She could the farmer at his work assist- Her mathematic studies she resign'dA systematic agriculturist.

"But she is idle, nor has much attain'd; Men are in her deceived: she knows at most A few light matters, for she scorns to boast. She appears to be a reviewer, too, and dabbles considerably in the magazines; but we must hasten to the conclusion :—

We pass the Brother Burgesses,' 'The Dealer and Clerk,' 'Gentle Jane,' and 'The Wife and Widow,' and reach, in Belinda Waters,' a most Crabbish portraiture of a fine dainty miss :

And what came of this delicate beauty ?—

'she took a surgeon's mate

'With his half-pay, which was his whole estate.'

And how does she relish a scanty establishment, a housefull of bawling children, and the weekly accounts?

Her husband loves her, and in accent mild

Answers, and treats her like a fretted child;

But when he, ruffled, makes severe replies,

"My dear, your father's creditors could tell!"

And then she weeps, till comfort is applied, That soothes her spleen, or gratifies her pride:

And seems unhappy-then she pouts, and cries, Her dress and novels, visits and success "She wonders when she'll die!"-She In a chance-game, are softeners of disfaints, but never dies. tress.'-p. 207.

'The Will' and 'The Cousins' are among the most powerful of these tales; and The Boat Race,' Master William, or Lad's Love,'Danvers and Rayner,'Preaching and Practice'-in short, almost every piece in the volume-might furnish us with some extract, grave or gay, which would much adorn our pages. But we believe we have already quoted quite enough to convey a fair notion of what this legacy amounts to. It is on the whole decidedly inferior, in most respects, to any other volume of the author's poetry; but still it is perhaps more amusing than any of the rest of them: it is full of playfulness and good-humour, and the stories are, with hardly an exception, such as we can fancy the good old man to have taken delight in telling to his grandchildren, when the curtains were drawn down and the fire burnt bright on a winter's evening, in the rectory parlour of Trowbridge. Why, air,' said Johnson at Dunvegan-(anno ætat. 64)- a man grows better-humoured as he grows older. He improves by experience.' It is pleasing to trace the gradually-increasing prevalence of the softer feelings in the heart of Crabbe, when removed from the stern influences of his early distress. Requiescat in pace! We hope his Sermons may be found worthy of the high reputation which this volume will neither increase nor disturb.

6

ART. IX.-1. Belgium and Western Germany in 1833.
Mrs. Trollope. 2 vols. 12mo. London. 1834.
2. Visit to Germany and the Low Countries.
Brooke Faulkner. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1833.

MR

By

By Sir Arthur

RS. TROLLOPE is, we think, extremely well adapted to the task of planning and executing a 'pleasure tour,' (as the Germans call it,) and giving a correct and spirited report of her seeings and hearings, for the benefit of us home voyageurs autour de nos chambres. With the tact and quick observation of a woman, and much of the unpretending good sense of an Englishwoman, she unites great activity, bodily as well as mental, sound views on most topics, political and religious, a lively style, good feeling and good spirits, and much unprejudiced fairness in her judg

ments

ments on men and manners. If she has but 'little learning,' her good sense prevents its being a dangerous thing;' and every reader of any taste must like her and her work all the better for the absence of all pretension to more than she possesses. We verily believe she started to write a tour in Germany, with scarcely any other apparatus than a common guide-book, and a passport duly vised-without having got up, more solito, Madame de Staël's 'Allemagne,' or dipped into Frederic of Prussia's Correspondence, or marked quotations (like Sir A. B. Faulkner) in the first chapter of Tacitus de Moribus Germanorum. Then, although she follows Lord Bacon's advice, and diets in such places where there is good company,' she neither engages, nor prates about, Italian couriers, and britschkas and extra post horses; she can breathe in a lohn kutsch, and make her observations very shrewdly and like a lady in the eilwagen and the wasser diligenz; and she rationally prefers the lively table d'hôte to expensive and uninforming repasts in her bed-room. The result is, she has produced two very agreeable and companionable volumes upon Belgium and Rhenish Germany, full of animated description and natural observation, free from conventional rhapsodies and second-hand criticism, -never dogmatizing, and seldom theorizing, and strictly following (though not citing) Horace's golden rule,

'Quod

Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinquit.' Though she spends some days at the Universities of Bonn and Heidelberg, she is not drawn into sublime disquisitions about Kant's philosophy, or transcendental raptures upon Goethe and Schlegel. She describes the castles on the Rhine without swelling her volumes with every legend appurtenant to them from Schreiber or Gottschalk; and she clearly states what she sees in the vaults of the supposed secret tribunal at Baden, without extracting an elaborate history from Sir Francis Palgrave, or bewildering herself in the controversy as to its constitution and fall; nor does she reproduce, from a thumbed copy of Childe Harold,' Byron's noble but hackneyed descriptions of the river and the castles 'where ruin greenly dwells;' nay, her chapters are headed by plain prose tables of contents, instead of useless and sentimental mottoes-in the reciprocation of which we observe a considerable traffic among the poetasters and standard novelists' of this age of puffing.

