GERMANIA.

CHAPTER I.

THE SNOW.

"TRAVELLING is so easy now-a-days!" that is the phrase one hears on all hands. "Since the establishment of railroads, there are no distances." Granted. It is easy to go to Egypt, and the journey up the Nile is a mere nothing. Shooting parties may be accepted on the borders of the Mississippi, and from the Havannah to Liverpool you may cross in a fortnight. I met a gentleman last winter who told me of the great railroad by means of which we shall go to Calcutta in eleven days, passing through Persia and Asia Minor, (fancy the "Babylon Station !") and as to the Holy Land, why it will soon be our next

VOL. II.

B

door neighbour: all this I do not dispute, and it may, for aught I know, be very easy to take one's

tea

And toast upon the wall of China,"

but it is not easy to go from Munich to Vienna.

The cold came on suddenly; on the 19th of November, the warmth was so great, that the only explanation of it was, that "the sweet South," in its passage from Italy, had not had time to cool itself by the contact with the Alps; on the 20th, early dawn saw Munich swathed in snow!

And now, get away as you can. No railroad connects Bavaria and Austria; the Danube is frozen over-what is to be done? It is provoking to be obliged, in the nineteenth, to do as people did in the seventeenth century, and travel à petites journées, neither more nor less than Madame la Marquise de Sévigné used to do when she went from Paris into Brittany, in the year 1670. I would almost as soon contemplate a voyage en litière, which she declares no two persons, however friendly, can accomplish without hating each other at the end. "You had better stay here," said our kind Munich friend.

"I must be in Vienna for Christmas."

"They are going to give Lachner's opera of Catarina Cornaro' on Wednesday, mit festlich

beleuchtetem Hause,"* objected the pretty Madame

de. WW.

"There is to be a concert at the Odéon, for the benefit of the soldiers wounded in the SchleswigHolstein campaign, and the whole Court will be there," added the Countess M

"But we must go to-morrow." "You will be snowed up."

"The carriage must be put upon a sledge.” "You will be blown over a precipice."

"The wind may change."

'You will be overturned in a ditch."

"Ditches are dry."

"You had better go home through Italy," advised a worthy countryman of mine, who thought "comfort" the first consideration in life, and who was, besides that, a little "hard of hearing." "I am dying to see Radetzky."

"You could go by Roveredo and Milan . . . ." "But I want to make acquaintance with Jellacic." "Or by Venice and Bologna, and then, from Leghorn by sea, to Marseilles....

"But we have letters to Schlik."

"The land-road is the most interesting; but the steamers from Leghorn are so comfortable that they compensate for . . . ."

* What the Italians style an illumination a giorno.

"The Ban!" cried I, in my obstinate friend's ear, they won't compensate for not seeing him-demandez à ces dames." He was, as I found out afterwards, of north country origin, and might have gone maundering on till now if I had not stopped him. As it was, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled down his wristbands, settled his ruffled feathers, and decidedly "giving me up" as incorrigible, walked to the tea-table, remarking, in the sort of tone one would adopt to warn a man from "wicked courses:" "You may depend upon it, it is impracticable; you don't know what the inns are."

Bless Eothen! how his eternal "Oui! je sais," recurred to me.

I never met this excellent "borderer" before, and probably never shall meet him again; but he was not altogether wrong in representing the hostelries of the Austro-Bavarian frontier as places not to be imagined in this our civilized age.

Nevertheless, all things must have an end, and so it was with our pleasant stay in Munich. Our last day was employed in admiring the rare collection of drawings, medals, engravings, books and paintings, belonging to the Baron de Lotzbeck ;* and when, in

* M. de Lotzbeck is a Peer of Bavaria, and possesses one of the most valuable collections of the works of modern artists