off his work and stood stupidly gazing upon them in a manner calculated to excite their suspicion. "Through! Through!" shouted Sir Gilbert, from the bottom, in an agony of terror and vexation. The man mechanically obeyed, down went the saw through the plank it was operating upon; and the officers, nothing to detain them, galloped off on a vain quest of the fugitive.

Our readers, we fear, by this time will begin to enquire, a little impatiently, what this string of derivative curiosities can possibly have to do with the respectable nobleman whose name we have taken the freedom to prefix to this paper. We are, it must be admitted, as unconscionably long a time in approaching our subject as King Charles the Second, with his wonted courtesy, confessed himself to be dying. Nor will it probably be thought to be any extenuation of our offence, when we say that it is one which we habitually and irresistibly commit the moment we take a pen in hand. Yet something may, surely, be urged in defence of digressions. "If men," says Doctor Swift, "were put upon making books with the fatal confinement of delivering nothing but what was actually necessary, and to the point, the Honourable Society of Authors would be reduced to a very inconsiderable number." We would not quarrel with an epic poem though it were as full of episodes as "The Anatomy of Melancholy" is of quotations, or Prynne and Pineda of the names of authors, and these should consist but of any remaining adventures in the writer's collections, having nothing in the world to do with his hero, yet too good to be thrown away; for episodes, it cannot be denied, are oftentimes far pleasanter reading than the story from which they jut out. The citizen's pudding, in the Spectator, had not suet enough to make it cohere; but they that partook of it would have less difficulty, for that very reason -like so many Jack Horners-in picking out the plums, and might very probably, as we do ourselves, prefer them to the coarse material. If the stars, in Cowley's fine illustration, stood so thick in the sky that men questioned if those were really stars which painted the Galaxy, they made the night brilliant by their shining. Doubtless, the city of Ecbatana, which was surrounded by seven walls, gradually diminishing in circumference, amply repaid (being arrived at) the trouble which it gave a man to get there. And though in that common child's toy, a nest of wooden pears, the innermost one is a very small and utterly worthless commodity, the happy proprietor of the article finds a great deal of amusement and curiosity in opening the successive boxes, and wondering what the deuce they contain. We should be exceedingly well contented ourselves, to be as rambling and inconsequential a writer as old Montaigne, or fierce Bishop Warburton, if we could only, like those great men, lead our readers so pleasantly astray from the straight path of a subject, that, like a merry

party out for a walk, so they did but light upon an agreeable one, they would care very little whither it led them.

It occurred to us, a year or two ago, to be laid up by a sharp fit of illness, in the charming little Swiss town of Lucerne. Our malady was the gout: a malady which, we are perfectly certain, was never experienced by those learned Frenchmen* that absolutely writ in praise of it "De laudibus Podagra;" thereby infinitely transcending, not only that opinion of the Stoics, who simply denied the ill of illness, but Baxter, who Christianly made the best of it, thanked God, when he had the gout, that it was not the stone, and when he had that other and worse affliction, that he was not visited by both of them at once. Our sufferings were very severe" membrifagi cruciatus," as they are very aptly called by the translator of Lucian's tragedy-and such as would not, we are confident, have yielded to all the remedies, even that last and filthy one, of Georgius Valla. But we are optimists, in a reasonable and religious way-after Chillingworth's fashion, not Pope's-and endeavoured, earnestly, to draw some good from the pains which we underwent. One while, we flatter ourselves, it was of a higher and graver character-in impressing upon our minds the necessity of patience and an uncomplaining acquiescence in the Divine will, “Thy pleasure, O Lord, be done, even though it be to my undoing;" at another time, mundane and literary. Many a man, indeed, to speak of the latter consideration only-for the former suits not these light pages has both read and composed a great deal more during the wagon progress of a long convalescence than he would ever have found time to do amidst the thousand pleasures of health, and the eternal hunt after money-that game which all the world seems to think to be never out of season. Many another book than that of Congreve's-his play of the "Old Bachelor". '—or Miss Mitford's "Atherton," we have better grounds than prefaces for knowing, has been written in bed, to beguile the tortures or the tediousness of illness. And of which there merits not, we hope, to be said what carping Collier said of that one, "that the disorder must be bad indeed which could be worse than such a remedy.”

