when, whatever might be the wickednesses of this world among the satrapies of the Continent, there was a spirit of grandeur, Gothic as it was, moving among mankind. I never tread my swampy way under the shadow of those fierce old buildings, that seem to scowl over the degenerate race of modern traffickers; without doing homage to the phantoms of sovereign commerce which still linger round the comptoirs, like ghosts round the spot they loved.' Vol. II. pp. 221. And now for a few sketches of the worthy natives, whose 'fair, flat, piscatory visage' affords so striking a contrast to the bi'lious pug-dog physiognomy of the Gaul". It is impossible to refuse the Germans all the praise due to goodnature, kindness of manner to strangers, and especially to general intelligence. Every one reads, almost every one writes, and altogether there is more of the active power of education visible in general society, than, perhaps, in any other country of the world. But they have two désagrémens, for nothing but the word can express the thing, too slight to be called vice, and too vexatious to be entitled to tolerance; which very considerably undo the spell of German society; and those are— smoking, and stocking knitting. A few mornings since, I visited a man of letters. I found him in his study, entrenched up to the chin in books and papers, and surrounded with all the printed wisdom of his country, in bindings that had evidently known a good deal of the "midnight lamp." The nocturna versate manu, versate diurna, was in every thing. In short, all was as it ought to be in the sacellum of literature. The master of the shrine was a very intelligent person, I believe a very learned, and certainly a very industrious one; for in a list of his daily pursuits, which he showed to me, there was scarcely an hour out of the twentyfour, which had not its appropriate study. But the genius of tobaccosmoke was there, writing his death warrant, as legibly as my learned friend ever wrote a line of high Dutch. His pipe was in his hand; his goblet of eau sucrè, its never-failing, and almost equally sickening, companion, was beside him; and with a lack-lustre eye, and a cheek as yellow as the yellowest page he was poring over, was this able and valuable man sadly smoking himself into the other world. His chamber, his books, his clothes, every thing about him, were tobacco; and I left the interview in sorrow, and half suffocated. Argument in this distemper is but loss of time. No logic can pierce the integument that smoking wraps round the brain. Nothing will ever be effectual, except a general fusillade of the criminals, and a cordon prohibitory of the entrance of this fatal gift of America for the mystification of the continental soul. The propensity too is declared by the physicians to be actually one of the most efficient causes of the German tendency to diseases of the lungs. In point of expense, its waste is enormous. In Hamburg alone, 50,000 boxes of cigars have been consumed in a year; each box costing about 31. sterling: 150,000l. puffed into the air! And it is to be remembered, that even this is but a part of the expense; the cigar adorning the lip only of the better order, and even among those, only of the young; the mature generally abjuring this small vanity, and blowing away with the mighty meerschaum of their ancestors. This plague, like the Egyptian plague of frogs, is felt every where, and in every thing. It poisons the streets, the clubs, and the coffee-houses; furniture, clothes, equipage, person, are redolent of the abomination. It makes even the dulness of the newspaper doubly narcotic; the napkin on the table tells instantly that native hands have been over it; every eatable and drinkable, all that can be seen, felt, heard, or understood, is saturated with tobacco; the very air we breathe is but a conveyance for this poison into the lungs; and every man, woman, and child, rapidly acquires the complexion of a boiled chicken. From the hour of their waking, if nine-tenths of the population can ever be said to awake at all, to the hour of their lying down, which in innumerable instances the peasantry do in their clothes, the pipe is never out of their mouths; one mighty fumigation reigns, and human nature is smoke-dried by tens of thousands of square miles. But if it be a crime to shorten life, or extinguish faculties, the authority of the chief German physiologists charges this custom with effecting both in a very remarkable degree. They compute, that of twenty deaths of men between eighteen and thirty-five, ten originate in the waste of the constitution by smoking. The universal weakness of the eyes, which makes the Germans par excellence a spectacled nation, is probably attributed to the same cause of general nervous debility. Tobacco burns out their blood, their teeth, their eyes, and their brains; turns their flesh into mummy, and their mind into metaphysics. Vol. I. pp. 176-180. To the eye accustomed to genuine English beauty, the foreign countenance is seldom seen to advantage. The foreign brunette is too dark; the blonde is too light; the Greek profile, grand as it is, is too inanimate; and the French favourite nez retroussé, seconded by the little restless brown eye, is too common-place. For the combination of dignity and tenderness, for the noblest expression of mind and heart together, the countenance of English loveliness, in its few finer instances, is altogether without an equal in the world. But the German females have better claims than those which depend upon the exterior; they are a remarkably kind-hearted, faithful, and honest-minded generation. The German ladies, excepting where they are led away by the tempation of French manners, vindicate the character of the sex, and fairly constitute the stronghold of the national morality. Even such superficial knowledge of their domestic life as might lie open to a stranger, conveyed the impression of a mixture of gentleness and goodness, which forms perhaps the best quality for home. The ties of parent and child certainly seem to owe but little of their acknowledged closeness, in Germany, to severity on the one side, or fear on the other. The feature which strikes a stranger most, is the general prevalence of a simple familiarity, perfectly consistent with duty on both sides. The aged head of the house is looked up to with