It was now nearly ten years since I had been afloat in life. I had in that time no reason to congratulate myself on what the world calls good fortune. I had not made money. I had lost it by a chain of circumstances over which I had no control. I did not go to the West of my own accord, because I knew London would be more eligible to my views, and thus I lost early years out of it irretrievably. I doubted if my nature admitted of that attention to trifles, that utter devotion of body and soul, those thoughts by night, and disguises of thoughts by day, those concealments and over-reachings, which constitute the general road to pecuniary accumulation. I had not to blame myself for extravagance. I had no expensive follies, but I had that vice in the sight of the multitude, that I never employed my mind upon schemes of profit. I was content to labour for a stipulated reward, and think no more about gain, until the time for labour returned again. The idea of books and of the acquirement of knowledge, still more a love for them, has long been pronounced the bane of success in life. Fortune, therefore, was not to be my lot. People, we

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are told read little but newspapers now. They may soon read nothing else, and the nation will thus become richer than ever, no matter whether it become wiser or better. But there will always be a few who will not suffer the better order of literature to perish.

I had paid no attention to these differences, and had regarded almost wholly the expression of just principles, and kept to them, or what I thought to be such. Time has confirmed my judgments, but unhappily, I thought reasonable pecuniary profit would follow honest exertion, and that “the public” as it is styled, was a discriminating tribunal, neither to be bribed nor hoaxed, where the end was discovered to be honourable, and all was plain and above board. This is the great error of young and ardent minds. The public is ruled by accidental circumstances, in its rewards and neglects, by some collateral event, by fashion, by the cry of multifarious ignorance, and by the arts of the trader. I thought its dicta not to be impugned in place of its being the result of a false, as often as of a true direction. The road of the many is not the narrow way in any pursuit. I looked for success in the avoidance of error, and suffered my labours to speak, when I ought to have intrigued to get myself trumpeted. This I found to my cost. I gained little wisdom from experience, none of my organization ever will, who do not bend with the willow. It is the broad way traveller who sees but one point in the horizon, who fills his purse by trucking the humanities if needful. Such are the worldly wise, consigning knowledge and science to the winds, or only purchasing of them as much as may be useful to assist their own selfishness. I committed the unfortunate mis-

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take of not proceeding with the many in the broad straight line like that by which mathematicians tell us they are to reach heaven. I deviated out of the road, trod the wild, rambled into fragrant gardens, along flowery lanes, and through groves of verdure, independent in spirit, and, therefore, I was not to be of the favoured, among the jog-trotters on life’s highway.

Napoleon having set sail for St. Helena, I went to France, I had an object in view which it is not of moment to state. A short delay in setting out, enabled me to visit the West of England. How sad and contracted all there appeared, though not less beloved than before, perhaps more beloved from its less pretension. The rivulet had diminished to a thread; the streets once so broad in appearance and so long, now appeared short and narrow with houses over which I could vault. The ocean alone maintained its mighty aspect, as it had done “from creation’s dawn.” The new marvels that had succeeded the old, did not occupy the same space in the heart, they had only raised the worth of the more insignificant. They had ministered to surprise, but generated no affection. I visited the house where many of my early years had been passed, it was tenanted by strangers. I did not venture to ask leave to go over it. Five miles away I entered the dwelling of my mother’s family—not one survived. The rooms fit for Brobdignag in my youth, seemed now only adapted for the citizens of Lilliput. I explored the ground and found enclosures demolished, trees cut down that I well remembered before. I reluctantly admitted that change was the law of nature. It was the time of day when the bat begins to flap his leathern wings, that I roamed

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through the garden for the last time, memory steeping my thoughts in sadness. Melancholy are the recollections of youth in later life. They come back in shadowy garb as if to mock us with repeated convictions that they have passed away for ever, in place of leaving more than the solitary conviction of the fact of their doomed termination before long, with all our cherished memories of them.

