the veil which kept him from discovery of himself removed;" the fire of his nostrils is extinguished, and the glory of his course ended. What signify to him the pomp and glory of a ceremonious funeral, or the lamenting elegies of the poet, or the annual celebration of his birth-day? Posthumous fame, after all the fine sentences that have been lavished upon it, is the emptiest bubble that dances on the surface of existence-the most unsubstantial pageant emblazoned on the tomb of the departed. The blast which issues from the trumpet of fame, and which the hills echo to the valleys, and they again re-bound to the next hills, reaches not the ears of the dead, and is as little regarded as the silver cherubims and bugles which glitter on their coffins.-Yet even the tree planted by the visionary enthusiast may, in time, produce fruits for the benefit of the species, if not of the individual-and this longing after nominal immortality—this "last infirmity of noble minds," may, like the sharp excrescence under the pinion of the ostrich, stimulate man in his flight from present danger to future security, from indolent quiescence to glorious freedom of mind and person.

66

We were pondering on the learned labours and unquiet life of Dr. Heylin, when this train of reflection presented itself.Ensuing times" have not had the curiosity to inquire how this geographer, divine, poet, and historian, employed his hours. With which of his thirty-seven publications is the world acquainted? The book-worm alone travels over, and is skilled in his elaborate pages, from his Cosmography to the History of St. George, from his Sermons to his Polemical Pamphlets. The fine-spun threads of his wit are entangled in the subtle web of the spider. The student no longer

"From breakfast reads, till twelve o'clock,

Burnet and Heylin, Hobbes and Locke."

His Cosmography, although a book of great industry and research, may now be bought by the weight or for the worth of the paper to the cheesemonger. The housekeeper may purchase food for the body, and have food for the mind into the bargain he may chance to get the Kingdom of Italy with a piece of Parmasanne, or one of the Seven Provinces with a pound of butter. He may, without any miraculous luck, buy the best Rochelle wrapped up in the attic salt of the doctor, a strange and heterogeneous combination!

Dr. Heylin was born in 1599, and is represented as having exhibited an extraordinary precocity of intellect. At the age of seventeen he wrote an English tragedy, called Spurius-at nineteen he read his Cosmographical Lectures at Oxford, where he drew the whole society into a profound admiration of his

learning and abilities-in the same year, he produced a Latin comedy, called Theomachia, which he composed in a fortnight -at twenty-one he proceeded Master of Arts, and in the following year published his geography, which was afterwards enlarged, and re-published under the title of "Cosmography," and has gone through seven editions. We do not mention this as any proof of its value-Chamberlaine's State of Great Britain has passed through between thirty and forty!

Our author afterwards took orders and was made chaplain to Charles the First, and, on the restoration, to Charles the Second. Being a zealous churchman and royalist, he became obnoxious to the presbyterians, who deprived him of his little all, not even excepting his library.

It was Dr. Heylin to whom the king committed the Histriomastix of Prynne, to select such passages as were scandalous or dangerous to the monarch or the state, a task which he performed with great expedition, and delivered them, together with his inferences, to the attorney-general. Prynne, on his release from prison, attempted to revenge himself, by bringing the doctor before the committee for the courts of justice, on a charge which did not succeed.

The book, which it is our more immediate object to notice, was the offspring of a flying tour of six weeks, in the year 1625; a brief visitation, to be sure, to write a book upon, and yet modern authors have thought proper to adopt the same plan.-This volume, however, we assure our readers, is of a most amusing description, and indicative of great reading and acquirements, for the age at which it was written.-It is full of the effervescence of young life and animal spirits.-The air of France. seems to have actually converted the author into a Frenchman, whose vivacity, point, and badinage, he seems to have imbibed. -The very moment he touched the Gallic soil he cast away his canonicals, and became the most facetious and joyous of good fellows, the most lively of tourists. He joked with the courtezans, and drank his bumper with the jolly friars.

