French vivacity. But even were a foreigner to succeed in the attempt, it would probably be at the expense of more valuable qualities; it were like selling his birth-right for a mess of pottage,

Speaking of travellers, however, the English are all and every thing. England is a land of wonders, and its travellers are not the least of its wonders. No nation in Europe,-no party or sect, can make out the English. The Bonapartist, the Ultra, the Liberal, all stare in amazement at them; the English are a complete riddle to the rest of the Continent. The fact is, that Continental people look to a unity of character and opinions, which the English will never submit to. Yet among the myriads of English travellers, it is easy to find men suited to every one's taste. You meet among them with philosophers, philanthropists, literati, virtuosi, men of the world, men of pleasure, scholars, politicians, men of science, and men of speculation. An Italian lady used to say, that if the English were to take half the pains to please in foreign company that the Frenchmen do, they would certainly be preferred.

There is your grave Spaniard, most decidedly and most unpleasantly national; few of that nation, however, are to be met on the high roads; there is your Swiss, half sentimental, half blunt, aiming at wit; your Italian, apparently solid, yet internally as quick as mercury; your Dane, Swede, Norwegian; but it would be too long to enumerate all the tribes; de minimis non

curat.

Oh! that most indescribable vehicle, a French diligence! There you have the best chance of meeting with specimens of all these different characters. The captives in the inside being cased up, and the door closed upon them, their tongues, ears, and eyes are the only parts of their bodies having full play, while the ponderous machine rolls slowly on at the rate of four knots an hour. The live luggage in it is completely separated from all the rest of the world, much more so than in an English coach; for in France you travel mostly through a solitude, having only a distant caravansera to look to, and the conducteur, an amphibious being who partakes of the policeman, soldier and guard, tells you before hand that you must not expect more than one meal a day. In this moving bastile, the unfortunate, inquisitive, splenetie, and simple travellers are all brought into close contact with each other; acquaintances are made, stories told, confessions brought out, intrigues carried on,--all precious materials for novelists. Then sometimes a mixture of strange tongues and outlandish oaths forms a most delectable discord. There you see a man throughout all his phases,-in his night cap and morning deshabille, before his breakfast and ablutions, peevish before dinner, and flushed after

it, prosy and sleepy in the evening, and snoring and stretching during the night. Oh what a place for study a diligence is? I don't think there were any diligences in Sterne's time; no, it must be a revolutionary invention introduced by those amiable patriots, the terrorists, to find out the real character of their countrymen, and deal with them accordingly. However, vive la diligence !

There is in our days a particular class of travellers, who, instead of writing an account of the nations they have visited, actually bring home with them the very form and spirit of those nations, and dramatize them. They are with regard to the moral features of a country, what the panoramas, dioramas, and all the rest of the ramas are to the material appearance of it. First, in this class stands the inimitable Mathews. He is a real dramatic traveller; he personifies a whole nation, whether Irish, French, or German, with the most striking correctness. Of his American characters, I cannot well judge; yet there are many touches in them which have appeared to me as wearing the stamp of likeness. He has carried his delicacy to an amiable excess, in avoiding every thing that might give offence to those transatlantic republicans; and in this he seems to have followed strictly the exhortations of his own Mr. Pennington, whom I sincerely esteem, but with whom I beg leave to differ. Two such nations as England and America sprung out of the same source, and afterwards rent asunder by a violent shock; pursuing now the same career of industry and commerce; both aiming at maritime supremacy,two such nations may esteem one another, but as to affection, nationally speaking, it must be out of the question. The efforts of philanthropists ought therefore to be directed to redress misrepresentations and expose slander. Let the English and the Americans know each other thoroughly, such as they are, and they will respect each other, and avoid, as much as the complicated machinery of national interests will allow, that their respective views should clash.

Other travellers, such as the lamented Belzoni, Mr. Bullock, and several more, come nearer to the description of artists. They import the relics of distant countries; they arrange them for your examination, and leave you the agreeable task of supplying the links which are found wanting between those mysterious memorials, and nations and empires, long since sunk into oblivion.

There are also poetical travellers, such as De Staël, Byron, Chateaubriand, Nodier, and others, who embody the whole mind of a nation and mix it with their own; you recognise in their descriptions some general characteristics, although you seldom can trace out individual ones. When Byron paints individuals, his colours are beautiful; the traits separately taken are all in nature;

but the aggregate figure is ideal, the offspring of his fancy. Where is a Conrad, a Gulnare, or a Giaour to be found? They are of the same race as the Malek Adhels, the Atalas, and the Corinnas. Yet, when Byron, assuming the pencil of Guido, sketches out tamer and milder characters, such as a Zuleika, a Medora, or a Julia, then he paints true nature,-the nature of the countries he has visited, and where the originals of his pictures are daily to be met with.

I shall say little of the writers of prose travels and journals. They are divided in many classes; there are still to be met in our days, as in those of Sterne, the Smelfunguses and the Mundunguses, the sentimental and the dogmatical, the grave and the satirical travellers. This branch of literature has considerably advanced within a few years, but is yet susceptible of much greater improvement.

