whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," in respectful awe; to shun the French as their natural enemies; and to stay at home and mind the shop, to the greater glory of Old England. It was no small blessing thus to get rid of the most boring of all bores, the fidgety persons, who are cursed with a superabundance of locomotive faculty; and the elbow-room and repose acquired in many families by the absenteeship of aunts, cousins, and visiting neighbours, will not be forgotten for a generation to come. But the calm was delusive as it was sweet, and brief as it was voluptuous; or rather, it was but the pause which precedes a tempest. In due time the travellers returned home; sights were seen, purses were emptied, and our streets and houses were filled with a bevy of conceited coxcombs, who could think and talk of nothing but what is said and done in the Vatican and the Tuileries. The noise, and the chatter, and the annoyance which ensued, on the return of this flight of magpies, was absolutely intolerable. There was a cool assumption, too, of superiority about them, as offensive as their noise. He who before his voyage knew himself for a fool, and was humble, and silent, and submissive, as a fool ought to be, would not now suffer you to understand trade, or politics, or science, to order your own dinner to your own taste, or to wear your own clothes after your own fashion. My younger brother, who was brought up to call me Sir, when he came back from Paris had the effrontery to rally me on my ignorance of the beaux arts; and my wife's sister, who was once as inobservant as Mrs. Shandy, became, after a visit to St. Omer's, so deeply impregnated with Continental ideas, that every article in my house, furniture, books, table, prints, and toilet, was the undisguised object of her censure and contempt. Sterne has informed us, that he was driven upon foreign travel by the eternal reference of all things to the standard of better management in France; yet the travellers in Sterne's days were "but as one man among ten thousand," to the modern heroes of the White Bear in Piccadilly, and of the Tower-stairs at Billingsgate. No wonder, then, that the most sedentary of the Bull family, the most determined hater of post-horses, the man who could least understand what Falstaff meant by "taking his ease in his inn," should have been compelled, as I have, to seek refuge in flight, from the vaunting, boasting, and babbling of these Coryats of the back shop, who vent their "crudities" over the counter, these Marco Paulos of the tea-table, and Eustaces of the club-room. There was no end to the thwarting, the snubbing, and direct contradiction one met with, abroad and at home. If you ventured, in a mixed company, to hint that Boulogne in France is not exactly the same city as Bologna in Italy, you were sure to meet some sturdy disputant, who, on the strength of having crossed the herring pond, assured you with a confident air, that you were mistaken, "for he had been at the place himself, and seen it;" and straightway you were voted an ignoramus by the whole society, nemine contradicente. There was a time when I passed for a tolerable judge of port wine; and if I smacked my lips after a glass, it was the signal for a good order to the merchant who supplied the house; but now, 'every puny whipster" who says he has seen the vines grow, can put down his betters, by a glib repetition of La Fitte, Chateau margôt, and half a dozen other cabalistical terms, which pass

66

muster for so many ideas.*

The case is the same with acting. One cannot mention John Kemble and his sister, but some fellow who scarcely knows a tragedy from a tabernacle sermon, draws over all the company by talking nonsense of Talma and Duchenois. Liston is not to be listened to after Potier; and Ducrow is a mere gander, to the troop at Franconi's. No matter, indeed, what is the theme; every thing, any thing, is subjected to some outlandish and unknown measurement; and all the world applauds, in the exact proportion to its ignorance and want of comprehension. I am naturally a patient personage, with little ambition of shining in company; but perpetual dropping will wear a stone; and it is very provoking to be for ever convinced against one's will, and silenced when one feels that one is not confuted. I honestly confess that I was nettled, and that it required no great persuasion to seduce me into joining a party of pleasure to the Continent, which I conceived would raise me to an intellectual level with my friends, and, to use a familiar phrase, make a man of me for ever afterwards.

No man, "or woman either," (as Hamlet has it,) does a thing in a passion, without finding cause very shortly to repent of it. If I were to define a party of pleasure for a dictionary, or an encyclopædia, I should write it down, a concentration of every annoyance and evil under the sun. From a pic-nic dinner on the damp grass at Twickenham, to a philhellenic excursion against Ibrahim, or a sojourn with the Bedouins, there is no possible modification of this sort of connexion, which is not imbued to the very core with makeshift and discomfort. To a person who is partial to sleeping in his own bed, and prefers a particular seat at his own fire-side, the mere strangeness of all he sees and touches in these expeditions is pregnant with annoyance; not to speak of the positive ills of damp sheets and rheumatisms, of draughts of air and sore throats. Then every body will have his own way in all the arrangements, while, after fifty disputes and squabbles, every body ends by doing no single thing that he likes. Something also is lost or forgotten at every stage, and the ill-humour incidental to unforeseen delay disturbs the harmony of the society. After this comes bad accommodation on the road, villainous wines, the devil's cooks, the abominable necessity of sharing your bed-chamber with a friend, or the bed itself perhaps with the bugs. Then there is the oppressive sense of duty which commands you to see every thing, admire every thing, and hang upon the tediousness of guides and ciceronis, who never think they can give you enough for your half-crown; and then the eternal consciousness of spending money with both hands in the attainment of all these various delights. In short, from the beginning to the end of a party of pleasure, there is but one incident capable of conferring the least gratification to a well-regulated mind; and that is the fact of turning your horses' heads towards home. If such are the evils of a party of pleasure in England, how much worse is it when the excursion is for many weeks' duration, and in a foreign land. In an evil hour, therefore, I agreed to indulge my wife and family with a trip to the Continent, and committed myself to the chances and perils of a tra

