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relation to the individualities of a flock of sheep passing through his gate. In Berlin or Dresden, on the other hand, you will find something like the antechamber to a court levee, frequented by rather distinguished-looking personages, who favour you with a good deal of patronising politeness. Have you no smaller coin to offer for a place in the parterre than an English sovereign? Monsieur had better not wait outside-let him step in, and his change will be presently brought to him. With the class of persons to be dealt with in such matters at home, every one looks personally after his own money matters, and would pause with jealousy over such an arrangement, fearing that the change-bearer might, by some unlucky chance, fail to find him in the crowd, and that he himself might fail to discover his debtor. But he need not be afraid-he is in the hands of a public officer of the Crown, who would no more think of cheating him than the collector to whom he pays his income-tax at home.

If there was something rather patronisingly condescending in their bestowal of their services, I cannot say that I found among the German official men during my last trip any of the haughty insolence sometimes attributed to them. I have a notion that the splutter made about the Macdonald affair may have in the end considerably smoothed the path of British travellers. It proved the sensitive vigilance of our organisation for the protection of the British citizen, and the smallness of the matter that would be converted into a State question if it involved a real injury or affront towards a subject of our Queen. The Prussian Government, it is true, backed the culprits, but every subordinate officer has been no doubt made to feel that he will by no means be doing an acceptable service to his superiors by giving them cause for such conflicts.

I have heard Germans of the upper classes complain that they themselves are by no means exempt from

the insolence of office, and what the poor have to take from it is palpable. Seen have I one of those epauletted and besabred grandees, who look as if they could do no meaner work than command a squadron to charge, march up to an attenuated huxtergirl, with her barrow, and pour upon her a roaring denunciatory oration concerning some breach of police etiquette committed by her. Stopping occasionally to take breath, he returns to the charge, reads out regulations, takes notes of facts, exhorts, illustrates, and, coming to the climax of his righteous indignation, clenches his fists, and seems scarcely able to restrain himself from inflicting violent personal chastisement on the trembling culprit. In such a case, a policeman among us would execute his duty, whatever it might be, with peculiar quietness, and a sort of shamefaced feeling that dire necessity, not love of authority, drove him to so disagreeable a task. A Prussian, to whom I stated this, was by no means silent. "Would you, then," says he, that your quiet-speaking policeman, ashamed of his duties, who carries a baton instead of a sword, should convey the poor creature before a magistrate, who finds that the law gives him no alternative but to sentence her to a period of imprisonment with prostitutes and thieves?"

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We have in this country an intense horror at any administration of justice coming spontaneously from the central Government. It must all be set agoing by the parties interested, who collect their own evidence, set forth the facts of their own cases, and plead upon their merits. All that the Government does is to supply us, in the first place, with judges, serene and impartial, whose duty it is to be utterly blind to everything not brought legitimately under their notice; and, in the second place, with an array of professional persons-counsel and attorneys-whose function it is to see that every litigant has the merits of his case brought fully out. No doubt this is the perfection of judicial inquiry. The outs and ins

things bring one to questions of the greatest nicety and difficulty, and so reveal that there are elements of defect in the most perfect of human institutions. We can never in this country abandon as a fundamental principle the administration of justice, in all important cases, through judges independent of the Government, who act in public, and are liable to the influence of all the forensic science and dialectic ability which litigants can bring to bear on them. Yet it might not endanger the stability of our illustrious constitution if the Government did more for the protection of the poor and helpless litigants.

