poetry, moved and excited as we may be, we can take in no more than a part of it. Passages of equal beauty are unable to raise enthusiasm. Let a work in poetry or prose, indicating the highest power of genius, be discoursed on; probably no two persons in a large company will recite the same portion as having struck them the most forcibly. But when several passages are pointed out and read emphatically, each listener will to a certain extent doubt a little his own judgment, in this one particular, and hate you heartily for shaking it. Poets ought never to be vexed, discomposed, or disappointed, when the better is overlooked and the inferior is commended. Much may be assigned to the observer's point of vision being more on a level with the object. And this reflection also will console the artist, when really bad ones are called more simple and natural, while in fact they are only more ordinary and common. In a palace we must look to the elevation and proportions; whereas a low grotto may assume any form, and almost any deformity. Rudeness is here no blemish; a shell reversed is no false ornament; moss and fern may be stuck with the root outward; a crystal may sparkle at the top or at the bottom; dry sticks and fragmentary petrifactions find everywhere their proper place; and loose soil and plashy water show just what nature delights in. Ladies and gentlemen who at first were about to turn back, take one another by the hand, duck their heads, enter it together, and exclaim, "What a charming grotto!"

In poetry, as in architecture, the Rustic Order is proper only for the lower story.

They who have listened, patiently and supinely, to the catarrhal songsters of goose-grazed commons, will be loth and ill-fitted to mount up with Catullus to the highest steeps in the forests of Ida, and will shudder at the music of the Corybantes in the temple of the Great Mother of the Gods.

ART. IV.-Mittheilungen aus dem Reisetagebuche eines Deutschen Naturforschers. England. (Extracts from the Travelling-Journal of a German Naturalist. England.) Basle. 1842.

THE German naturalist made a pleasant excursion in England, and having been very hospitably received, not only by his scientific brethren (one of whose meetings at Birmingham he came to this country to witness), but also by many of the gentry, possessors of handsome houses and parks, kind dispensers of good cheer, he has seen the country in its most agreeable aspect, and writes of it with grateful goodnature. And so simple, kind-hearted, and unassuming seems the German man of science to be, that his reader cannot fail to be pleased with his companionship, and to share his good humour. It is a fine thing to travel, even in imagination, through the rich inland counties of England in the cheerful summer-time; to go from one fine house to another, where welcome, plenty, elegance, and kindness await you; where all the men are hearty and kind, all the ladies handsome and smiling; where the claret is of the very best, the lordly parks in full leaf, and the best of venison in season. There is scarcely any foreign traveller that we know of who has not been duly affected by such things; and whose records of them are not, by reflection, pleasant. We have had many harmless Barmecide feasts in the company of Dukes and Earls to whom we have been presented by his Highness Fürst Pückler, that thoughtful dandy chronicler. Who has not spent a month in the Highlands, in the castle of the Duke of G-rd-n, and cheek-by-jowl with his Excellency the Earl of Ab-rd-n (M-n-st-r of State for F-r-gn Affairs), being introduced to those great personages by the incomparable Mr. N. P. Willis? And with Miss Sedgwick, or Mr. Fenimore Cooper for a conductor, have we not had the honour to dance at Devonshire-house, to dine with Lord S-fton or Sir George W-rr-nder, to breakfast with Mr. Samuel R-gers,-in fact to enjoy all the delights of the best company of the greatest city of the greatest country in the world! Of all these modern travellers in genteel English society, only one has been discontented with what he saw or ate-and if Mr. Fenimore Cooper's notions of equality are such that he cannot brook superiority in his neighbours, and his stomach so delicate that hospitality and kindness makes him sick, at least it may be said of the others that they were pleased with the attention shown to them; and expressed their sense of the good things enjoyed by them each in his way. Sometimes, perhaps, in perusing their descriptions of feasts given, and great

and beautiful personages seen, the English reader may feel a little pang of mortification that he, being an Englishman and no foreigner, may live to be a thousand years old, and never have a chance of figuring at Almack's, or hobnobbing with a Duke at dinner: but such little outbreaks of envy are soon suppressed in the well-regulated mind; and the next best thing to enjoying a good thing one's self, is to see another honest fellow heartily and kindly enjoying it. Besides, we have in our turns this consolation, that be we bakers' sons, or retired linendrapers, or erratic lawyers'-clerks, with a sufficient sum of money to carry us genteelly through a six-month's continental tour, we need only purchase a fancy volunteer's uniform from some fashionable tailor in Holywell-street, and may in our turn figure in foreign courts, dancing quadrilles with the best duchesses at the Tuileries, or eating sauer-kraut by the side of German counts and dukes of thirty descents. Let all English persons excluded from the fashionable world and envious that foreigners should so easily be admitted to it, take the above remark into consideration, and remember that if genteel England is shut to them, all Europe on the other hand is their own.

Our honest "Naturforscher" (who as we conjecture from certain very pertinent though severe remarks which he makes concerning the German "adel" has not himself the privilege of writing "von" before his respectable name) is not in the least degree blinded or puffed up into vanity by the attentions paid him by great people, and instead of taking advantage of their kindness to fancy himself a dandy and an aristocratic personage, as some of the travellers before mentioned have done, his sense of the hospitality he has received only takes the shape of perfect goodhumour and contentment with things about him ; and we would almost venture to assert, that the friends whom this simple, shrewd, kindly German traveller has visited, would be glad to see him again.