The antiquarian, the amateur, the naturalist, the bibliomaniac, all these are useful travellers,-useful not so much to the countries they visit, but to those they belong to. The collectors of paintings, statues, and manuscripts, I look upon as a sort of lawful invaders; yet, when they come and strip the Italian palaces of their most valuable treasures in exchange for their gold fumber, I am not surprised if the natives feel an instinctive jealousy against them. But so fate has decreed! And if the proprietors of those master-pieces of the arts stand in need of gold to prop up their falling fortunes, it is better for them to part upon fair terms with the ornaments of their galleries, than to be plundered of them by the next conqueror who may cross the Alps, or land upon the Ausonian shores, whether in the name of social order or liberty, of religion or philosophy, but with the invariable object of making his assistance dearly purchased by his protegés.

There is a class of itinerant writers of memoranda, whom one is almost afraid of falling in with for fear they should intrude upon one's privacy, and put one's name in print with a biographical account of one's birth, adventures, and political and religious sentiments; to the no small annoyance, inconvenience, and even danger of the party principally concerned. These people have

become a real nuisance in our times.

The above are some of the principal classes of travellers; but I am far from having exhausted the subject, for who can count the leaves of the forest? I shall leave to the judgment of my readers to choose amongst the various characters. I have hastily sketched those whom they will resemble in their travels.

The advantages which are to be derived from travelling in our days are of a superior nature. Men of distant countries, and of all classes of society, see each other, know each other, and acknowledge readily one common nature, and common feelings,

and sympathies. Formerly, most travellers examined, chiefly, paintings, monuments, inanimate things; now, they study man, the noblest work in the creation. We can trace, in almost every country of Europe, a gradual development of the mental qualities, which is in the end favoured even by those momentary obstacles, which short-sighted people look upon as irremediably fatal to the progress of the mind; those obstacles often serve to correct the aberrations of genius, and to chasten the works of fancy. Meantime, individuals are enabled to range through the regions of research; sciences, arts, and letters are mutually assisting each other; many illusions and prejudices are falling to the ground in every direction; and, even in those countries we are apt to consider as most unenlightened, the condition of society is much improved within the last twenty years.

Impressed with this persuasion, the traveller will find himself well qualified to visit new countries in such a manner as to gain the good graces of the natives, and preserve at the same time the esteem of his countrymen. Let him set out with the conviction that man is by nature every where in a state of progressive improvement, that every one of us can assist in this progress, though we cannot always expect to direct it. Then it is of little consequence to which part of the compass he turns his steps, for the world lies before him like an immense garden, in every partition of which he will find many plants to be admired, others to be used, and some to be avoided. "I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry it is all barren."

ITALY AND THE ITALIANS *.

THERE is perhaps no country upon which more has been written, and of which less has been understood, than Italy. Her magnificent scenery, her glorious works of art, are familiar to all of us. Our earliest associations of beauty lead us to the land of classical recollections; and whether, with the records of her military, or the proofs of her intellectual, greatness, we trace her through her phases of youthfulness, maturity, and decay, or go onwards to her sacred triumphs of Art and Letters, after her long sleep of barbarism, she is still the land of proud and heroic remembrances-the land in which genius and enthusiasm still delight to find a resting-place. But her people have been neglected

*Italy and the Italians in the Nineteenth Century; a view of the civil, political, and moral state of that country, &c., by A. VIEUSSEUX, 2 vols, C. Knight,

in this love for her monuments; the past has thrown its gigantic shadows over the present; and the vast and the obscure have turned away our thoughts from the tangible and the familiar. Travellers have gone to Italy, not to estimate the character of her inhabitants to examine her forms of government-or to learn the influence of her climate, her history, and her literature, upon the popular mind-but to describe the remains of her ancient splendour, and the less perishable trophies of her modern taste. It is delightful, with Eustace, to wander over the magic scenes which Virgil and Horace have described; or, with Forsyth, to understand all the proportions and details of those master-pieces of architectural grandeur, which the Rome of Augustus and the Rome of Leo have equally presented to an admiring world. But there was still wanting a traveller who would lead us through Italy, with a view, not indeed of passing by her monuments with indifference, but of making them subordinate to a faithful description of the people who still dwell in this region of beauty. The want of such a description has rendered Italy the subject of ceaseless errors and exaggerations ;-and her natives have constantly been the objects of inflated hopes and extravagant censure. They have at one and the same moment been called upon to snap the yoke of their complicated despotisms, and execrated as a servile and enervate race, incapable of freedom; they have been conjured to remember the inheritance of their ancient glory, and pronounced incapable of any lofty and ennobling principles of action. The political condition of Italy has thus, in this country, been too generally misunderstood; and the very charm of that common name which the inhabitants of her states bear, has blinded us to the difficulties and absurdities of expecting a consistent identification of interests, which a thousand prejudices and habits and accidents have tended to disunite.

The author before us is an Italian-we believe a Florentine; and he is thus better prepared to speak of the internal condition of his country, than those who have travelled through Italy for the gratification of particular pursuits of taste and learning, or for the establishment of particular prejudices in politics and religion. He has thus been enabled to observe and describe the peculiarities

of the Italian character, with more accuracy than of his pre

any

decessors. His book is neither a hastily and prettily-got-up volume of travels-nor is it a formal treatise upon the civil institutions and the popular temper of the Italian states. It is a very happy union of the description of particular scenes, and of general reflections growing out of those scenes-reflections which have evidently their origin in a mild and tolerant, but yet an acute and discriminating, mind. One of the most remarkable features of the book is, that being the composition of an Italian evidently writing