something of patriarchal respect, which he returns by something of patriarchal affection. In England, families suddenly break off, and scatter through life, as if they were blown up by an explosion of gunpowder: they fly to all corners of the world, never to rejoin; but the happier circumstances of this country frequently allow all the branches of families to settle near each other: sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, with their children and their children's children, come and sit under the shelter of the family vine. Circle spreads beyond circle; and the ancient father, sitting in the centre of all, like another Jacob, with the sons of Joseph at his knee, is loved and honoured, rejoices in his grey hairs and fulness of years, and in peace and gratitude prepares for the great change that comes to all.' Vol. I. pp. 217, 218. In genuine domesticity, however, the Englishman is distinguished alike from the pipe-loving Teutschlander, the talk-loving Frenchman, or the sun-loving Italian. Be it known, that the Englishman is the only inhabitant of Europe, who, between the hours of dinner and sleep, can stay at home. Be the weather wild as Boreas and Eurus together ever made it, the sunloving Italian steals to his casino; the Frenchman rushes out into the whirlwind, to yawn for three hours in the same coterie where he has duly yawned every night for the last fifty years; the Dutchman finds a moral impossibility of smoking his pipe at home, and goes to enjoy it in the Harmonie; the Spaniard's lemonade is tasteless unless he can sip it in the accustomed Caffeteria; and the German's schnapps and newspaper cannot go down, except in the Guinguette atmosphere of brandy, lamp-oil, and the most pestilent tobacco fumes that ever nauseated the lungs of man. This anti-home propensity accounts for half the phænomena of foreign life; for the rarity of affection where it ought to be, and the universality of attachment where it ought not;-for the wretched profligacy of private life, and, as a consequence, for a good deal of the very scandalous corruption of public; for the crowding of the theatres, the prosperity of the gaming-tables, and the general propensity to suicide. The Englishman, on the contrary, can sit at home, and bear to look at his wife and children, without grudging the moments given to either, as so much lost to sentiment, and the billiard balls.' Vol. I. pp. 148-150. The original malediction of the foreigner is restlessness: he lives under an anathema of perpetually doing something. His Governments, and his nature, alike make him an idler,—I speak not of the few exceptions, and the misery of his idleness is to be made endurable only by eternal trivialities. The Gaul thus chatters away his understanding; the German smokes and mysticises; the whole South of Europe vainly absorbs itself in sonnetteering, scandal, and macaroni. The Englishman is the only individual in existence, who can sit still when he has nothing to do; and hold his tongue, when he has nothing to say; and limitless praise be to him for both. To this pitiful propensity, worthy only a forest of baboons, is due the theatre and coffeehouse haunting spirit, that utterly un-domesticates foreign life; a vast quantity of the vice,-for foreign life is intolerably vicious; and the incalculable waste of the energies, talents, and opportunities which Providence has given as largely here as elsewhere, but given in vain. To this is due the opera and ballet-fever, the frenzy into which a dancer or a singer throws the public for a hundred square leagues, noble and gentle, prince and plebeian; all crowding for fifty nights together, to see a profligate from Paris, who stands on her toe half a minute longer than all other profligates from Paris; or a singer from Milan or Naples, who eclipses all the violins, and all the vices, of her native hot-bed.' Vol. II. pp. 301, 2. In our own metropolis, the theatres are comparatively deserted by the higher classes; but the multiplication of clubs and clubhouses, to say nothing of billiard-rooms, is, we fear, making serious inroads upon domesticity of character, and undermining, in many cases, domestic virtue. Happily, if Paris is France, London is not England. A chapter is devoted to the history of the Hanseatic League, -a graphic and spirited sketch, in the vivid colouring of romance. Charlemagne is exalted into a benefactor; and the Crusades are referred to as having showered gold on the north; representations which do not belong to history,-but tant pis pour les faits. Next comes The Battle of Bautzen'; followed by a Tale of the Generations of Napoleon', to which this gorgeous paragraph forms a head-piece,—a pen and ink vignette. 6 Who has not heard, read, written, or dreamed of the Bay of Naples? Of its morning sun showering it with pearls and roses, and of its evening sun exchanging them for topazes and tulips! Of its being at one time a mirror in which Aurora dresses her ringlets, and at another a prodigious cathedral window, stained with all kinds of heavenly things, before which Phoebus goes to vespers!' After perusing this tale, fanciful, extravagant, oriental in its conception, dramatic in its execution, the dullest reader will scarcely be at a loss to conjecture the name of the Writer, if he has not detected him before; but the following stanzas, which it would be injustice to withhold, tell the secret still more plainly. We will not, however, deprive our readers of the pleasure of guessing. · THE RUSSIAN BLACK EAGLE: A NIGHT VIEW. The trumpet of the storm is blown, Seems lighting funeral shrouds ; Stoops through the gloom Of the thousand rolling clouds. That head is crown'd with many a ring! I know that fearful eagle-wing! Fierce, broad, and black, It hung on the track, From Moscow's towers of flame, Till France was but a name. Thou eagle-king! I know thee well, Thou wentest forth to slay; But kingdoms, slaughter-strewed! 'Dark spirit of the mystic North, When sweeps thy sullen pinion forth, Like a cloudy zone: What fated throne Must sink in dust again! Com'st thou to wreak Old vengeance for the Greek, Giving him blood to drink like rain! 'Or shall thy gory talon sweep 'Or from thy tempest-girdled nest Glance where trembling India lies, Thy grandeur like the rest—a dream! 'Or shalt thou revel till the storm, Destroying, and destroyed but with the world!' |