As I rambled over heaths, and near the verge of deserted ancient mines, there came to memory of the accidents that I had heard of in my youth. The stories of miners, who declared they had heard the cocks crowing in China, and voices that, at two hundred and forty fathoms deep, had warned them of the Lisbon earthquake, to which paying no attention by

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going up “to grass,”* thunder was heard beneath their feet, and the sides of the drivings (galleries) shook, to their great terror. Then we had visitation of spirits, which were universally credited, as well as omens and dreams. A man who had set out to return home, was one night missing. A second night came, and there was no appearance of him. Twenty descents were made into as many deserted mines, in vain. At last, one of his comrades dreamed that he had fallen into a particular shaft, which he named, and there his body was found, dreadfully mangled. A jury might, on circumstantial evidence, as justly have found the dreamer guilty of the murder, as it might find a man guilty of murder upon the evidence alone of medical men, on the symptoms exhibited in the act of dying, as described by second parties. People are prone to credit a probable falsehood sooner than an improbable truth.

A Mr. Chapman was proceeding homewards on horseback, attended by his servant. He had taken too much of “inspiring bold John Barleycorn,” and perhaps the servant had followed the example of the master. They were sufficiently sensible to know that their horse-path lay among deserted mines, where a couple of yards off the road would plunge them down fathoms into the bowels of the earth. On each side was an open heath. It was dark. The master bade his servant dismount, and he followed the example, the servant going ahead as pioneer. Mr. Chapman must soon have got off the path. The servant went on, until, not hearing his master behind him, and shouting

* The terms for going up to the surface of the ground above.

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without a response, he thought he might have taken another way home. When he himself arrived there, he was surprised to learn that there were no tidings of his master. The horse his master led was found, in the morning, grazing near the spot where the servant imagined he had left him. A body of miners was at once assembled to descend the old mines in the vicinity, and they were thus employed in vain until four o’clock the next day, when one of the miners thought he heard a moaning sound ascend from a particular shaft, down which he was looking at the moment. He shouted, and a low desponding murmur was heard in reply. A man descended with a lanthorn, and there found the missing gentleman, secured him with ropes, and he was drawn up by the men above, without a broken bone or any serious injury, after seventeen hours of the most painful suspension between life and death. He had fallen fifteen fathoms, when his fall was suddenly arrested by a cross drift. Below this there was a farther descent to the level of water, many fathoms in depth. Thus he had remained on the cross piece of timber suspended over fathoms of water, amid horrible silence, without a hope of relief from his fellow men, fearful of slipping off his support and being drowned. He lived in good health many years afterward to tell this tale.

I have often wondered how I escaped some of those yawning gulfs when a boy, and visiting in the country, heedless where I ran. My mother, when young, was remarkably active and lively, and was nearly a victim to one of these accidents. One gate of her father’s house opened upon the down I was now traversing.

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Starting from her companions to evade observation, she ran as fast as she was able among the hillocks and heaps of heath-covered rubbish thrown out of the workings of a mine, the shafts of which had been deserted for half a century before. Not thinking of a forsaken shaft in her youthful heedlessness, she rushed on to the brink with too much rapidity to recoil, and had no choice left but to spring over it with her utmost strength. She succeeded and cleared the horrible gulf by a few inches only, the shaft being oblong, and she having the narrowest sides only to cross. About four feet by eight. She only said how thankful she ought to feel that her clothes were wide enough to permit her to leap so far! A man had been taken out of the same mine but a few days before, whose skin hung from his limbs torn by the rocky sides of the orifice, and sodden in the water at the bottom. The earth afterwards fell in funnel fashion around the mouth, in which state, as a boy, I used to tremble to look down into it. I found it now filled up, the surface levelled, and a smooth sod covering all, having been enclosed and the surface round it forming a green meadow. All the foregoing tale about it lives in my recollection, that only existing, it is probable, which retains this portion of its history—how many such histories exist among individuals, and how many have passed away. I should be charged with romancing in stating the foregoing facts to the present residents on the spot.

