although for the present it is one of the latter that we are about to
introduce to our readers.

Every body knows, or ought to know, that M. Dumas has been in Italy, and
found means to make half a dozen highly amusing volumes out of his rambles
in a country, perhaps, of all others, the most familiar to the inhabitants
of civilized Europe--a country which has been described and re-described
_ad nauseam_, by tourists, loungers, and idlers innumerable. On his way to
the land of lazzaroni he made a pause at Marseilles to visit his friend
Méry, a poet and author of some celebrity; and here he managed to collect
materials for a volume which we can recommend to the perusal of the daily
increasing class of our countrymen who think that a book, although written
in French, may be witty and amusing without being either blasphemous or
indecent.

We have reason to believe that many persons who have not visited the
south-eastern corner of France, think of it as a "land of the cypress and
myrtle;" where troubadours wander amongst orange groves, or tinkle their
guitars under the shade of the vine and the fig-tree. There is something
in a name, and Provence, if it were only for the sake of its roses, ought,
one would think, to be a smiling and beautiful country. And so part of it
is; but in this part is assuredly not included the district around its
chief city. One hears much of the vineyards and orange groves of the south.
We do not profess to care much about vines, except for the sake of what
they produce; most of the vineyards we ever saw looked very like
plantations of gooseberry bushes, and the best of them were not so
graceful or picturesque as a Kentish hop-ground. As to olives, admirable
as they undoubtedly are when flanking a sparkling jug of claret, we find
little to admire in the stiff, greyish, stunted sort of trees upon which
they think proper to grow. But neither vines nor olives are to be found