• This babble has infected even the newspapers and magazines. Pray you, "avoid it altogether," Mr. Editor..

veller's life. Had I known as much then as I do now, I would have cut off my nose before I would have budged a step: but experience must be bought; and, God knows, a pretty pennyworth of it I have brought home for my future guidance! To begin with the beginning; it is no easy matter to get a family under weigh. There are so many things to be put by, so many to be bought, so many to be made, such arrangements for remedying one's absence from business, for procuring a regular supply of the one thing needful on the journey; such leavetakings, and parting with servants, and lockings up of premises! Then, above all, there is such packing and stowing! I have, all my married life, had a tolerable acquaintance with ribbons and flounces, gauze and wire, and have known pretty well what it is to pay for a lady's superfluities; but the cost and trouble of transporting these things had never before fully possessed my imagination. I might, indeed, have reflected that a lady's sleeve takes more silk than an entire gown formerly consumed; and that her hat is better fitted to hold a post-chaise than to be itself included within the ordinary dimensions of such a vehicle. But I own a thought of the consequences of these antecedents never suggested itself until the moment of starting. My good lady, moreover, who is as provident a housewife as you would wish to encounter, had determined that, as she was going to Paris, it would be absolutely necessary to take a good stock of clothes with her; and had put her wardrobe on the full war establishment, with every article in the newest London fashion, to show the Frenchmen, as she said, that we were not nobodies. Six trunks, two hat-cases, one portmanteau, together with night-bags, workboxes, necessaires, reticules, parasols, umbrellas, coats and cloaks, (besides small parcels innumerable,) are not easily stowed into a hackneycoach; without mentioning the living cargo which was also to be disposed of at five o'clock in the morning, when we were to keep our appointment with the captain of a steam-boat lying off the Tower. Yet this was only the first act of the tragedy. The abomination of too much baggage, in a private family, as in an army, comes against the commanding officer at every turn. The said six trunks, two hat-cases, one portmanteau, &c. &c. &c. were to be constantly looked after, counted, put on, and taken off; guaranteed against weather, made to ride easy, and seen nightly to the several bed-chambers, and re-collected in the morning. Hercules and Argus combined would scarcely suffice for the due execution of such a task. Not, however, to dwell too much on details, we will suppose all these things duly arrived at the water's side, and the party assembled rather more than in time for being too late. They were all still to be put, persons and things, on board the ship, by the intervention of a wherry. Those only who have been at Tower-stairs know the full extent of this travelling misery. The press of boats was considerable, and the press of pickpockets and other light-fingered children of Autolychus was not less. The clamour of the watermen and the screams of the women were strictly in proportion. Though we go to Richmond by water twice every year, my wife has never yet been broken of the habit of holding fast by the edge of the boat. "Put in your hands, ma'am, if you please," said the boatman; and so she did, but not before the collision of another boat had very nearly deprived the said hands of two nails, much contused, and a reasonable superficies of skin. I hear her shriek at this moment. Un

fortunately, we all responded somewhat too quickly: away went the wherry from under our feet, and but that there was no room to fall into the water, we should infallibly have been drowned. The vagabonds set up a horse-laugh instead of coming to our assistance; and it was not till after a general tumble, half-a-dozen contusions, and for my own share a good draught of bilge water from the bottom of the wherry, that we contrived to reach the ship.

