answered, "Mais non, madame, le souterrain est comblé." The reare some prodigiously grand masses of granite starting out from among the woods near the castle, which look almost like a continuation of its walls. Here my two companions found employment, one with his pencil, and the other with his hammer, while I placed myself in a shed, where there was a bench and a table.

By no possible chance, I think, can the beams of the sun ever find their way to that spot: tall pines, enormous rocks, and lofty towers, all throw impenetrable shade upon it.'-Trollope, vol. ii. p. 24.

We have hitherto only alluded en passant to the second book on our list. The author, Sir Arthur Brooke Faulkner, dedicates his volumes to his Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, as a return for his unvarying condescension' and an acknowledgment for the honour of those introductions to which he owed so large a share of his enjoyment on his tour;' and he hopes for his Royal Highness's patronage, in writing in opposition to the system of obscurantism by which the world has so long been kept in leading-strings.' He adds, 'What a glorious prospect it holds out, to hear princes, in these days, openly advocate opinions more liberal and enlightened than a few years back were those of the most zealous and patriotic of the people!' If the reader does not at once fully understand the royal duke's protegé from this dedication, he very frankly explains what, not who, he is, in his preface.

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It is proper my readers should know that mine are the thoughts of one who despises alike Whig, Tory, and Moderate, to whom the interests of his country are not of more value than his party... it being of my political creed to believe that, as a lobster turns red by boiling, a Whig grows Tory when long in power.' ! !—

That Sir Arthur is a paragon of impartiality cannot be doubted after this-his modesty and candour are not less remarkable-he admits that his talk about the church must be quite a bore,' and that his politics fill a very disproportioned space.' He is charitable enough to think that many of our clergy may indulge a sneer, sous cape, at my making so serious an affair of religion,' and needlessly assures us, I have no prejudices bishopwards. After a few more interesting traits, he sums up, Such are the principal details of a sustained character with which I have whiled away a few heavy hours,'-that they must have been heavy indeed his readers will soon discover.

At Darmstadt, our knight is struck with the regularity and beauty of the town, but the Grand Duke is, of course, no favourite with Sir Arthur: he says the want of finances obliges him to occupy a small palace in the vicinity of the Grand Chateau, hardly superior to a very (qu.) third-rate gentleman's mansion in England. Now if this statement were true, it might be supposed

that

that the economy of a limited sovereign would be a merit with a republican but not so with the genuine citizen. If a prince lives spendidly, a picture is drawn of the starving of his subjects through his heartless extravagance; if he economizes, he is sneered at as penurious. But the truth is, the excellent Grand Duke of Hesse and his wife continue to reside (as George IV. did at Carlton House after his accession to the throne) in the very respectable and elegant palace in which, as hereditary prince and princess, they had passed their youth. Whether this knight was admitted within its walls, we know not: if he was not, he has described, as if present, a scene which he never saw; if he was (as is probable) hospitably admitted for once, as a protégé of the Duke of Sussex, to the table and society of the Grand Duke and Duchess, our readers shall form their own judgment of the breeding, the decency, of the man who could write what follows:

'The Grand Duke and Duchess are very hospitable, according to their courtly acceptation of the term: compared with our English notions, it is a little peculiar. They give a tea and turn-outish sort of thing, called a soirée, to which the invited is expected to come with a poker in his back, for all purposes inflexible and jointless, excepting the operation of bowing, which, from perpetual habit, is performed, I have no doubt unconsciously, as by a sort of instinct. The court dine at three o'clock, which is an affair of a good deal of ceremony. The guests are expected to come in full dress, and to sit down to table without pulling off their swords.'-[Was there ever a court in Christendom where the cavaliers, before sitting down to table, huddled their swords into a corner, like officers in a mess-room?]It may quadrate somewhat strangely with an Englishman's idea of their dignity, but I have met here at dinner some of the mediatized princes of the most ancient royal families of Germany, whose income did not much exceed the pay of one of our reduced officers. I have heard it rated at somewhere about two thousand florins a year. Among our retired tailors or grocers, I have no sort of doubt, there are some of wealth sufficient to mortgage the whole aggregate heraldry of one of these mediatized counts.'-Faulkner, vol. i. pp. 280, 281.