I prolonged my tour to what the great chymist, Humphrey Davy, called,

“The dark Bolerium seat of storms;”

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vulgarly the Land’s End, a grand spot, thrusting its granite front into the Atlantic. I visited the Lizard after ascending to the chair of St. Michael in Mount’s Bay, in which I dared not sit, but ventured to stand a few moments. Many delicate females have sat in the seat of the archangel, which after all is no seat, but the remains of a gothic lanthorn which occupied the place of one of the pinnacles of the church tower. It is of granite three feet high, and no doubt once held a light which the charitable monks placed there as a guide to shipping. Let the half of a common lanthorn be supposed broken away longitudinally. Here it would be the external half. The place for the light or the bottom of the lanthorn is the pretended seat, the legs hanging down from the angle of the tower, which stands on the edge of a perpendicular rock at a great height above the sea breaking below. As the back part of the lanthorn remains, it being the part next the platform, those who sit in it must needs get round that part, kneel and turning from their kneeling position seat themselves as I have described. To get out of the seat again, they must repeat the process of getting upon their knees on the seat, and then on their feet with nothing of which to take hold, and the height over the thundering sea below quite sufficient to shake the strongest nerves. The sitter must then step in over the battlements, and so upon the tower platform. Yet the story that all who sit in that chair, if husbands, shall rule their wives, and vice versa, has made females risk themselves in an idle operation, which it makes me tremble to think upon. Beneath that fabled abode of the archangel, lived a family once dear to me, of which

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I know not of one survivor. Their dwelling I have seen since, but it is tenanted by strangers, no one could imagine that a numerous family, more than commonly amiable and happy, had been born and passed out of the world there within a few years, and with them delightful remembrances—a painful event too commonly witnessed in life.

The Lizard, a noble promontory of beautiful serpentine rock, has double lighthouses, the first and last of England’s main seen by the parting and returning vessel. Over the serpentine, and nowhere else in England, grows the beautiful variety of heath called erica vagans. There is some fine rocky scenery here where I luxuriated. Returning to the mining districts, I descended into an adventure of lead and silver, in which the vein of galena shone prettily by the candle light, the vein, about a foot square, being cut transversely. None of the mines here at all resemble coal mines. Coals lie in floors and may be worked out. The metallic veins run downward in branches, like the veins or arteries in the human body. Their depth is unknown, as they are only followed as far as it will pay the cost of draining off the water, and bringing the product to the surface. In seven years in the parish of Gwennap alone, copper had been raised to the value of £1,920,000. In 1827 no less than £357,000 value in copper and tin was raised in that parish alone. A depth of four times the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral is nearly as far as the mines penetrate, or from a fourth to a third of one mile, and four thousand miles are required to reach the earth’s centre. It is not the penetration of the eggshell in thickness compared to the

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semi-diameter of the egg. The tin and copper mines do not exhibit anything worth the labour of the descent. With a felt hat on, flannel jacket, and two or three candles, one lighted, the ladder perpendicular to the walls, the mine is descended to a platform, where another ladder commences. Galleries branch off to the different veins wide enough for two men to pass each other. The mines are so deep in some places and the galleries so prolonged, that a miner will require the best part of an hour to descend and to come up. I was tired of the burrowing, and found the ascent of the ladders fatiguing enough. The workings and galleries in the Consolidated and United copper and tin mines extend sixty-three miles under ground, and employ three thousand two hundred persons. The timber used in the Cornish mines is Norwegian pine, of which trees of one hundred and twenty years’ growth are required, and the annual consumption demands the growth of a hundred and forty square miles of Norway forest. I made numerous notes, since superseded by printed works upon the subject. I can only say that after my descent into the earth’s entrails, it was most grateful to me to leave the heat below, and see the heaven again. So much for the metallic wealth near my birth-place.