I am not remarkably timid; but working out of the river is more than a nervous piece of business. A greater number than usual of craft, of all sorts and sizes, were in motion; some sailing up, with a light wind accompanied by occasional squalls, some coming to anchor, and others again dropping down with the tide, and exhibiting stem, stern, or broadside, as accident seemed to direct. The whole had very much the air of a naval quadrille, each vessel making its demi-queue de chat, or, in plain English, pursuing its own course in utter independence of any "rule of the road," and in defiance of all consideration of mutual safety and accommodation. By virtue of our steam, we threaded this labyrinth at a rapid pace, and with much dexterity; but whether from too great a reliance on our resources, or from some momentary carelessness, we came off Greenwich into an unexpected juxta-position with a coal brig, that threatened us all with instant submersion. Busily occupied at the time with taking an observation of a pirate's gibbet in the offing, through my spy glass, the first notice I had of this event arose from finding myself astride on the enemy's bowsprit, and suspended over the water, at some feet on the other side of our own vessel. The crash of contact was by no means assuring, but the ultimate damage was not adequate to this note of preparation. The sailors soon cleared the ships and relieved me from my perilous exaltation, with the loss only of my hat, which had "dropped down the river to the Nore," and of a new pair of unmentionables, irretrievably and provokingly torn. We had all promised ourselves a delightful sail down the Thames; and nothing surely can equal the beauty, physical and moral, of that superb and majestic river. But what are the beauties of Eden itself, when it rains and blows as it did from the moment after our accident? The cabin was crowded with passengers, and smelled as the cabin of a packet only can smell. We were comforted, indeed, with the hope of a quick passage; but unluckily we took the ground on a sand-bank opposite Sheerness, there to wait the return of the tide; by which accident we not only lost our patience (one of the most trifling losses, by the by, which most people can sustain, if indeed a nonentity can be lost at all,) but what was infinitely worse, the chance of saving our tide at Calais. One unpleasant consequence of this "untoward event" was the general reproach and recrimination it excited in our little company; every one regretting that we had not taken the land journey to Dover, and my wife (wives are always charitable in their interpretations) kindly laying the whole blame upon what she was pleased to call my stinginess. To add to our annoyance, the rain increased, and so too did the heat and stench of the cabin. An unfortunate infant made one continued cry of it from London to Calais; and the imperturbable impertinence of a disserting, contradicting, loquacious, Bloomsbury-square lady, (a smuggler, in a parenthesis,) was still more annoying. At length we were again underweigh, and were about to console ourselves with a beef-steak

pie and a bottle of London particular, when the doubling of the North Foreland substituted for a tolerably keen appetite that giant ill, the most intolerable of all sensations, sea-sickness. When Johnson defined a ship to be " a prison, with the danger of drowning," he was, as usual, incomplete and unsatisfactory. A ship is not only a prison, but an infirmary also; and the malady is so predominant a feature of the complex, that it completely overpowers and puts into abeyance all idea either of danger or confinement. We have all heard of the Scotch clergyman, who endeavoured to frighten his frozen parishioners into piety by depicting the unnameable abode of the reprobate as "a mickle cauld place." In my mind, the doctrine which would better conduce to a godly life than all others, would be that which should consign the unrepenting sinner to an eternal sickness on a portless sea. If any one could doubt that the stomach is indeed the seat of the soul, this terrible affection would suffice to convince him. Every faculty of the mind is laid prostrate before it. The ideas flow during the intervals of suffering in an uncontrollable reverie, through every modification of moral and physical annoyance; only suspended from time to time by a forcible return to the realities of a renewed paroxysm. Volition is annihilated, and with it the power of locomotion; the most violent passions are subdued; and Venus, albeit born of the sea, has no more influence in a packet-boat than an old woman of ninety. But it is not my intention to write an essay upon this subject; suffice it to say that a party of pleasure is dearly purchased at such a price. Our voyage was at once rough and tedious. There was a superabundance of wind, but that was against us; we had a short allowance of coals, and that was not in our favour. To add to our horrors, an accident happened in mid-channel to our engine; and we rolled for an hour in the trough of the sea like so many Reguluses in torture. Nothing was wanting, in short, to complete this preliminary misery of travelling but the bursting of the boiler; and that, at least, would have been a receipt in full for all future suffering. The flag, as was predicted, was down in Calais harbour on our arrival; and the passengers were landed in boats, doubly drenched to the skin with rain and with sea-spray. Under all circumstances, however, the leaving a ship is pleasant. I doubt even if Jonah did not gain by the change, when he was rowed on shore in the whale's stomach. Let the captain be as serviceable and polite as he may, he meets with nothing but ingratitude, and is left without regret; and we overlook the fidelity with which the gallant vessel carries us in safety through the perils of the deep, in the terrible sensations incidental to its motions.

Next to sea-sickness, in suffering, if not in duration, is the passing a custom-house; and the one follows close on the heels of the other. Not that I have much to complain of in the Douane of Calais. It is true, we were detained in our wet clothes for the better-that is, the worst part of an hour, and our persons were searched with a minuteness but little compatible with decency or respect.* But for these things we had to thank our Bloomsbury-square companion, who had Heaven

We are indebted, it is said, to Mr. Peel for exemption from personal search on this side the water, which for some time was illegally exacted, at the caprice of the officer. According to law, the person can only be touched by a warrant, founded on affidavit of just cause of suspicion. It is good to know this.