What has become of our knight's high-souled love of philosophy and liberty, when he despises any man-even a princefor the smallness of his income? But who does not know that robbery and confiscation are the sole cause of these princes of ancient royal families being in a condition to excite his pity; and that but for the oppression of a revolution-sprung despot, effectuating by iron power the principles of destruction and disorganization so favoured by the citizen school, these respectable mediatized sovereigns would now enjoy those rights and that income which this leveller delights to see them stripped of?

• Of

Of the late sovereign, several oddish traits are related. In the sharpest weather of winter, he had every morning a cold bath, for the purpose of bracing his superannuated muscles against the encroachments of age.-[Wonderful "oddity!"]- At night, he was quite as regularly in the habit of taking a drive through the forest, in an open carriage, by torch-light: on which occasions, a hat was rejected as an encumbrance and a superfluity.'-[" Oddish," certainly, if true; but we happen to know that the opera and scientific concerts occupied the late Grand Duke's evenings in a different manner.]—He lived a great deal in the society of his opera-singers, with one of whom, in particular, he had been long on a footing of special intimacy. Yet have I heard him seriously held up by one of his subjects, a man of distinguished learning, as a prime pattern of piety and good morals: every Good Friday, it appeared, he used to shut himself up at his solitary devotions the greater part of the day, having previously taken the sacrament. His familiarity with the sex was considered, at his time of life, as innocent as that of the patriarch David.'-p. 281.

The rest of this passage we must suppress, as obscene, absurd, and profane. Of the ladies of Germany, our knight may be conceived to be a gallant and fair critic, when he admits that he went among those at Darmstadt with a preconceived and deeply-rooted idea of homeliness being the attribute of every rank and condition in father-land.'

In point of fact, the ladies of Darmstadt are all remarkably homespun in their address and appearance; one reason of which may be, that they consort only with each other; or, when they have a réunion, it is for tea'-[The ladies of Sir Arthur's acquaintance doubtless prefer Mrs. Browning's beverage.]- and stocking-knitting, on which occasions not even a son or a husband is allowed to be present. Yet was I so singularly fortunate, by a mistake of Lady Faulkner's, who was invited to an evening tea-party, and deemed it a fair unquestionable sequitur that I should be included in the invitation, as to spend a whole evening with some dozen and a half of these excellent, thrifty housewives. It is impossible that Clodius, when detected at the mysteries of the Bona Dea, could have been more stared at and "perused" than I found myself on entering the room. I instantly made a move to retire, but it was overruled. The creatures I found, as was very natural from their secluded habits, a little shy of me at first; but this soon went off, and I hardly recollect having ever spent a more agreeable evening, or enjoyed a more intelligent conversation. The majority spoke French; and some were by no means defective in my own language.'-pp. 276, 277.

Of the accuracy of our chiaro obscuro knight, we must give one or two specimens:

Baden, as a watering-place, began first to be known after the holding of the Congress of Sovereigns at Rastadt in 1799.'-vol. ii. P. 145.

Baden

Baden was well known to the Romans as the Civitas Aurelia Aquensis, as is proved by the remains of Roman baths, found in abundance there, and of which Caracalla is said to have been the chief author. It has, for centuries, been frequented by the German princes and nobles.

Of the Gardens of Schwetzingen, he says

'About three millions sterling have been expended in their completion; and it takes fifteen millions of florins annually to keep them in repair.'-p. 177.

Fifteen millions of florins (one million and a half of pounds sterling) is about four times the amount of the revenue of the Grand Duke of Baden, the owner of these and about seven other palaces and gardens! The magnificent Elector Palatine Charles Theodore, with a revenue at least treble that of the Grand Duke, and the main author of the costly beauties of Schwetzingen, used to spend 66,000 florins, about 6600l., upon them. We are quite sure the present Grand Duke does not expend one-third of that sum on a place where he never resides.

