above the Rhone. These gigantic and beautiful summits, with their crowns of eternal snow glittering on their rugged and inaccessible heads, are so close to each other, that they appear as if they must have been torn asunder. Heights which appear as lovers who have parted In hate, whose mining depths so intervene That they can meet no more though broken-hearted. Vineyards, orchards, forests, smoking hamlets, and white towns, are scattered at their base. The blue Rhone alternately rushes and meanders through this champaign scene, till it pours its waters into the broad basin of Lake Leman, which harmonizes the landscape with its bright glassy expanse, and allures the eye to the grey distant scenes about Lausanne and Vevai and the faint hills of the Jura. Few scenes can be found which embrace in one complete and various landscape so many features of picturesque beauty, in which the near and the distant are equally lovely-in which the eye glances in an instant over so much that is delicious to the sight, and congenial to the mind. We arrived at Vevai late in the evening, having walked along the upper bank of the lake, by the Castle of Chillon, as the sun set in rosy magnificence over the scenes at the farther extremity. The inn at Vevai was almost entirely occupied by a travelling pension of young ladies, in number twenty-two, who were spending the holidays in making a tour with the mistress. Their travelling equipage was a large coach with seats round the interior, drawn by four horses. These itinerant establishments are not uncommon, I hear, in Switzerland. Instead of removing the mountains and snows, according to the suggestion of a tasteful traveller, who thought them too sauvage and cold, Vevai would be much improved by getting rid of one half of its vineyards, and all its stone walls, which have entirely usurped the place of the woods, groves, pastures, orchards, which are infinitely more pleasing in a landscape. A vineyard is connected with ideas of sultry suns, luxuriant soil, teeming plenty, and pastoral happiness, and has, time out of mind, held a place in poetical description; but in reality, it is hardly more picturesque than a bed of dwarf gooseberry bushes-its stunted regular ranks and monotonous green are bad substitutes for the beautiful variety of cornfields, hedgerows, and umbrageous groves and orchards. Vevai is, however, a lovely spot-its deep blue lake, with all its bays and graceful sinuosities, its sloping hills, its chateaux, hamlets, and châlets, its amphitheatre of green forest-covered mountains, with an upper range of snowy pinnacles on one side, all the grace and softened beauty of cultivated fields and vineyards washed by the gentle lake; and on the other, the severe sublimity of the Alpine chain, with its rocks and glaciers in their varied forms of rugged grandeur-the massy turreted castle of Chillon on the left -Meillerie and its rocks immediately opposite-the blue hills of the Jura in the far distance to the right-and immediately around, a scene of smiling plenty and happiness, which soothes and softens the feelings, and combines with the grander objects to produce the most irresistible and pleasing impressions on the mind. At Vevai we enjoyed two days of delightful indolence after our journeyings in the mountains on mules, among rocks, snows, and preci VOL. IV. No. 20.-1822. U pices. This repose and change of scene were not less refreshing to the mind than the body. An open champaign scene of vineyard, meadow, and lake, was not less congenial to the eye and the mind, after being cooped in by ice-crags and impending granites, than a calêche and a good road were consolatory to our limbs after the bonesetting fatigues of mule excursions. Much as we had heard and read of Vevai, its scenes in no degree disappointed our expectations. Even Rousseau's impassioned eloquence has hardly overcoloured its beauties. Its variety is endless-there is no kind or shade of picturesque charm which an exploring traveller does not find in its precincts, from the pretty simple home view, full of peace and love, and rustic repose, to the wildest magnificence of overpowering Alpine nature. Its scenes are scenes not merely to be visited and wondered at, but to be dwelt upon, contemplated, and inhabited. The feelings become "tinctured with their every hue." The coldest and hardest of hearts would in vain seek to resist the softening and expanding influence of their rich and diversified beauty; and if there is a scene where the world and all its vanities and strifes might be supposed to have no place, where Nature's lovely influence must be felt in every thought and action of life, where a man might spend his days in a flow of pure and exquisite enjoyments, and close them in innocent repose, surely this is such a scene. It is singular to see how indifferent either habit or phlegmatic temperament, or both, frequently render the Swiss to its charms, and indeed to those of their country in general. They appear to me to have singularly little enthusiasm. You scarcely find one person in twenty among the cultivated classes, who has explored much of his own country, or who takes any warm interest in its curiosities and beauties. A