I spent two or three days on my return with a family inhabiting a fine old place near Lostwithiel, called Pelyn. The lady of the house was in her eighty-sixth year, lively, good looking, full of information about old times, and in full possession of her intellects. She was the daughter of Humphrey Cotes, the friend of Wilkes, Beckford, Churchill, and Hogarth. She was pleased at finding I could converse a little about those whom she

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had known personally so long before, though only through books. She had been in the ball-room in Bath with Pope, the lion of her girlish day, when she was then only sixteen or seventeen years of age. She recollected that he was a little ill-made man, upon whom the eyes of the company were turned. She had visited at Prior Park, but did not recollect Pope being there at the time. She asked me what I thought of the Chevalier d’Eon, who had died in Millman Street, four or five years ago, I think in 1810, and who had made so much noise in her time forty years before. She seemed surprized at the little interest I felt about the nondescript. She spoke much of Charles Churchill, who used to be frequently with her father. “Charles Churchill,” she observed, “nobody could ever dream he was able to write such fine poetry, who knew him as well as I did. He was such a heavy, dull man. He had little to say in company. He often dined with my father, and had a great name with the players.” Wilkes, she told me, generally came to her father’s with Churchill, and he had all the conversation, having something to say to everybody and about everything, but he was so ugly. Charles Churchill, for so she always spoke of the poet, seemed to have had little power of impressing his friends with the idea of the talents he possessed from his personal bearing, nor was he much of a talker, although after dinner the visitors used to converse much over her father’s wine. I found that Mrs. Kendal, for that was Miss Cotes’ name by marriage, did not think much of her father’s friend as a gentleman, though as a poet, the world, she said, was full of his praises. I told her I had read of her father in Wilkes’

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correspondence. She mentioned that her father lived in St. Martin’s Lane, when Wilkes made a noise all over the country; and observed that she had forgotten many things about her earlier days, because after her marriage and retirement into Cornwall, she met with few who knew or could talk about the characters that in London were once of so much interest. All she had known there, too, were now long dead, and she should be a stranger where she first drew breath. I encountered, a little man on this tour, whom I remembered in my boyhood. He was of a passionate disposition, persevering, and obstinate. He had a share in a mine which involved him in debt, but he would not part with it, because he had great faith in the adventure. He was sent to prison, but he would not resign the property. At length the concern which had Wrecked him, turned round and became profitable. He got out of prison, having paid all his creditors, and realized besides one of those small competencies of which there are said to be more in Cornwall th’an in any other county of its size in the kingdom, from three to five thousand pounds each. He kept a farm for his amusement, much of which he had enclosed from the waste around, and although of little value, he extolled it highly, and boasted of his land in terms a little too exaggerated, while his disposition to inferiors was somewhat despotic. There was an old hare-finder, known to me in boyhood, a tall, gaunt man, one Abel George, attached to a neighbouring hunt called the Four Barrow. I met him on this tour, the last time I ever saw him, “Well, Abel, do you remember me?”

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“Bad enough; all the gentlemen you remember are moved away, or dead and gone. Mr. Vivian, Mr. Harry Vivian, Mr. Hussey Vivian, (afterwards Lord Vivian.)

“Then I’ll tell your father for you,” said Abel as he took a long stride to get clear out of the forbidden territory. He was a singular character, a great favourite with the hunt, and something of a knave. The magistrates and others that belonged to the Four Barrow

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Hunt, were good honest country gentlemen, of urbane manners and much given to kindness. I see the hare-finder, Abel, among them now, as of old, round shouldered, with his pole in his hand.

I visited Plymouth, as I have mentioned before, remaining two or three days with Mr. John Collier, to whom I owed so many acts of kindness during my former residence there, he afterwards represented the town in parliament. I deeply respect his memory. He died possessed of great opulence at the age of eighty. I stayed a day or two at Taunton, with the proprietor of the paper, a hospitable and well-informed man. I remember we made an excursion to Ilminster. Dining at the inn there, and recollecting that the Duke of Monmouth a little more than a century before had made it his head-quarters, where, too, he had many followers, the conversation turned upon the difference between the inhabitants of most continental towns and those of England. Abroad, if an individual lived in a place famous for any historical event of moment, it was known to the inhabitants rich or poor, though ignorant of general history, and in other respects no better informed than the people of this country. My friend was of an opposite opinion. The Duke of Monmouth had made the town his head-quarters, after landing—that could not well be forgotten. Here is the waiter, I will ask about it.

“Pray did the Duke of Monmouth take up his quarters here, after he landed at Lyme, before the battle of Sedgmoor?”