"As I travelled to Orleans," says he, "we had in the coach with us three of these mortified sinners; two of the order of St. Austin, and one Franciscan, the merriest crickets that ever chirped. Nothing in them but mad tricks and complements, and for musick they would sing like hawks; when we came to a vein of good wine, they would chear up themselves and their neighbour with this comfortable doctrine, Vivamus ut bibamus, et bibamus ut vivamus: and for courtship, and toying with the wenches, you would easily beleeve it had been a trade, with which they had not a little been acquainted. Of all men when I am married, God keep my wife from them, and till then my neighbour's.".

Nay, he seems to have forgotten, in his relation of his travels, the strict decorum of his cloth, and to make use of expressions which we at least cannot transcribe into our Review.

As visits to France have recently become more common than a tour to the Lakes or to the Welch mountains, we have thought that our readers will be amused with some of the worthy doctor's descriptions, from which they will find that the French are much the same people now as they were two centuries ago.

We will, in the first place, extract the author's account of the French men and women, which has a good deal of the point and felicity of the "Characters" which were then in great vogue.

"The present French, then, is nothing but an old Gaule, moulded into a new name: as rash he is, as head-strong, and as hair-brained. A nation whom you shall winne with a feather and loose with a straw; upon the first sight of him, you shall have him as familiar as your sleep, or the necessity of breathing: in one hour's conference you may endear him to you, in the second unbutton him, the third pumps him dry of all his secrets, and he gives them you as faithfully as you were his ghostly father, and bound to conceale them sub sigillo confessionis; when you have learned this you may lay him aside, for he is no longer serviceable. If you have any humour in holding him in a further acquaintance (a favour which he confesseth, and I beleeve him, he is unworthy of,) himself will make the first separation: he hath said over his lesson now unto you, and now must find out somebody else to whom to repeate it. Fare him well; he is a garment whom I would be loath to wear above two dayes together, for in that time he will be thred bare. Familiare est hominis omnia sibi remittere, saith Velleius of all; it holdeth most properly in this people. He is very kind hearted to himself, and thinketh himself as free from wants as he is full so much he hath in him the nature of a Chynois, that he thinketh all men blind but himself. In this private self-conceitedness he hateth the Spaniard, loveth not the English, and contemneth the German himself is the onely courtier and compleat gentleman; but it is his own glass which he seeth in. Out of this conceit of his own excellencie, and partly out of a shallowness of brain, he is very lyable to exceptions; the least distaste that can be draweth his sword, and a minute's pause sheatheth it to your hand: afterwards, if you beat him into better manners, he shall take it kindly, and cry Serviteur. In this one thing they are wonderfully like the devil; meekness or submission makes them insolent, a little resistance putteth them to their heeles or makes them your spaniels. In a word (for I have held him too long) he is a walking vanitie in a new fashion.

"I will give you now a taste of his table, which you shall find in a measure furnished, (I speak not of the paisant) but not with so full a manner as with us. Their beef they cut out into such chops, that that which goeth there for a laudable dish, would be thought here a university commons, new served from the hatch. A loyne of mutton serves

amongst them for three rostings, besides the hazard of making pottage with the rump. Fowl, also, they have in good plenty; especially such as the king found in Scotland: to say truth, that which they have is sufficient for nature and a friend, were it not for the mistress or the kitchen wench. I have heard much fame of the French cookes, but their skill lyeth not in the neat handling of beef and mutton. They have (as generally have all this nation) good fancies, and are speciall fellowes for the making of puff pastes and the ordering of banquets. Their trade is not to feed the belly but the pallat. It is now time you were set down, where the first thing you must do is to say your grace; private graces are as ordinary there as private masses, and from thence I think they learned them. That done, fall to where you like best; they observe no method in their eating, and if you look for a carver you may rise fasting. When you are risen, if you can digest the sluttishness of the cookery, (which is most abominable at first sight) I dare trust you in a garrison. Follow him to church, and there he will shew himself most irreligious and irreverent: I speak not of all, but the general. At a masse, in Cordeliers' church in Paris, I saw two French papists, even when the most sacred mistery of their faith was celebrating, break out into such a blasphemous and atheistical laughter, that even an Ethnick would have hated it: it was well they were catholiques, otherwise some French hot head or other would have sent them laughing to Pluto.