German, from his dull sandy plains, and certainly an Englishman who never saw a mountain higher than the Brighton Downs, is far more alive to grandeur of scenery than these born mountaineers. I cannot think that habit and use make the difference. A Highlander has none of this phlegm: he loves his mountains and glens for their own beauties, as well as because they are the home of him and his ancestors: he is proud to shew off his crags and lakes to foreigners, and feels a poetical and enthusiastic attachment to every wild scene of his native land. I have seldom seen any of this glow and romance in an inhabitant of Switzerland. He is a good patriot, and attached to his Canton and the Confederacy; but it is a staid, phlegmatic, and calculating feeling, connected with little romantic love of its alps, and lakes, and mountain-circled valleys, but built upon the sober basis of home and its comforts his snug cottage and châlet, his independence, small taxes, paternal government, and his consequence in the Canton Council. Certainly there cannot be better or surer foundations for patriotism than these-and it would be absurd to expect any people to forget these excellent reasons for loving their country, and to doat upon it only for its barren rocks and frozen mountains; but the Swiss appear to love its comforts alone, and to have no soul for its beauties. You find persons who have passed their lives within fifty miles of Mont Blanc, and have never visited Chamounix; and half the people of Berne have never taken the trouble to travel forty miles to see the Glaciers of Grindelwald and the Jungfrau. The mal du pays which affects a Swiss when out of his country in so remarkable a manner, ap pears little connected with any ardent recollections of its sublime scenes. It is a yearning for the snug secure comforts, the little tranquil primitive habits of life so contrasted with the bustle and turmoil of greater countries. It is not the wild mountaineer sighing for his bleak but native rocks, but the sober thriving peasant, or burgher, regretting his republican comforts and consequence, and longing to fly from aristocratical splendour and noise to the confined circle of his ordinary pursuits and homely pleasures. It is the household gods, not the trophies of the republic, or the sublimities of nature, to which he is attached. Do not imagine that I wish to undervalue the sober patriotism of the Swiss-their history for five centuries is its best eulogium. It is not the less constant or sincere for being, like all their sentiments, singularly posé, reflective, and unimpassioned. Unknown those powers that raise the soul to flame, D. DRINKING SONG, FROM THE FRENCH. BY MAITRE ADAM. MAITRE ADAM BILLAUT was a carpenter of Nevers, who flourished in the reign of Louis XIII., and was called the Virgil of the Plane. His poetry obtained for him the applause of Benserade, Scudery, Menage, and other wits of his nation. It has something of the poist and polish of the lighter French compositions of Voltaire's day; and for the age and station of the author, is singularly good. In our own times low-born poets have been frequent, because literature has been placed within the reach of all classes. But it would be curious, could we know the circumstances which called forth the intellects of " rude mechanics" in that epoch of darkness and despotism in which this poet wrote. Maitre Adam had a rival in a poetical biscuit-baker at Paris, who piqued himself that if Adam's verses were composed avec plus de bruit, his own were written avec plus de chaleur. Quillons le soin avare, &c. &c. Farewell for ever, Thou dull tormentor, Care, of youth the grave, Thee will I honour never, For the vile drop thou seekest cannot save The trembling miser from the grasp of death; Nor buy the gasping wretch one moment's ling'ring breath. If cruel Fate, Charm'd by the love of gold, would hold her hand, Her writ suspending at its bright command, In love of life I'd hoard the saving ore; But this can never be, and I will toil no more. The jolly god, Bacchus, the parent of each dear delight, Shall sway me with his nod, And rule the laughing hours from dawn to night. Since, when we part with life, we lose our money too. M. DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD. NO. I. STANDING at the door of the Library in Conduit-street on one of these fine summer evenings, after the hubbub of carriages had passed away and left that part of the town somewhat tranquil, I observed three extraordinary figures making their way down the street and gazing with a strange curiosity upon every house as they passed. One was a painful-looking old gentleman, with a cross visage embayed in as cross a wig: he was a large man, with a spacious forehead and shoulders, evincing strength of brain as well as muscle. His companions seemed to share his curiosity and astonishment, but not his spleen. One was a shabby-looking rake, with his hand as consequentially stuck in his empty pocket as if it anchored in gold coin, and the cock of his hat was arranged to make amends for its rusty triteness. The other was a simple, bachelor-like mortal, in a peach-bloom coloured coat, with open mouth, vacant eyes, and long