Let us not be supposed for a moment to undervalue the travels of persons of real science, and of historical and antiquarian knowledge. We know hardly any works more delightful than Saussure's Travels in the Alps and Humboldt's in South America, for their union of scientific observation with glowing and animated description;

description; and the details which we have of the northern countries from Clarke (enriched by Heber's notes), of Italy from Eustace and Forsyth, and of India from Heber, acquire a tenfold value from the real familiarity of those authors with the history and antiquities of the countries they visit. But what we dislike, and what Mrs. Trollope's work is far superior to, is the book of travels, so common in these days, compiled from guide-books, gazetteers, and topographical dictionaries, instead of the actual use of the tourist's ears and eyes-with centos of inapt quotations-profound displays of title-page learning-shallow lectures on general politics-crude generalizations from scanty particulars-in short, all that indicates misplaced industry at home, with little note-taking and careless observation on the spot.

But though her readers will readily forgive Mrs. Trollope for not being a profound antiquary, or even a German scholar, and will doubtless applaud with us her contempt for the too common affectation of learning and languages, we really wish she had possessed herself of some good dictionary of proper names, or had at least copied them correctly from the guide-books and road-posts which fell in her way. It is really distressing to find, in her generally accurate volumes, our old acquaintances the German towns and villages, rivers, and mountains, so metamorphosed in name as to be hardly recognizable. The town of Bruchsal is turned into Bronchsul, the Murg river into the Moury, the Bergstrasse into Bergstross (it is not the beautiful chain of hills which is called Bergstrasse, but the chaussée at their feet-the mountain-road): Braubach is Branbach, Rheinfels is Rhinefels or Rhinfels, Marbourg is Marberg, and Starkenburg is Storkenberg: the termination burgfortress or town, and berg-mountain, being generally confounded. The Fulda river is written the Foulde, the Sieben-gebirge are turned into Sieben-geberg, the town of Deutz into Deuty; Rolandseck is divided into Roland Seck (i. e. dry Roland, instead of Roland's nook); Nonnenwerth is turned into Nonnenworth; Bethmann the banker is curtailed of his final n-the Marquis of Sommariva of his second m--and Danekker the sculptor is transformed to Dennecker. We point out these errata, which will be more offensive to her foreign readers than to many of her English ones, in order that Mrs. Trollope may correct them in a future edition. From various circumstances, we have little doubt that this one has not had the advantage of being carried through the press under her own inspection.

Having thus summed up her typographical demerits, we have pleasure in saying that we think her style considerably strengthened and improved since her Tour in America. Her observations are also more sober and just than was always the case

in that amusing volume; and if her present work does not excite so many broad grins' as the former, it is in part owing to the difference of subject, but also because it has less of extravaganza and caricature.

Mrs. Trollope commences her peregrinations on the 1st of June, 1833, on board the Lord Liverpool steam-boat, which she finds far inferior in accommodation to those on the Hudson and the Mississippi. Her delay of ten days at Ostend (occasioned by a wound received by her son, in a combat scene, in acting Bombastes Furioso on a private stage) enables her to explore Ostend and its vicinity more leisurely than travellers are wont. With the exception of a good market for vegetables, fruit, and flowers; flat sands, convenient for sea-bathing; and a church filled with tawdry representations of the Virgin, before which half-dressed devotees are unceasingly prostrate-this much-used, but difficultly approached port has nothing worthy of remark. The traveller finds himself in the land of bigotry and ultra-Catholicism on crossing any frontier of Belgium. With the exception of Spain, and of some parts of Italy, the processions of the church are probably nowhere so well got up, or its legends and traditions so numerous, as in Belgium. In the village church of Ghistelles, near Ostend, Mrs. Trollope finds a shrine of brass, containing the bones of a certain Countess Godelieve, with a stately monument representing her horrid fate :

'Godelieve was a woman of France, and married a Baron of Flanders, who being a wicked man, and influenced by a still more atrocious mother, hated her for her goodness, and also for having black hair, unlike the fair girls of his own country; he, therefore, had her strangled: but afterwards repenting him of the cruel deed, he became a monk at Bruges, and subsequently caused the church to be erected to her memory.'-Trollope, vol. i. p. s.

The count having thus made matters square, after the manner of the twelfth century, the lady was of course promoted into a saint, and in that capacity works miracles, to this day, at Ghistelles, and would have more practice than she actually enjoys, but for the 'well-authenticated finger' of a certain other saint of older standing, which treats the countess as a parvenue, and is enshrined in the church (though not in the calendar) as undoubtedly the saint A 1.

Catholicism in Belgium does not (as it does in Italy, in Savoy, and in many parts of Germany and France) possess the accompaniment of filth. The cleanliness of the farms, the cottages, the dairies, the kitchens, as well as of the dress of the peasantry, must strike every traveller. At a farm-house which Mrs. Trollope visited, where she was struck with the rich cream, the Valen

ciennes