There are but few objects in Cassel much worth specification: it is a gilded bauble.'—vol. i. p. 57.

From the days of Reisbeck and Doctor Moore, down to those of Russell and Mrs. Trollope, every traveller has ranked Cassel, for situation and plan, ornament and general effect, as one of the most beautiful cities of Europe. Undoubtedly, Napoleon and King Jerome so esteemed it.

Of the present Grand Duchess of Baden, the daughter of Gustavus, the unfortunate dethroned King of Sweden, he speaks thus accurately, decently, and politely:

The royal family' (the grand ducal family) are very general favourites. The reigning Grand Duchess is an amiable personage, and of no very moderate pretensions to personal attractions. Her only fault is, that she is rather niggardly of bestowing the light of her countenance on her loving subjects, whom she treats like Turks, that is, with all the hauteur of a sultana. There is an anecdote of her, which has too general a currency to be altogether a fiction: that, on some late occasion of her holding a drawing-room or levée, this great lady had the cartel so arranged as to have her nobility placed rank and file on one side, and those not of their order on the other. After the customary affability of making glad the heart of the noble portion of her company was over, her derrière all the while to the goats on the other, she turned short, as the narrative recites, upon her august heel, and made her retreat without so much as deigning them one look or smile of favour, to sweeten existence or smooth their despair. Poor devils! whom, no doubt, she had invited from the most laudable of motives-that of teaching them to know their place in society, by seeing how she treated their superiors.'—pp. 160, 161.

A more

: A more coarse and vulgar libel was never penned. It is the perpetual error and absurdity of writers of this school, coarsely to abuse individual princes and princesses for those marked distinctions as to rank amidst which they are born, and which, instead of being aggravated, are undoubtedly, in Germany (as in England) much softened by the kind-hearted and frank demeanour of the individuals, and of none more so than the amiable and cultivated woman whom Sir Arthur attacks. That some such anecdote as the above (if it be not a mere blundering exaggeration of the tourist) may have found currency among the sort of people to whom Sir Arthur had introduction, is just possible; but that this unpretending wife of one of the most popular of German sovereigns-herself a very general favourite,' according to Sir Arthur's admission-should treat, on any social occasion, the non-noble portion of the company (whether separated by custom from the nobles or not) with any intentional discourtesy, we should by no means believe on much higher authority than that of Sir Arthur Faulkner.

Sir Arthur, of course, bedaubs the German universities with his panegyric. Not possessing German enough to understand a lecture,' and of course not enough for the purposes of conversation, he ventures the most extravagant eulogies not only on the undoubted learning of the professors, but the very orderly' demeanour of the students; contrasting both, in a spirit of bitter prejudice and a style of blundering verbosity, with Oxford and Cambridge, of which it is evident he knows exactly nothing.

How can Sir Anybody write such unhappy trash as this?

In our universities, when this active principle (emulation) is roused at all, it is usually limited to the paltry prize of class honours, which when won, the ambition of the aspirant subsides, perhaps 'ceases altogether. The walls of the university bound the whole horizon of his aspirations. But if the German student has, comparatively, few of these prizes, he has one worth them all, though more distant to his view-he is taught to look to his education as the means of procuring fame and distinction, not in the university alone but in the world.'-vol. i. p. 174.

6

Can this Irish knight have mixed with educated persons either here or in Ireland, and yet suppose that English university men are content with the paltry prize of class honours,' and do not look to education as the means of distinction in the world? Is he ignorant, that ten of the fifteen judges now on the bench in Westminster Hall are high wranglers and prizemen from our two universities?-that nearly one-half of our most eminent practising lawyers gave a similar promise of their fame? Does he know that the primate of all England, and the four first in consequence of our Bishops, all obtained high academical reputation ?—that

the