For our own illness, we are obliged to confess, that we brought it entirely on ourselves, by an unwillingness to be convinced that we were twenty years older than when we last visited Switzerland; and by taking as much, and as violent, exercise as we were able to take upon that occasion, not only with impunity but advantage. It clung to us long and lovingly; wanting, in truth, but the slightest invitation, in the

* Christopher Balista, of Paris, and Bilibald Birchmeyer, of Strasbourg: joint authors of one of those many mock Panegyrics, which we have, sometimes, thought of collecting, by way of a supplement to Dornavius.

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shape of a piece of additional imprudence upon our part, to remain our body's guest, and the jailer of our freedom, for some indefinitely long period of time but being upon our guard, we were rewarded, at the end of five weeks, by feeling ourselves sufficiently recovered to emerge from our chamber.

A happy day, indeed, was that as we scated ourselves, once more, on a sunny bench, upon the pleasant terrace, in front of our good and kind host's, the proprietor of the Schweizerhof; gazing, absorpedly, on the glorious lake and its amphitheatre of mountains. The sky was covered with innumerable clouds, each of the whiteness and, apparent, bigness of a sheep's fleece, through which the powerful sun ploughed his way like a ship among the icebergs. The air was so soft and warm, yet, at the same time, so fresh and pure, that we could have fancied, as we basked delightedly in it, we were enjoying the Roman luxury of a bath of milk.

"Continuo sensus pertentat Frigoris aura

Vivida; et insinuans mulcet amænus odor."

We know not that we ever, so thoroughly, tasted the beauty of those exquisite Latin lines,* worthy to have flown from the pen of Propertius. So wrapped up were we, at once, in the scene and the hour and our own enjoyment of them, that we should, we sadly fear, had anyone interrupted us by a question or remark, in that delicious doze of waking faculties and contemplation, which was not thought, have answered him snappishly-or at random-or, perhaps, not at all.

On our right hand frowned Pilate, with sullen sides and many pointed heads the Hydra of mountains. Far behind it, visible only at its eastern extremity, rose the white peak of the great Finster-Aahorn, seen like a snowy tent close at hand. A little to the left, nearer to us, peering over the long chine of the Stanzerhorn, was the round and blunt head of the Titlis. Wallenstock was in front of us, and the lower ridge of Hammerswand jutting over the lake; and bounding the horizon, in that direction, the great chain over which is carried the Pass of Saint Gothard. Dodi Glariden and savage Glarnisch, in the bend of the horse-shoe, followed in succession. Close at hand, on our left, its white buildings glittering in the sun, rested the green mass of Righi, the least picturesque

* Preserved in Dr. Joseph Warton's most charming "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope:" one passage of which, however, not all the gratitude which we bear to the author can prevent us from smiling at. "It is a true observation," says he, very gravely, “that a poet, to write happily and well, must have seen, and felt, what he describes ;" and he proceeds to illustrate his notion of excellence, in this way, by the poem of "Fracastorius de morbo Gallico." Heaven forbid our being a poet at such a price!

of mountains in itself, the most beautiful of all mountains for the view which it commands. The lake lay beneath our feet, its blue waters flashing and broken with the oars of the returning market-boats. The body and end of the slanting Cross, to which, for its shape, it has frequently been compared, were hidden in the distance; but its bright arms stretched out before us, the right one pointing to Alpnach, the left one towards Kussnacht. Seebourg-once an Austrian fortress, in the days of Swiss subjection, but now a pleasant pension-house-with Stotz, and many another fair building, lined its margin or smiled upon its slopes.