upper lip, that gave a queer air of precision to his look: he seemed, like his companions, to be quite in a quandary of amazement, out of which he awoke on perceiving that any one regarded him; when he brushed the stray snuff off the breast of his coat, and looked as spruce as possible for a few minutes. The three wights made a dead pause opposite the shop-window of No. 50, and darted their noses, like storks, at a volume there displayed. It was "Table Talk," Vol. II; and the cross-looking fellow took a huge pinch of snuff as soon as he read the title. He pointed his stick to the door-way in what I thought a rude manner, for to all appearance he poked me in the stomach; however, I felt it not. And thereupon an awe came over me that held me stock-still where I stood. My gentlemen made but little of such an obstacle, but passed clean through me and the door-way, without disturbing either the nap of my coat or the hair of my head. Ghosts they were for certain; but whose ?—that was a point soon ascertained from my acquaintance with Reynolds's canvass. The big fellow was no less a man than Dr. Johnson himself; he that followed in his wake was Goldsmith; and the other, though I knew not his countenance, could be none other than Dick Savage. With the freedom of the old literati they had pierced beyond the sacred barrier of the counter, and had dispersed themselves into divers corners of that labyrinth of books and shelves. Johnson was among the quartos "grappling with whole libraries." Savage had run through most of the new poems, and in his progress had found time to damn the Excursion, and to pocket the five Cantos of Don Juan. But what should Goldy be studying? By Jupiter, his own image and gay coat in the glass! The publications of the last fifty years, to see which he had travelled some billions of miles, he had forgotten in a moment, and was busied in arranging, or endeavouring to arrange, his stock in the new mode of a St. Andrew's cross, when Savage touched him on the shoulder, with an "Eh, Goldy, still at that old frontispiece of thine? Why, man you thought yourself a great fellow for having written two poems of some four hundred lines in each: look here! look here! and look here!-Verse by wholesale, and good verse too. Why, thou wouldst now be but a grasshopper chirping among such a multitude of nightingales." Johnson. Poetry, Sir, is not to be weighed by the pound. Little as I am acquainted with the contents of these poetical quartos, I would venture to assert that one of the sententious lines of our old school might be dilated into two or three pages of the new. Body o 'me, it's impossible for any man to think a volume of new poetic thought every year. Savage. Thought, Doctor, thought! what has thought to do with poetry? May not a man tell a story in verse every year? Johnson. Nay, Sir, every hour for that matter: but the second will be but a repetition of the first. The age is right, however, and so are its writers, in multiplying duplicates of their genius, in case of that universal wreck of literature which must be one day expected to take place. Goldsmith. Is this poetry, Doctor? Johnson. No, Sir, that 's unintelligible nonsense. Savage. Worthy Doctor, you're in your old way again. Why, man, there's not a word in your own dictionary, which may not be denied, in stubborn precision, of every imaginable and unimaginable thing. Call these productions what you will, there is thought in them, deep and new-philosophic, refined, and passionate thought, clothed in numbers that have their charms, though perhaps not for our ears. Goldsmith. But how came these fellows to slight and despise us? Savage. No man slights thee, Goldy. Goldsmith. No one ever speaks of me, and yet every scribbling dog Savage. Hath his day-and why not? The world must talk on disputable subjects, if it intend to talk any time; and Goldsmith's merit is no disputable point: that would never do. A man that wishes to give scope to his tongue or his pen, must uphold a comfortable paradox, and there can be no fear that he will ever lack matter. "Pope is not a poet,"" Such a gentleman is,"-these are the ever-springing wells of disputation, without which people now-a-days would never get through the world. They are a sort of pocket-arguments, pulled out on all occasions, like the quizzes of our days, to fill up the vacant intervals of solitude or conversation. Johnson. But how can you explain the inclination so universally evinced to fall foul of me upon every occasion. Fellows, Sir, that dared not look upon my face when living, spurn at me now that I am laid low. Savage. Confess, my lexicographer, do you not deserve it? Such will ever be the case. Aristocracies and dictatorships usurped in literature will always be disowned by the succeeding age. Would that the principle were known, that genius might be contented with being humble, and dulness know the vanity of attempting to be otherwise. Johnson. Nay, I speak not of controverting my principles, of calling my critical opinions in question: I speak of a tendency to depreciate, and even to deny, my talents. That they were thrown away-frittered in periodical writing and common-place essayism-that they were not |