"The French language is, indeed, very sweet and delectable: it is cleared of all harshness, by the cutting and leaving out the consonants, which maketh it fall off the tongue very volubly; yet, in mine opinion, it is rather elegant than copious; and, therefore, is much troubled for want of words to find out periphrases. It expresseth very much of itself in the action: the head, body, and shoulders, concurre all in the pronouncing of it; and he that hopeth to speak it with a good grace, must have something in him of the mimick. It is enriched with a full number of significant proverbs, which is a great help to the French humour in scoffing, and very full of courtship, which maketh all the people complemental; the poorest cobler in the village hath his court cringes, and his eau benite de Cour, his court holy water as perfectly as the Prince of Condé.

"In the passadoes of their courtship, they expresse themselves with much variety of gesture, and, indeed, it doth not inisbecome them: were it as gracious in the gentlemen of other nations as in them, it were worth your patience; but the affectation of it is scurvy and ridiculous. Quocunque salutationis artificio corpus inflectant, putes nihil istà institutione magis convenire. Vicina autem gentes ridiculo errore deceptæ, ejusdem venustatis imitationem ludicram faciunt et ingrutam: as one happily observed at his being amongst them. I have heard of a young gallant, sonne to a great lord of the three Brittish kingdomes, that spent some years in France to learn fashions; at his return he desired to see the king, and his father procured him an interviewe: when he came within the presence chamber, he began to compose his head, and carryed it as though he had been ridden with a martingale; next he fell to draw back his leggs and thrust out his shoulders, and that with

such a graceless apishness, that the king asked him if he meant to shoulder him out of his chair, and so left him to act out his complement to the hangings. In their courtship they bestow even the highest titles upon those of the lowest condition. This is the vice, also, of their common talk, the beggar begetteth monsieurs and madames to his sonnes and daughters as familiarly as the king: were there no other reason to perswade me that the Welch or Brittaynes were the descendants of the Gaules, this onely were sufficient that they would all be gentlemen.

"His discourse runneth commonly on two wheeles, treason and ribaldry; I never heard people talk less reverently of their prince, nor more sawcily of his actions; scarce a day passeth away without some seditious pamphlet printed and published in the disgrace of the king, or of some of his courtiers. These are every man's money, and he that buyeth them is not coye of the contents, be they never so scandalous of all humours the most harsh and odious. Take him from this (which you can hardly do till he hath told all) and then he falleth upon his ribaldry; without these crutches his discourse would never be able to keep pace with his company. Thus shall you have them relate the stories of their own uncleanness with a face as confident, as if they had no accident to please their hearers more commendible."

Heylin had a particular inducement to shew the little respect in which he held the French character, and this will account for the unfavourable colours in which he has delineated it. James the First, to whom his Geography had been presented, having, in an unpropitious moment, stumbled upon a passage in which the author stated, that when Edward the Third quartered the arms of France "he gave precedency to the French, because France is the greater and more famous kingdom;" the king was so much offended, that he ordered the lord-keeper to call in the book. And although the doctor found means to reconcile himself to the monarch, by showing that the word is was a typographical mistake for was, yet it is probable he thought it expedient still farther to manifest his opinions in favour of his own nation.

Our author is much more severe on the French women.

"I am now come to the French women; and it were great pitty they should not immediately follow the discourse of the men: so like they are one to the other, that one would think them to be the same, and that all the difference lay in the apparel: for person they are generally of an indifferent stature, their bodies straight, and their wastes commonly small; but whether it be so by nature or by restraining of those parts, I cannot say. It is said, that an absolute woman should have (amongst other qualities requisite) the parts of a French woman, from the neck to the girdle; but I beleeve it holdeth not good; their shoulders and backs being so broad, that they hold no proportion with their middles: yet this may be the vice of their apparrel. Their