When we hear people say, of a scene like this—a great sublime expanse of nature-that it crowds their bosoms with various emotions, we have no sympathy with them. With us it has a precisely opposite effect. It crushes all thought and feeling, in an overpowering and benumbing consciousness of its presence. It is to our minds what one of those little water-glasses, which we make use of to extract a fly or other small object, It fills the whole frame and socket of it; leaving room there for the sense of nothing but itself.

is to the eye.

in our

But we are not writing a guide-book: yet that out of no respect for Mr. Murray, whom we look upon as a jealous publisher, loving not the name of Bɔgue, or the name of Tauchnitz-though the latter gentleman, opinion, is one of the greatest benefactors, of the age he lives in, to every Englishman that travels abroad; and we fully design, one day or other, to erect a monument to him, in these pages, of our own and our countrymen's gratitude. We will linger but a few minutes more before proceeding to what we have got to say, just to mention one or two matters, special we think, in their combination, to the town and canton of Lucerne, and for the truth of which we pledge our word. In the first place the wind never, or but most rarely, blows there; so that the mercury may descend as low as it likes, within any reasonable west-ofEurope limitation, and you shall not, in that perfect stillness, suffer any serious inconvenience from cold. We have been warmer there, out of doors, upon a day when it was twenty degrees below the freezing point than we have been in our own country when it was ten degrees above it. For our experience of that part of Switzerland is not limited, we desire say, to the enforced and summer sojourn, which we made there upon that particular occasion, but has extended, at various times, to every season of the year. In the next place, every experienced sportsman, who are here the Moores and Murphies of the community, as shepherds commonly are in other places, will predict, with unerring accuracy, impending falling weather, in how long time it shall arrive, and whether in the shape of rain or snow, by a minute observation, not of the heavens but the earth. For the surface of the ground, say they, to those

to

that will watch and study it narrowly, sympathizes, perceptibly and quite differently, with every coming change of the weather. And what is generally thought to be true of tortoises and cats, and a piece of sea-weed, is manifested in that barometer much more strikingly and discriminatingly. And, lastly, what we can in no way account for, though you should introduce a white ram and twenty of the whitest ewes in the world, into the canton, the progeny, of nine out of ten of them, shall be black-a most mischievous anomaly and freak of nature in regard to the mutton, which is here invariably bad, and such as would have drawn tears and moving ejaculations from Fontenelle and Charles Lamb. It tastes abominably of the hide,-as we nothing doubt would be the case with a collop cut from a blackamoor; for, though Brown, who questioned whether Jews had a bad odour,* has decided, and as we are disposed to think, upon the whole, not unreasonably, that proposition in the negative, he had never questioned the unsavouriness of Negroes,—so that it is an indispensable rule, in this part of the world, as it is a very good one everywhere else, to parboil a leg of that meat before you put it upon the spit.

We should have been abundantly happy the next few days, though we had had no other cause of happiness than the blessed sense, after so much suffering, of a perfect freedom from pain. Two or three times in the course of a morning, we would spring suddenly up from our chair and jump over the stool at our feet-not like that celebrated German Baron, by way of learning to be lively, "j'apprends à etre vif," that would have gone far to justify the, not altogether unfounded, opinion of Father Bouhours, that one of that nature cannot possibly be witty-but to make sure that we had entirely recovered the use and vigour of our muscles. Then we would remain still for two or three seconds, listening, as it were, with our whole body, to find whether any ache or strain had followed from our performance. And when we were satisfied of our entire sound

* "Vulgar Errors," book iv., cap. 10. His arguments appear unanswerable; but our senses, we must confess, are somewhat opposed to our sense in the matter; and, to speak our minds fully, Jews that eschew pork have for the most part, to our thinking, rather a swinish cast of countenance. Brown, who combats its justice, admits the general prevalence of that opinion of their ill savour: "which," says he, "the nastiness of that nation and its sluttish course of life, their servile condition at the first, and ways of parsimony ever since, have done much towards the promoting." How old the notion was we read in “ Ammian," and, more clearly, in "Martial's Epigram:" Jejunia Sabbatariorum

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Mallem, quam quòd oles, olere, Bassa."

The famous Cardinal Campeggio, of whom Ancillon in his "Conversations," as reported by his son, records other eccentric opinions, not only took-pro concesso-the unsavouriness of Jews, but held it for "a curse divinely inflicted upon them: a badge and a perpetual brand on those that crucified Christ."