“I don’t know, Sir, I will ask my master.” The master and mistress did not know anything about the

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Duke of Monmouth. I had not disputed about the superior intelligence of any class in or out of England, but simply of what was local in its nature. Thus at Rouen, every inhabitant knows it was the birth-place of Corneille, and that poor Joan of Arc was burned there. Jean Hachette is well known at Beauvais to have been its heroine. In England, there is no feeling for such reminiscences, except among well-educated persons. Abroad it is believed among the masses, that important events and being the birth-place of a great man confer honour on a locality. It is not so in England.

I visited Burton Pynsent and the column erected by Lord Chatham to the memory of Sir William Pynsent, who left the great minister the estate. The late Lord Chatham as he was nick-named, because when Master of the Ordnance he came to his daily duties when most people began to think about leaving theirs—the hero, too, of the Walcheren expedition, gambled away this estate, left a precious legacy to his father. The column would have gone too, and been pulled down for the materials had not a private subscription been made to purchase that, and the ground on which it stands, under the auspices of some of the neighbouring gentlemen. This is all remaining on that spot of the name or family of the greatest of England’s statesmen.

The Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived in the ‘Bellerophon,’ while I was at the Lands’ End. Not thinking he would remain more than twenty-four hours I did not deem it worth while to go to Plymouth at a hazard. That he was transferred to the ‘Northumberland,’ I did not know. The ‘Northumberland’ contained officers of my acquaintance, that would have given me

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facilities for seeing this great man. Some of the commanders of other vessels in attendance were well known to me—among them was Lillicrap of the ‘Eurotas.’

Lillicrap, who, like too many of that time, imagined because hatred to Bonaparte was carefully inculcated by church and state, that he was the beast with seven heads, and ten horns mentioned in scripture, and that all to be superlatively loyal could never abuse him enough in society. Lillicrap declared he detested the fellow, he held him in contempt, and what not.

“Why Lillicrap, you do not mean all this, it is impossible.”

“Nonsense, Lillicrap, if Napoleon came into this room now, you would bow to him—if your hat were on your head, you would take it off.”

It was singular that the first boats ordered to attend the removal of Napoleon from the ‘Bellerophon’ to the ‘Northumberland,’ were those of the ‘Eurotas.’ Lillicrap mounted to the quarter-deck of the ‘Bellerophon,’ with two or three of his brother officers, he being foremost. No sooner was he on the deck, where Napoleon stood, than his hat was in his hand before the Emperor’s, the first of the party. When the ceremony was over, and they had returned on shore, some of them dining with Mr. Collier that day, and the commander of the ‘Eurotas’ among them, the question was put,

“Why, Lillicrap, you were the first to salute Bonaparte, to-day—how was that, after what you said.”

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Such was the moral influence of the great man’s presence. A still more remarkable trait of the power of Napoleon over minds, in no way likely to be influenced by any other consideration than the momentary impression, who had never heard of Marengo, Austerlitz, or Eylau, was exhibited by a young female on seeing him. I cannot well place it on record. Such instances are but a part of that natural superiority which strong-minded men and their actions produce upon the small actors on the stage of life. All, more or less, feel the influence of greatness of character.

I was taking leave of the West, and was walking with a lady in a garden on one side of her house, laughing at something she said, when she changed the topic, and struck down my momentary hilarity by pointing out a green and flourishing sprig of a tree, which she remarked to me my mother had planted there a year or two before, adding the remark she had made, that when they saw that sprig, it might recal her to their recollection. It was a yard high, green and flourishing. Where was the planter, while the frail twig was full of life and vigour!

How hast thou fallen while thy green oaks stand?

said a poet to his depressed country. It was the same kind of sentiment I felt at that moment. My mind was no longer levigated. I hurried my departure, longing to be away from a spot I have never seen again

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—to be where all should be new to me. I loved my mother intensely. “I have discovered a thing very little known,” says the poet Gray, “which is that in one’s whole life, one can never have any more than a single mother.” Obvious it may be, trite—but how true! The scenes of youth revisited, many altered and strange faces there did not affect me so much as the recollection of both does now, because I see them, as they were, in the mirror of memory, every old portrait in its place, every character in wonted action, which the real scene cannot exhibit. Oh! that inexorable time!

