these writers to indulge their military raptures, and to pay the honours of war to the grave of armies, let us ascend this hill, which flanks the right wing of the position held by the English when the fight was at the hottest, and we can obtain a panorama of the whole view in a moment or two, without any embellishment from the imagination, or any vain flourishes of nationality.

This hill is called Mont St. Jean, not the Mont St. Jean of 1815, but a speck and span new Mont St. Jean, composed of the soil dug from the ancient mount to cover the bones of the slain of both armies. Upon the summit of this conical hill is erected, on a spacious and lofty pedestal, a huge bronze lion cast from cannon taken at the battle. The ascent is toilsome, and acutely recalls to one's memory Shakspeare's description of the sapphire-gatherers on the cliffs of Dover. As we gain the top, the two or three people who linger in the fields below begin to look like crows, and the scattered cottages are only so many dove-cots. The scene now expands beyond all expectation. Here, under the shadow of the colossal crest of Belgium, let us look out quietly on the chess-board where Wellington and Bonaparte contested the last game of their protracted match.

And a chequered board it is, sterile and parched and melancholy to the rim of the horizon. A vast plain stretches round you in all directions, relieved only by distant patches of trees, two or three dismal houses rising up like solitary land-marks to help, as it were, the speculations of the eye, the Forest of Soignie, rent by the woodcutters for firing, and despoiled of its massive depths of foliage, at least on the side which is nearest to us, and the high-road to Namur running through the centre like a well-defined track on a map to shew the line of Napoleon's escape, when, in the agony of his heart, he exclaimed, Sauve qui peut! and fled from the field. There on the right is the chateau of Hougomont buried in a little wood, with its white walls glancing through the leaves, and presenting such a mass of compound architecture as to create some doubt, if we did not know it to be the house of a comfortable propriétaire, whether it was a monastery or a farm-house. Away on the other side is La Belle Alliance and La Haye Sainte; but let not the names of these memorable sheds deceive you. La Belle Alliance, with its vacant yard, its ugly gables, and its shapeless walls and roofs, and La Haye Sainte, with its white-washed front, on which certain cannon-shot marks are preserved (in black paint) as palpably to this hour for the lovers of the marvellous, as if the battle had been fought only last week, are as unpicturesque objects as you could fall in with even in the dullest parts of dull Flanders. It is true that one of these cabins was the last house Napoleon entered before he fled from Waterloo, and that the other was the scene of the meeting between Blucher and Wellington when the day was won; but these associations, however they enhance the historical interest of the spot, abate not a jot of its actual dreariness. Near to these is a plain obelisk to the memory of the German Legion, and at a short distance a fluted column on a plinth with a florid inscription to the glory of Sir Alexander Gordon, whose titles are enumerated in a cloud of words that obscure his last and greatest claim on our sympathies. Between these is Picton's tree, the simplest and most affecting memorial of them all. At its foot Picton received his mortal wound, and died like a soldier in the arms of victory. That lonely and graceful tree

speaking with the tongue of poetry, is more eloquent than the noblest sculpture. Beyond, trembling on the confines of light, like a shadow, is the thicket through which the Prussians came up, pouring unexpectedly on the flank of the French army, and giving, as everybody knows, a decisive turn to the fortunes of the day.

Glance over the whole, from north to south, and from east to west, and you see nothing but an immense barren tract of land, on which a malediction would seem to have fallen, so cold and hopeless a prospect is it to gaze upon. The question naturally suggests itself to the mind whether this great plain is kept in its desolation for show, or whether it is really as unproductive as it appears to be? But a few snatches of corn-fields just glimmering on the surface afford evidence that the plough has succeeded the sword, although it is clear that its dominion in these arid wastes is anything but prosperous. There-a guide, one of those that helped to bury the dead when night closed upon the carnage, is winding his way up the hill. Let us hasten down to escape his loquacity. He will tell us a long rigmarole about the feats he witnessed that would make your hair stand up. A Waterloo guide is worse than the showman who exhibits Wellington mounted on a white horse, speaking through a trumpet till he is hoarse.

The village of Waterloo should not be passed over. It gave its name to the battle. A poor, straggling, dirty village is this same village of Waterloo ; but as we could not know that without coming to see it, so it is worth coming to see for the sake of ascertaining what sort of place it is. The church has a tone of bleak romance, which, in so very rustic a church, is not easily described. Upon the walls in the interior a number of tablets record the names of scores of English and French officers and soldiers, whose fall was thus affectionately commemorated by their kindred and their surviving brothers in arms. But tributes like these lose their interest in their accumulation, and we turn away oppressed and palled with endless catalogues of names which these mural tokens only help to mass into oblivion.

