which will not in the smallest degree diminish its value, even though his thought should prove a fact. He thinks that Eothen was composed upon the plan of the Amber Witch and Lady Willoughby's Diary, and that the success of the former work led o the composition of Eothen. We copy a part of his remarks, which are certainly very plausible.

We are more than half inclined to suspect that the success of the Amber Witch has provoked the really clever writer of Eothen to test, by a like experiment, the boasted infallibility of the English Reviewers. Sparkling as most of the sketches in Eothen are, there is not from beginning to end a single passage that could not have been written by a man of vivid imagination — such as the writer evidently possesses — without removing from his library. Hundreds of writers of works, avowedly fictitious, display quite as much of graphic fidelity to nature in describing scenery, costumes and manners, with which they have no other acquaintance than through books.

The reader of Eothen will note that the author carefully avcids all ticklish ground, and never ventures upon any desciption the fidelity of which can be tested by actual observation. Thus his journey from Belgrade to Constantinople, his residence in that city, his visit to the plain of Troy, his description of Smyrna, &c., although specimens of very beautiful writing, are yet so vague, shadowy, and indistinct, that of the thousands who have visited the same places none can say that this is true, this false, except in the general way that every well read man can make the same averinent — We see the writer and read his reflections, but we see nothing of the East.

His visit to Lady Hester Stanhope is described with more particularity of detail, for the reason that on such a theme the writer felt himself on safe ground. Lady Hester is dead, and so cannot contradict any statement he may make, and besides, she was so eccentric, saw so few travellers, and her mood so changed from time to time, that the writer of Eothen might let his fancy run riot in description, and none could convict him of fiction. — His adventures in Palestine, with descriptions of what he saw, could easily have been made up from books, and the hints derived from the conversation of friends who hid actually visited the Holy Land. The whole of that portion looks like patch-work, made brilliant by the glow of a fervid imagination.

But we are willing to stake the whole argument on the chapter of “Cairo and the Plague.” If any one can read that and verily believe the writer ever witnessed and passed through what he professes, he need not stagger at any thing. The same is true of what he says respecting the Pyramids, and that incredible, solitary ride on a dromedary [column 2:] in the night, across the desert, to Suez. — Look, too, at Baalbec, despatched, literally, in a dozen lines of dreamy mystification, containing not one definite idea. We might go on with particulars, but these are enough to direct inquiry to the point we wish. The mocking tone in which much of the book is written, gives piquancy to it, while at the same time it suggests that the wicked writer was chuckling over the success of his scheme to mystify the Aristarchuses of the reviews. The view we have taken of the book in no way detracts from its literary merits, which are of a very high order; but what fun it will be to the writer to have so effectually mystified the erudite, elaborate, and solemn Quarterly, the keen, critical acumen of Blackwood and the very respectable reading public generally? We should like to have the opinions of our critical friends of the Mirror and the Broadway Journal upon this matter.

If the travels of Bruce, published with his own name, and accompanied by numerous original drawings of the objects that he saw in his journeyings, were looked upon as apocryphal, it would not be a strange matter if a book like Eothen, which has been published anonymously, should be regarded as a fiction. But its authenticity has never been doubted in England, where the author must be well known. Its authorship has been attributed to a barrister named Trevilian, and we have no doubt that it is a perfectly true book. The beauty of the style, the light-hearted novelesque manner of the narrative, and the absence of such statistical matter as we generally find in books of travel, all help to give it an air of romance. But these are just the points which a good artist, like the author of Eothen, would have regarded, and to make his book appear true, he would have introduced some of the characteristics of other true books; as the author of the Amber Witch has done. But its originality is one of the strongest evidences of its genuineness. Nothing could be more easy than to get up, without leaving one's library, a book of Eastern travel that would thoroughly deceive the public; hut only a very great artist could have hit upon the novel idea of practising a deception by framing a work unlike any other that had ever appeared on the same subject, and instead of using the same materials which others had brought from the east, to reject them altogether. But it would be impossible for the author to take his reader to a region which he had never visited himself. Eothen brings the east to us more vividly than any other eastern traveller has done; such spots as Baalbec are hurriedly and dreamily sketched, because other travellers had described them minutely. There is a minuteness of honesty in many parts of Eothen, which appears exceedingly like the work of an ingenious artist rather than the effect of an ingenuous mind; but they are few, and the marks of sincerity and honesty are many. We read the work with entire faith, satisfied that if the author were not a true traveller, he was in the highest degree a true artist.