gene

piquant contrast between its provincial manners and the ral reason of mankind, than enlivens the Persian Letters, those of Espriella, or of Gulliver himself. Occasions also may possibly arise, of reaping a still higher and more moral use out of observations coming from such a quarter. One of the great benefits of foreign travel to individuals, consists in its tendency to remove the film of vulgar and local prejudices from their eyes. A whole nation, unfortunately, cannot migrate. But the visit of an enlightened and impartial stranger may, in this respect, be quite as effectual; provided the nation will give a patient hearing to his criticisms on its institutions and its manners. The work before us has met with great success on the contiIt has been honoured by a very favourable notice in the Berliner Jahrbuch, from the universal Göthe. The good fortune which attends its introduction to the English public, is still more remarkable; it is indeed almost unique for a German book. It has been so perfectly translated, that from the beginning to the end there is not a turn of expression, by which an Englishman can be made aware that he is not reading a spirited original.

nent.

A few words will explain the class to which these travels belong. Whatever else the German Prince affects, he makes no pretension to any tincture of science in himself, or of scientific object in his tour. It never appears to occur to him that he is making any discoveries, beyond what the guide-book and a postboy, or at most a mountain boy, could have shown him; and his adventures, even with the sex, are not much out of the common way. His sphere of vision extends only to two points, scenery and society. With regard to the first of these, the spirit in which he observes and describes the works, both of nature and of art, occasionally seems to indicate a more educated taste than belongs to our every-day wanderers after occupation and the picturesque. The book of nature lies tolerably open, in spite of park palings. It is very different with mankind, especially with that class by which the character of every people ought to be determined. We see feeble signs of any intercourse with this class, except what was to be snatched up on the top of a coach, by the counter of a shop, or in the coffee-room of an inn. The exceptions appear to have been enough only for the purposes of gossip and caricature, but by no means enough for a real insight into principles of action, or modes of life. Of course, for this purpose, London drawing-rooms (with which we do not doubt his intimacy) are worse than nothing. There are some good general observations upon life scattered about; but little particularly refined or new. The chief novelty consists in the extreme personality of many of the pictures. People seem to think on these occasions that they get

The

at the truth of life by being admitted behind the scenes. truth is, in the meantime, that there is no error to which, under these circumstances, we are more liable, than that of drawing too extensive inferences from a few instances. We are thus led to compromise whole bodies of men, by the conduct of individuals, who, after all, represent only themselves. The pruriency of scandal, as well as a desire to get together the moral statistics of a nation, combine to make works of this kind popular. The eagerness with which we might probably have perused similar communications, of which Germany was the subject, of course answers to the pleasure which Germany may have received from these relations; a great part of which, however, has no other merit than being an act of individual treachery against the hospitalities of private life. As far, however, as there is either general or particular truth in these exposures, it will be our own fault if we have the discredit of them only. We ought to have sense enough to get the sweet uses' out of what Madame de Sevigne would call ces vilaines confidences, by extracting the profitable instruction which, so considered, some of them may perhaps afford.

Nothing, if we look at our mob of tourists, can be so easy as to write a passable book of travels; yet few things, by the same test, should be more difficult than to write a good one. It is to the credit of our author that he has scrupulously excluded from his journal the collateral learning of the road-books. Much also of what appears to us trivial, may (considering the extreme ignorance in which the continent always has been, and still continues wrapped concerning England) be suitable enough in a work intended for foreign readers. Justice compels us, at the expense of too many of our garrulous countrymen, to make a further and more serious admission. The desire of avoiding commonplace occurrences, may have contributed to his overcommunicativeness upon scenes and conversations of a purely personal and private nature. This is a sin, however, against which English travellers unluckily are, of all others, the least entitled to exclaim. If the Roman Catholic clergy of Cashel should not be thankful for the publication of their symposie, and their confessions after dinner, the Abbé Recupero, it must be remembered, was brought into more serious trouble by Brydone's Sicilian Tour. In the event of Lady Morgan feeling somewhat scandalized at her friend for having taken the liberty of throwing a ridiculous colour over their interviews, it is a point, on which, after her publication of Denon's letter addressed to her, as mon dröle du corps, he might reasonably conclude that she was not extremely sensitive. At all events, our sympathy on her account is much abated, when we

remember how often, as her countrymen, we shrunk in Italy
from the reproach of the persecutions to which the unpardon-
able indiscretion of her travels had exposed the friends of Italian
freedom. It is only retribution arte perire sua.
This is a case,
however, in which the misconduct of third persons can grant no
privilege of general reprisals. M. Simond, and the Baron de
Stael, who have written by far the best foreign commentaries
upon England, had much greater facilities for domestic tale-
bearing; but such facilities are a trust which they were too ho-
nourable to abuse. In the present ubiquity of the European press,
a foreigner is not a whit more excusable than a fellow-citizen
for repaying hospitality by printing notes of what may have fall-
en from a host at dinner. Yet who, on being entertained by a
family as one of its members, in his own country, durst ever
publish to the world, histories of the foolish freedom with which
its daughters received him, of the barbarian ignorance with which
the sons bored him, and the religious politics of the females of
the house? We should like to be present at the next reception
of this gentleman, (we refer him to his own definition of the
word,) in Galway or Kerry. A few more examples of the kind
would close every door against an uncertificated foreigner, (even
though he were a titular Prince,) and turn the line of abstract
suspicion of which he was made aware-into one of direct
quarantine prohibition. Publications, after the fashion of Peter's
Letters, whether in English, French, or German, are equally
reprehensible. Their mischief does not depend on their truth or
falsehood. In either case, they are alike destructive of the con-
fidence and sanctity of familiar life. There is an implied pro-
mise to the contrary in the understanding which pervades the
intercourse of all honourable men. No visitor made welcome on
the faith of this presumption, can afterwards reveal a syllable of
what he has so heard or seen, beyond what he has reason to be-
lieve that the parties would sanction, were they present to be
consulted. In every other instance, notwithstanding the vulgar
eavesdropping and babbling license of the Jackals, who haunt
tea-tables and club-windows, and pander for Sunday newspa-
pers, Pope's malediction applies to all of them-the well-dressed
spies,