It cost an entire day to reach Dover from London over the dearest road in England, because most travellers and strangers arrived that way from the continent. It was cold weather. I mounted the coach, and had for a companion in front, a fine fellow of a seaman, who had been pressed into the navy, and so ill-used that he was going away with a resolution never to return home again, but to serve any foreign state. I was sorry to

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learn that he had served in the ‘Eurotas.’ I never heard any complaints of Lillicrap, but it might have been before his appointment to that vessel. I did not ask, because I did not wish to know. I see from some notes written at the time, that I met a number of convalescents wounded, just coming from Waterloo. Some belonged to the Blues. At Canterbury, we took up a Serjeant. He told me his squadron charged four times. Our light dragoons were good for nothing. The French cuirassiers, he thought, were much too heavy for their horses, taking their complete equipment. The horses wanted power. The men were fine. He saw none that were not better men than himself, and far beyond what he expected to see. He was himself a fine likely fellow.

We reached Dover about nine o’clock just eleven hours travel from London. My luggage was sent to the custom-house to be searched, the real object being to extort a fee. A mob of hungry porters surrounded us like flesh-flies, patronized by the corporation. I paid half-a-crown, a town fee, for a board to cross from the shore to the packet—it was the custom. There were all sorts of claims, now mercifully swept away, thanks to an improved condition of things. The wind being contrary all the next day, I scrambled to the Castle, looked at Queen Elizabeth’s pocket pistol as every body else did, and for Calais towers, and met parties of the 9th, 27th, and 40th regiments. Afterwards, I visited the Shakespear cliff, and trod the disagreeable pebbly beach, dirty with chalk. Then to the inn and played backgammon to beguile the time. The wind blew a gale when I went on board. We took over despatches for the

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Duke of Wellington. What days of misery were spent in those sailing packets. A single cabin, beds in tiers, male and female in confusion together. I remember an elephantine dame on a sofa, much resembling Etna when the mountain has the heart-burn and can no longer be restrained by the sons of Vulcan. At the maternal side sat a slim young lady, not at all affected by the sea, her eyes fixed upon a youth in a gay uniform, sprawling in not a most fitting condition on the cabin floor. A youth tailored into a soldier, fresh from the maternal arms, and now the war was over, going to join his corps.

These and similar scenes in a cabin over-crammed, so that there was no moving without trampling upon the prostrate, even the floor occupied, induced me to look out for some more comfortable berth. What a blessed invention was steam, if it were only for crossing the channel. The deck was too cold to remain there. We had been out five hours, and were not making towards the French coast that I could discover. I found a place at last, near the cabin door, where lay a large coil of rope, over which I spread a boat cloak, wrapped myself up as well as I could, and ordered some hot brandy-and-water and biscuit. I did not stir until we found ourselves, after thirteen hours had elapsed, about a mile from Boulogne, near a circular wooden fort built upon piles in the sea, beyond low water mark. The artillery of this fort had kept our cruisers at a respectful distance during the latter preparations of the flotilla for the invasion of England. It cost two millions of francs, but was subsequently demolished by order of the French government. I was glad to enter the Hotel

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de Londres, kept by a certain lively Frenchman, named Boutour.

We halted at the Tête de Bœuf at Montreuil. A heaped up fire of fir cones gave out a fragrant warmth. The master of the inn, eighty-six years old, was an

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intelligent man of his class. He had weathered the storm of the Revolution on the same spot. He remembered entertaining Sterne there for several days, and was proud of relating the circumstance, and showing the room and place where Sterne had sat writing. The active manager of the inn at that time, was a female, a Madame Leroy, a relative of the landlord. She had a son, an intelligent youth, almost twelve years of age. The little cunning fellow told me he loved the English, because they had brought back their lawful king!