He writes of all he has seen without the least affectation, and with so much pleasantry and liveliness, that the reader at the end of the volume comes to have a warm personal liking for the author-the English reader certainly; for he is in love with our country, its men and its women, its manliness, and straightforward simplicity: somewhat of a tory, perhaps, he still modestly avoids all political discussions, which do not even interest him, he says: he thinks port wine capital (accounting excellently for our partialities that way): we find him coolly taking his share of "einigen bouteillen double stout" on the very first day of his arrival: add to this, he hates a Frenchman heartily, having a most thorough contempt for his braggadocio and his disposition to chatter, 2 C

VOL. XXIX. NO. LVIII.

and his absurd pretensions to be the leader of civilization. In these opinions upon French and English manners, and the beer of the latter country, Monsieur Victor Hugo and others may not agree; but perhaps it is one of the reasons why, as an Englishman, one cannot help having a sympathy with the honest, jovial Naturforscher. He begins with saying:

"In a former period of my life, I passed many years in Great Britain and France to the last-named country I brought a great number of letters of recommendation,-to the former, but one. In both countries, especially in the capitals, of each, I made many acquaintances-those made in France have long since ceased, and did not indeed survive my stay in Paris; while those contracted in England still exist, with all the old intimacy, although, since first they were formed, almost a score of years have passed away. For close private friendship, the chief part of Frenchmen do not seem to be formed; their personal intercourse is generally pleasing and obliging, though it must be presumed that these social virtues exhibit themselves in words rather than in actions. Out of sight out of mind, seems to be the Frenchman's motto, and the foundation of this sort of forgetfulness lies in the heartlessness of his character. How different is the Briton! In outward appearance cold, haughty, selfish, unsympathizing,-inwardly he is warm, highminded, accommodating, and ready to make personal sacrifices: these and other virtues will be found to develop themselves in the Englishman, by those who know the right way to move him.

"This preface will enable my readers to understand the reason which led me (it is now some short time back) to cross the channel for the third time.

"For this end two routes were before me. The one lay through La belle France and its capital, the other by the great water-road, the Rhine. The charms of a journey through beautiful France, I had already sufficiently experienced. The comforts of a dirty diligence, and the exquisite society to be found in it, the bad roads of the pattern land of Europe, the ennui of the journey, and of a sojourn in some of those dismal provincial towns, pitiful reflexes of the capital, were already so well known to me, that I did not hesitate a moment as to the road I should take.

"One Saturday morning, then, in the month of August, I bade farewell to my home. How different are the feelings with which a lad leaves it on his travels, to those which fill the heart of a husband and father, who is separating himself for a while from all that in earth is most dear to him! The one goes omnia sua secum portans, the other leaves a part of himself behind him. I was obliged to put some restraint upon my feelings as I pressed a last kiss upon the cheek of the little one still sleeping, and said the last word to its mother, and I do not care to confess that my eyes were not dry, as the Stadt Strasburg,' the steamer in which I was, shaped its course northward down the stream, and I had a last glimpse of the wife's waving handkerchief on the bridge."

On board the Stadt Strasburg our author finds himself almost in England, and passes away the voyage from Strasburg to Cologne in a pleasant gossip, with much about his fellow-passengers. There was a lord on board, and he does not fail to remark how eager all our beloved countrywomen were to get a sight of this great man, and what a noble interesting-looking creature they thought him. What a strange simple adulation it is that we pay to that picture of an English coronet;—we who look down with such a grand contempt upon all foreign titles; talking of swindling French counts, beggarly German barons, shabby Italian princes, with lofty indifference and scorn! And yet is there any single person of the middle classes who reads this but would not be pleased to walk down Regent-street with a lord? or any lady who will not confess that at the very minute of reading this she has a peerage upon her drawing-room table? There is no other country but ours where such a work is known; and it would be curious to call for a return of the number of such books which have been sold to the middle classes for the last fifty years to people who have not the slightest connexion with any one of the august families whose names and arms figure in that great book of reference to people who never see a lord except in the park or at the opera, and will die and never speak to one. The writer of this once asked the servant of an eminent Paris surgeon, who has much practice amongst the English there, to bring him a dictionary from the library. The man immediately brought back the Peerage. "That's the book," said he, "which Messieurs les Anglais always call for." And there it was, the last edition of Mr. Burke's national work,—not a year old,—but bearing strong evidences of having been well and frequently read. Is it not a fact that respectable families in the country have interleaved Peerages? that they strike off the deaths and births of the aristocracy, and insert their marriages or other accidents in neat crowquill manuscripts? Shakspeare, Debrett, and Mrs. Rundell, may be said to be the first books of the British genteel library: and, taken as a rule, the former is never read; the latter often; the second always. But let us hear the German tourist's description of the lord who has given rise to this unwarrantable disquisition. His lordship is young it appears, and married to a ladyship, much older than himself, and evidently doting on him, and the noble pair are in the habit of travelling about with Italian greyhounds. From this description, and from their own intimate knowledge of the aristocracy, perhaps some of our readers can discover who really this nameless lord is.

"Dear me,' said a somewhat ancient British spinster, 'is it indeed