Passing from the church and its sad memories, we come to a monument which is at least singular in its purpose, and which deserves to be distinguished for its strange union of the ludicrous and the tragical. It was a thought worthy of Cervantes to build a tomb to the glory of the Marquis of Anglesey's leg. In a cottage close to the church the Marquis's leg was cut off by Surgeon O'Brien (let the operator go down to posterity together with the hero who was operated upon); and the said leg, being no common leg, was awarded the rites of Christian burial, and, with due ceremony deposited in the dusty little garden, where a monument, bearing a pious inscription, was erected over its grave! The boot which once belonged to this leg is still kept on show here, and the coarse Titanesque woman who exhibits the place, does not scruple to relate extravagant legends of both leg and boot, for the delectation of the gobe-mouche English who flock here in crowds to visit them. Two advertisements over the tomb announce the astounding facts that the cottage was visited in 1821 by George IV. of England, and afterwards by the King and Princesses of Prussia; and the Titanesque show-woman gravely assures you that the Marquis of Anglesey himself, "with one foot in the grave," has, ever since the Battle of Waterloo, made an annual pilgrimage to gaze upon the

tomb of his leg! Alas! for glory that perisheth thus in vanity. While Achilles in the Park makes Wellington a pigmy, the Marquis of Anglesey's toe points the moral of Waterloo!

A more recent visit to the field of battle discloses extensive changes. The plain is rapidly losing its original character. Picton's tree has been cut down by the ruthless farmer to whom the ground on which it stood belongs; and the forest of Soignie has been so cut away that the outline it presented at the time of the battle can no longer be recognised, and the last vestiges of the wood are vanishing from the face of the earth. It appears that the King of Holland, eager to turn his kingdom into cash as quickly as he could, sold the timber to the bank of Belgium, and the bank (which has since failed) sold it away in lots to divers purchasers. The fate of the forest, therefore, was to be cut down. Even the Duke of Wellington, who had a gift from the king of a thousand acres, sold his lot, so that at the present moment little more remains than a few clumps of white beech, like spectres haunting the green places of the ancient wood. The plain of Waterloo itself, too, is greatly altered. A large establishment for the manufacture of beet-root sugar casts its heavy shadow over the spot where the last crash of bayonets scattered the disordered retinue of Napoleon. Cottages have sprung up by the road side; the greater part of the field is now industriously cultivated, and small enclosures filled with shrubs, and gardens have displaced that tone of desolation which formerly gave such a melancholy aspect to the scene.

The chateau of Hougomont alone retains its early characteristics. The ruin remains just as it was after the battle, making a reasonable allowance for the decay and patching of more than a quarter of a century. There is the orchard neglected and overgrown with rank grass and lusty weeds; the shattered walls, the mouldering chapel with the black marks of the fire still upon its crumbling sides, and a thousand names scrawled and daubed upwards even to its roof. Amongst the rest are the names of Southey and Wordsworth, assuredly not written by themselves, but by some attaché of the House of Warren, 30, Strand, who has painted up their names in large letters, and apparently in liquid blacking. There is one spot upon which Lord Byron actually wrote his name! but an English gentleman, taking advantage of the ignorance and facility of disposition of the poor woman who shews the place, cut out the plaster upon which the name was written, and carried it away with him to England; an act of sacrilege which, now that she has come to a proper sense of her loss, she regards with as much indignation as ever was visited upon the spoliation of the Elgin marbles. The outer walls of the château, enclosing the garden, still retain traces of the shells poured in by the French from the little wood which looks so peaceful at a short distance; and the loop-holes through which our soldiers fired are still preserved. The antique wooden gateway may still be seen in its original frailty, making the visitor wonder how two thousand five hundred men who were shut up in this confined space, with such insecure defences, could have stood a siege against an enemy whose numbers were so superior.

49

WHAT STRIKES AN AMERICAN IN ENGLAND.

BY MRS. WILLIAM KIRKLAND.

TRAVELLERS are sometimes blamed for writing about a country before they have had time to become acquainted with it. They should wait, it is said, until they have studied its institutions, and possessed themselves in some degree with its spirit; until the feeling of strangeness has worn off, and the reason of things become apparent. But if the traveller would recount his impressions, he must do it while they are fresh, for experience teaches the sojourner in foreign lands that all strangeness soon wears off with habit, and that in a little while he has nothing to tell. After a short residence we strive in vain to recal the feeling of interest with which things new and peculiar at first inspired us. We fall in so naturally with the established order of things, wherever we may be, that on our return home we have to become naturalized anew to the habits of our own country.