I found that the Russians were much more liked than the Prussians. They complained that the allied armies made the fuel dear. The English kept large fires, and though they paid, wood was rendered scarce. The conduct of Wellington, in suffering no wrong when active hostilities ceased, won much good-will from the people. Upon some of the houses where the Russians had been quartered, the uncouth characters of their names remained chalked upon the doors on the outside from the year before. The names of British officers and soldiers were chalked up in the same manner. As I passed through Abbeville, the girls were playing at battledore and shuttlecock in the street. Calling for a bottle of champagne, they said it was doubtful if one was to be had, the English officers drank it before, with, and after dinner. They brought one at last, which they said they believed was the only one to be had in the city.

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He soon broke off his tale of the war to relate a

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love story. He had been cruelly treated by the lady, and declared himself inconsolable. Evidently without thought of the morrow, he shifted the subject from one topic to another, like a schoolboy of fourteen on a holiday. Happy temperament! What is gravity, deep-thinking, and care, but

“Heavier toil, superior pain!”

While journeying towards the old capital of Normandy, I heard that Louis XVIII., or Louis le Cochon, as the Bonapartists called him in derision of his eating propensities, had just prohibited the introduction into France of our newspapers. This was in unison with his subsequent conduct. It was reported, that when placed upon the throne he ought never to have occupied, he did not even condescend to repay England the large sum advanced to him, to enable him to enter France. Charles X. in like manner is said not to have paid the debts he incurred when a refugee in Edinburgh. Such were the men whom the Duke of Brunswick set out for Paris to replace on the throne, and was ignominiously driven back, and whom England entered upon a twenty years war to serve.

After passing through Blangy and its forest to

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Neufchâtel, the clear trout streams around the last mentioned place attracted my attention, a most inviting spot for the devotees of old Isaac Walton. Renowned for small cheeses, less than a tea-cup in size, as its namesake in Switzerland is renowned for large, one of the old French ministers being in the Norman town, was so delighted with the flavour of these productions, that he wrote from Paris ordering a stock of several hundred to be sent to him, as they grew better for keeping, but misdirected his letter. Great was his surprise one day at seeing a number of large waggons draw up at his door, and to be told that his cheeses were come from Neufchâtel. Unluckily they were the Swiss kind, which had travelled all the way from Swiss-Prussian canton to add to the variety of his table. From their great size his hotel could hardly contain them. How the affair was finally arranged was not said, but no doubt the Swiss had the best of it. None but a Yankee or the devil, outwits a Swiss in a bargain, fully justifying the old French proverb. “If a Swiss jump out of a three pair of stairs window, don’t hesitate, something is to be got by it; follow him!”

I found at one place that the porter at the hotel had been beaten by an English dragoon, to whom he refused entrance at a late hour. I asked why he did not complain to the man’s commanding officer, and he would have got redress. The poor fellow replied that the troops marched early the next day, and it was of no use. It was the only instance I ever heard of any complaint against the English. The porter was acting in pursuance of his duty. Here as well as elsewhere they gave the English due praise. At Blangy an old woman, keeper

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of an auberge told me she had forty English dragoons on her premises for two months, and she lost nothing. The Russians took what they wanted, but the Prussians destroyed, and wasted what they could not use, the poor suffering fearfully. Every where the last bore an ill-name, and I believe deservedly. A conscript told me that he escaped wounded from Waterloo, into a wood some distance away, and could go no farther. A British dragoon saw his miserable state, made him mount behind him, and conveyed him to a place of safety.

Neufchâtel, though a poor town in those days, had a mean looking inn externally, but within there were good wines, excellent cookery, and clean and comfortable beds. Just opposite my window, a ruined convent was the only dilapidated place of the kind I had yet seen. I had passed through the forest of Blangy before entering the town. The forest was three or four miles across, and when about half way through, it formed a kind of amphitheatre of trees, with eight directing posts leading away by as many divergent avenues. Woodmen were at work, the smoke of their fires

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curling up among the trees, and the sound of the axe alone breaking the sweet tranquillity that reigned around. It was a beautiful sylvan scene, quite new to me.