Who tell whate'er you think, whate'er you say,
And, if they lie not, must at least betray.'

These volumes are the fruits of a visit to England two years ago, by an actually existent German nobleman; the Prince Pückler Muskau. The mask of his incognito was evidently never intended to be held over more than a fraction of his face-for a little

novel-like effect. From his station, and an ill concealed vanity therein, which is mixed up with highly liberal opinions, both in politics and religion, the neglect, which we have been observing upon, of the rights of good breeding and of humanity, has the more surprised us. His translator, in the good taste and good feeling which has guided her pen, has done all that was in her power towards the removal of this blemish. Every omission has been made, which was conceived to be consistent with the duty and with the terms of a translation.

Our author's quality as a Prince, is of less consequence to a reader than his qualities as a man. Every account of individuals or of countries must depend for its contents quite as much on the disposition and discrimination of the observer as upon the things observed. This is particularly the case, when the narration is so mixed up with personal feelings as to become almost a piece of autobiography for the time to which it relates. On the authority of a chance traveller, with whom he passed a morning at the inn at Mitchelstown, the Prince unrolls the scandalous chronicle of a noble family for two generations, and then exclaims, here is a picture of the manners of the great and noble of the eighteenth century.' The point is not whether the particular story is true or false; but whether its reporter has taken the proper pains to ascertain its truth. Does he think the German Prince, who travelled in England in 1828, so impeccable that no scandal got whispered abroad concerning him? On equally good authority, it would have been easy to mention various stories to his discredit. But we prefer taking him on his own showing; although he has mystified himself into a sort of sphynx, whose riddle it is difficult satisfactorily to solve.

Whilst some people go through life travelling in their own dust, others carry along with them a certain atmosphere which changes the colour of every ray before it reaches them. The form adopted in the present instance is very favourable to the exhalation of this sort of sentimental vapour. It is a Journal, addressed as Letters to a real or imaginary Julia. A love-letter of two volumes opens a charming field for egotism to strut and sun itself in, and hawk about the complacent changes of self-flattery and self-reproach in a way which would be otherwise unbearable in a grown-up man of some forty years of age. The result, unfortunately, is any thing but self-respect, simplicity, and truth. It would be great injustice to take this exhibition as a specimen of the German character. We agree that it is not acht deutsch:' nothing like it. We do not, however, at all admit, when, on returning to France, he calls it his half

'native soil;' that the practical shrewdness of those great masters of social life is responsible for the hues, now pink, and now sombre as a bat's wing, with which the milk-and-water part of these lucubrations is variously stained.

What is one to make of a writer, who marks the stages through which the nature of man has to pass by Göthe's three worksWerther, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust? We have got beyond the Werther age, it seems. The Faust period we have not reached it is the one which man is never to outgrow. After so bewildering a finale for the human race in general, no great light probably would have been thrown on his own case, if, in his resolution to be the hero of his book, he had, instead of a hundred bits of characters, condescended to fix on the one which he would perform. His nominal incognito appears to have been taken up for the mere masquerade amusement of assuming it at one moment, and laying it aside the next. But his travelling domino does not sit more loosely upon him than his prevailing humour. He parades an ultra-Byronism. The restlessness, misanthropism, and morbid mind of a care-worn and melan'choly' Childe Harold, forms a fantastic groundwork, into which he would fain shade the mysticism of Manfred, and the lighter graces of a volatile Don Juan. The ambition of imagining himself more original, and blown about by the storm of more violent contradictions in feeling and in fortune, than other people, produces the very monotony which is so dreaded. For what is more monotonous than the mere shifting of scenes and phrases-all about nothing? There is no reason, as far as we can see, why the dregs of a London season should lie particularly heavy on his stomach; nor any grounds for his paradoxical superiority to the pursuits in which he is engaged, or the people with whom he is living, whether fox-hunters or dandies. His perpetual abuse of the cake, which he still goes on eating, at last resembles the caprices of a spoiled and wayward child. It sounds ludicrous in the mouth of a middle-aged man who tells you that he has gone up in a balloon, danced a season at Almack's, and served a campaign against the French. A tone of falseness is thus spread over the whole, till it is impossible not to explain a good deal of his moral mysteries (although they puzzle him as much as Hamlet) by a summary solution. It is the same which alone disposes of the marvel by which in one page he is seeking for the plaintive interest of a confirmed valetudinarian, whilst in the next his rides are performances, and almost events. 'A man of my character......Uniformity of the good even soon tires 'me......Nothing falls out as I wish it...... Danger and difficulty

VOL. LIV. NO. CVIII.

2 c