of a complex history, containing within itself many facts which it is the interest of those who know them to conceal, will never be so effectually brought to light by the exertions of any royal commissioner of justice, as they will be by two armies of hostile lawyers, lavishly supplied with money, and taught by the traditions of their craft to devote every power they possess— zeal, talent, conscience itself-to the cause of their employer. This system follows up our national idea of fair play. It is a fair play, however, apt to give a great preponderance to superior audacity, talent, and wealth. In the local courts for deciding on small claims which have In various minute particulars, lately been spreading, there has been the paternal system, whatever it an intention to admit, in a timid may be to natives, is serviceable and negative form, some elements of and pleasant to the stranger and sothe Continental mode of inquiry. In journer. With us any one, high or the exclusion of professional lawyers, low, may wander at his will withsome responsibility is thrown upon out requiring to carry in his pocket the judge to act as counsel for both a sort of skeleton biography of his sides, and thus get, by his own in- passage through life, and without quiries, at the root of the matter. subjection to many vexatious public But these judges are educated in regulations current in other counthe national system, which over- tries. But in them, on the other shadows their practice, and they hand, every one, down even to the nervously shrink from everything humblest pedestrian or tramp, has that is not "brought before them.' his wants and conveniences cared To conduct the examination else- for. With us the pedestrian is looked where than in open court would upon as an idle vagrant, to whom it seem unconstitutional; nor can would be unbecoming to show any they refuse to hear whatever is said, courtesy. If there be a wayside or stop the mouth of the clever fountain, for instance, it will be litigant, whose loquacious plausi- constructed only for the use of bility overwhelms and silences his quadrupeds, these being valuable lethargic opponent. On the other animals; but there will be nothing hand, your German local Richter, to accommodate the pedestrian, who if the question be about an ac- will probably find that the watercount for goods furnished, may course is so adjusted that he canmake his appearance at some un- not get a drop to drink, unless he expected moment in the prosecu- be content to take it from the comtor's office, and rummage about mon trough at which the cattle in his cash-book and invoices. If slake their thirst; whereas in the discussion be about a nuisance, Prussia or Saxony-nay, Austria he will step to the spot at early also-if there be a well attached to dawn, and sniff the air with his a house on the roadside, the chances own official nostrils. He has no are that it has a neat cup chained notion of "parties being entitled to it for the use of the wayfarer. to be heard any further than the Where is the pedestrian who, in rehearing of them is to his own satis-membering his rambles in his own faction; and when he sees how matters stand, he pronounces the royal judgment accordingly. These

dear home of the brave and the free, does not recall with a sympathetic shudder the doubts, the diffi

culties, the final calamities he has undergone from cross-roads destitute of any friendly finger-post? How he has sometimes, when he thinks he must be close to his destined shelter, come on a moor or in a forest to a complete fan of diverging paths, all of which, save the one which he has no means of certainly identifying, may lead him like the Irish mile-stone, "fifteen miles from innywhere?" And should there be seen between him and the sky a fragment of a fingerpost standing like a gibbet, and should he with desperate effort climb up to it and accomplish the lighting of a lucifer match-behold, it tenders no reward or help-the instruction it once gave having been carefully obliterated by the freeborn youth of the district. What a feeling of pleasant security is there then in those instructive inscriptions scattered over Northern Germany, which tell you your distance to a fraction from half-a-dozen places, and indicate their direction! This is but a small part too of the varied information you receive in this shape. There are long and specific rules for your guidance and conduct touching the places where you are not to walk, or not to ride, or not to drive a vehicle, or if to drive a vehicle, yet not one of a certain form or weight; where you are not to smoke, and not, &c. &c. To the stranger this series of monitory and instructive literature is specially serviceable. It not only enables him to keep out of scrapes and difficulties, but it affords him a succession of valuable lessons in the German language. There are things necessary for the wanderer's comfort, and even for his safety, that he should know, and if he be but imperfectly educated in the language, the necessity that is the mother of invention will make him find short cuts to a closer acquaintance with it. The minute particularities of that system which seems to put every living thing, and also every article of still life, in its special registered place, in connection with the central Government, will amuse the Briton,

and excite in him a lively curiosity. The very cliffs in the Saxon Schwertz are numbered off with gigantic figures, which he that runs may read. If you were tumbling off one of them you might have the satisfaction, before being dashed to pieces at the bottom, of "taking the number" of the precipice that has so scandalously deceived you. Look at those collections of granite boulders, laid down in convenient places to be broken up into road-metal. Each has a special cabalistic mark and relative number. Examine the heaps which are in the next stage that is frayed into small fragments for use. You will find that there is laid upon each a small slab with a mark and number, the import of which is doubtless well known to the important officer whose wife is known in select circles as the well-born deputy assistant royal road directress.

I must not, by the way, forget a little trace of paternal government which seemed very interesting and laudable. In several of the Bohemian villages I saw a public notice in the following terms :-" Hier bestehet das Armen-institut, und ist da Betteln und Vagerange festlich verbothen." This is the neatest and most clear abridgment I ever met with of the whole philosophy of pauper relief. "Here stands the Poor-house, and therefore begging and vagabondage are solemnly forbidden;" so says the Government to the mendicant. The law admits the fundamental duty of protecting every one from starvation. Having done that, it considers itself entitled to put down practices which are not only extremely detrimental to the peace and order of society, but which cannot properly fulfil the purposes of charity, since they are more apt to reward importunity and imposture than to relieve destitution. The Bohemian notice to vagrants, in short, condenses into one short sentence the essence of the library of blue-books, in which the high officers who superintend our pauper system have deposited their views.