The interest felt by the American who visits England for the first time, in the minutest particular of the difference between that country and his own, is such that he finds himself irresistibly prompted to express the thoughts that suggest themselves to his mind; and the difficulty of doing this in ordinary conversation, without the risk of giving offence, through lack of time and opportunity for explanation and modification, suggests the pen as the better mode. The freer the interchange of thoughts and opinions between kindred nations the better; and the unprejudiced traveller, "speaking the truth in love," may always hope to say something which may be useful to the unprejudiced native who desires to see himself as others see him. Things great and small fall under the notice of the stranger, and if he be intelligent, and have enjoyed any opportunity of observation in other countries, he may be supposed to see them as they really His praise and his blame, passing for what they are worth, may be equally useful. If he lack judgment, he may yet speak truth; if his observations be petty, they may, perhaps, suggest small reforms. Give him but leave to speak out, and he can hardly fail to teach, either as an enemy or as a friend.

The American traveller comes to Great Britain under peculiar circumstances. Besides the historical relation between the mothercountry and his own, he has been accustomed to regard England as the nurse of arts, the depository of priceless treasures in every department of knowledge, the natural soil of enlightened benevolence; the birthplace of intelligent freedom. Her language is his; her great men are his; her literature is the fountain whence his intellect has drawn its most delicious nourishment-and the ties of blood can hardly be stronger than this inestimable bond. From his infancy he has been accustomed to hear England quoted as unquestionable authority in law; as the example of stability and order in government; as the steady advocate of noble principles through all vicissitudes of national fortune. All that he most prizes distinguishes this wonderful country; and in spite of some little rankling jealousies, some not unreasonable resentment of impertinence, and some fault-finding with particulars, he comes to it with an affection, an admiration, a reverence, which he is hardly disposed to acknowledge to himself.

VOL. XXVI.

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The very first thing that he perceives on looking calmly about him in England-putting prestige aside, and seeing things as they are-is that the Englishman not only does not reciprocate the feeling of affection, but that he looks upon his American brother with a cold careless glance, that would be suspicious, if it were not utterly indifferent; a glance devoid of sympathy, or even curiosity; and which would be infinitely quickened in interest if it fell upon a New Zealander or a Hottentot. He finds himself considered as a slovenly imitator of English civilization; a coarse, benighted person, who fancies himself a gentleman, while he is continually betraying the rudeness of his origin by his unquiet manners, and the vulgarity of his social connections by a strange drawl in his speech. His admiration of Shakspeare and Milton-his reverence for Newton-his love of Walter Scott-the tenderness which stirs in his heart when he thinks of Shelley-these are a bond between him and the Englishman, but they are no bond between the Englishman and him. He can wear none of all his associations or his appreciations on the outside. The sole tie recognised by his new acquaintance is that of language, and the national twang with which he speaks, makes even this an offence in British ears. So that whatever may have been the warmth and kindliness of feeling with which he set foot on English ground, he cannot but perceive in the manner of even the kind and the considerate, that the American in England must consent to be looked upon in some sort as a wild animal, not dangerous but troublesome; liable to whisk his brush in people's faces, or to utter strange discordant sounds when he is encouraged by notice.

The exceptions to this general remark may be found, first, among the few Britons who have been in the United States; and who have, therefore, seen the Americans where they appear to the best advantage -in their own homes; and, second, in a not very numerous class any where-those of the highest and most philosophical culture who are able to look through accidents of manner or speech, and to judge a man by the things which make a man of him; the inner springs from which in time manners flow, though the stream may be for a while obstructed or diverted by accidental causes. There is another harmonizing power, too, of which we must speak, though its mention may seem hardly in place here-religion, a sincere and operative reception of the truth on which depends our salvation, temporal and eternal; this has a divine efficacy where national, as well as where sectarian prejudices would intrude to weaken the great bond of brotherhood. Kindness and candour are the handmaids of religion; arrogance and contempt find no place in her train. The American who brings with him evidence of a religious character, always finds noble hearts in England open to him. He need not wear a sanctimonious outside either; for he will be sure to meet as much liberality of sentiment as characterizes the piety of his own land, and a warmth of interest which springs to meet what is good in the products of a new arrangement of the most important elements of society.

It must be confessed that the manners of a portion of the Americans who have travelled in Europe have furnished some reason for the British notion of all. Everybody who has money travels, now-a-days, and there are vulgar moneyed people everywhere. When the American of a certain class has made a fortune he pays Europe the compliment of coming abroad to learn how to spend it. He fancies that there is