There is one great feature of the paternal system which all of us must see dwindling away without regret the passport torture. This year I was never officially called on to produce my passport until I got into the Austrian dominions, and then I gave more trouble to the official people than they gave to me. Finding a pedestrian walking out of the Austrian frontier without any luggage-I had sent mine on by post-and choosing as far as he could remote hill roads, was evidently a perplexing problem, and subjected my passport to very anxious inspection by remote rural officers standing on their responsibility. The last who fingered it, a very mild gentlemanly sort of personage, kept it a long time in his hand wistfully murmuring over its contents. I believe, poor fellow, desirous to spare me the discourtesy of copying it, he was getting it by heart. Much good might it do him! It was one of those mystical documents issued by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, which are supposed to owe their wonderful efficiency to the broad splash of red wax with which they are decorated.

We are thus getting rid of an arrangement which was fraught with delay, trouble, humiliation, and countless sources of torment and anxiety to the traveller, especially to him who could not afford to lose a day or two every now and then at some dreary frontier station, if it did not happen to him -as I have known it do-to be marched with a guard of gendarmes to the coast and shipped homewards. Of old the small states, where the passport system could be put to no practical use, must needs, for the sake of their dignity and independence, be as punctilious as their betters. Geneva was especially troublesome and ceremonious about your credentials, yet a passport applicable to her own territory Geneva never could see, having no representatives to authorise it. It was, therefore, of no

consequence whence or whither it franked you-it might be from Nova Zembla to Timbuctoo; but a passport of some sort you must lodge with the authorities. The suspicion was not very unreasonable, that the chief object was to insure the republic the benefit of your bill at one of her inns for one night at least.

Nothing in this world passes absolutely away without leaving some little halo of regretful remembrance behind. In the extinction of passports we lose some amusing penand-ink personal sketches wherein home-truths were told in a manner not always complimentary, and personal peculiarities were described with a minuteness and honesty not pleasing to their owner, but sometimes amusing to others.

With the passport system will also go those entries in the police books, which, even at any roadside inn where he stopped to breakfast or drink a mug of wine, were as solemnly presented to the pedestrian as they were to my lord with his coach-and-six at the grand hotels. The information which the police derived from them must have been of a miscellaneous and rather distracting character. It was amusing, in those days, to find how continually John Bull was on the move in person, followed by some of the most illustrious of his citizens, such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Walter Scott. Snooks was also a frequent traveller, being generally occupied in journeys from Dan to Beersheba, or from the North Pole to the Equator. Chrononohotonthologos and Aldiboron tifoscofornio passed by occasionally. Baron Munchausen would be employed in a mission to the moon, and Jeremy Didler was en route from Hoaxem to Humbug. These pleasantries of course were only tried at places of casual and brief sojourn; in the towns or large inns where they stayed all night, our tourists required to be more circumspect and deferential to the institutions of the country.

CAXTONIANA:

A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of The Caxton Family.'

PART VI.

NO. IX.-HINTS ON MENTAL CULTURE.

IN the high-wrought state of civilisation at which we are arrived, few complaints are more common than that of a brain overworked. This complaint is not confined to authors and students; it extends to all who strive for name or fortune against eager and numerous competitors. The politician, the professional man, the merchant, the speculator-all must experience that strain of special faculties in the direction towards special objects, out of which comes nervous exhaustion, with all the maladies consequent on over-stimulus and prolonged fatigue. Horace is a sound pathologist when he tells us that, after Prometheus had stolen fire from heaven, a cohort of fevers, unknown before, encamped themselves on earth. In our audacious age, we are always stealing new fire, and swelling the cohort of fevers with new recruits. The weary descendant of Iapetus droops at last-the stolen fire begins to burn low-the watchful cohort pounces on its prey. The doctor is summoned, hears the case, notes the symptoms, and prescribes repose.

But repose is not always possible. The patient cannot stop in the midst of his career-in the thick of his schemes. Or, supposing that he rush off to snatch a nominal holiday from toil, he cannot leave Thought behind him. Thought, like Care, mounts the steed and climbs the bark.

A brain habitually active will not be ordered to rest. It is not like the inanimate glebe of a farm, which, when exhausted, you restore

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In therapeutic gymnastics, we strengthen one set of muscles hitherto little called into play, in order to correct the tendencies to a malady which the fatigue of another set of muscles has induced. What is thus good for the bodily health, I hold to be yet more good for the whole mental development of man. Mrs Somerville has written a charming and popular book on

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The Connection of the Sciences ;' but it is not only the sciences which have a family kinship; all the faculties and all the acquisitions of the human intellect are relations to each other:-The true chief of a clan never disowns remote affinities; the wider his clanship the greater his power: so it is with a true genius; the more numerous its clansmen, the higher its dignity of chief. If there be some one specialty in art, literature, science, active life, in which we can best succeed, that specialty is improved and enriched by all the contributions obtainable from other departmemts of study. Read the treatises on Oratory, and you stand

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