I found rich corn land most of the way. Orchards too abounded. The country increased in interest after leaving Neufchâtel. Normandy far exceeded my expectations, the land was well farmed, in some places lime was seen, in others stable dressing. The ploughs, though uncouth enough in appearance, appeared to do their work well. I speak of forty years ago. The harness, the harrows, and carts to be sure, were divertingly heavy and awkward. For iron work they seemed a century behind us. On descending a steep hill, I saw a waggoner unloose all his horses but one out of six. He then hooked five behind, and they exerted themselves to retard the waggon in place of a

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drag going down hill, the animals clearly understanding what they were about. I must confess, I liked to see those vast sweeps of corn land, and roadside apple trees, studded with islands of arborage having a farm-house in the centre. Before entering the Norman city, for several miles, the châteaux stood at the road sides, the summer retreats of the merchants and manufacturers. They were mostly shut up as if their owners had retired to the town to pass the winter.

The view of the most faithful of his cities, as Richard Cœur de Lion called it, I thought imposing from the Amiens road, the more so as I had never anticipated it. The Seine is indeed a lovely river, running along the chord of the fine crescent beneath, and studded with green islands, bright as so many emeralds. Crossing the Boulevards, I alighted at the Hotel de France, Rue de Carmes, kept by a M. Marc, a host having a very good opinion of himself—c’est moi. The next day I got a lodging in the Boulevard Cauchoise, an agreeable site, very different from the dingy narrow streets of the older parts of the city.

There was little prejudice visible against the English. If the feeling existed in some, which can hardly be doubted, it was repressed by the civil manner of the larger number. I encountered in “M. Pomme de Terre,” or “M. Godam,” all the insult I ever received, and that did not occur half a dozen times. The country people displayed much kindness, and were often not sparing of their hospitality. This might have been owing to the conduct of the British troops as contrasted with that of their allies, but it is only fair to remark that it was displayed in places where the foot of the

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British soldier had never trod. The people declared they were tired of war. Both nations seemed as if they felt a desire to know something more of each other. Some English crossed the water, and got no farther than Calais, others reached Abbeville, and returned home full of complaints of the state of things in France, which had the sin of differing from that to which alone they had been accustomed. The Duke of Wellington’s arrival in Paris, with every means at his command for speed, occupied nearly forty hours. Thus the rate of travelling now and at that time may be tested. I met no travelling Englishmen on the road. They generally took the broadest, shortest and most frequented way, in order to ‘see the country,’ being always in a hurry. A brother of the poet Campbell superintended a manufactory at Rouen, but I did not know this until I had quitted the city.

Rambling along the fine quay on the bank of the Seine, I observed a news-room or estaminet open. One person there was an Englishman. He proved to be Mr. Roper Curzon afterwards Lord Teynham. He had taken a house there for his family, and had lived unmolested with all his children except his eldest son, during Napoleon’s Hundred Days after the return from Elba. I found few or no English had arrived in the city recently, except Sir Henry Blackwood, so well known in our naval annals. He did not like a large manufacturing place, and quitted for Paris. I heard many stories of the insolence of the Prussians while in Rouen. They kept guns on the quay loaded, and matches lighted. If an unlucky Frenchman came too near an artilleryman, the latter would give him a kick

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and bid him get out of the way, in his German jargon. The barriers were occupied by Prussian troops. One of the officers quartered himself in a fine house in the Boulevards, belonging to a single lady. He took possession of the best rooms, in which he received his dirty men on all occasions. He made the servants wait upon him, and if they did not bring what he wanted, though he could only converse by signs, he smashed an expensive mirror with his cane, or knocked a glass chandelier to pieces. The poor lady was kept in continual fear. The faithless Prussians well merited all they got from the French in return for the duplicity of their perfidious court, both towards England and France, prior to the battle of Jena.

Two royalist officers whom I met at dinner, had both been emigrants. One of them was busy in raising a regiment for the service of Louis XVIII. He belonged to the cavalry, and had brought over eighty fine English horses, having grooms of the same country. Both were gentlemanly men, but could not tolerate

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Napoleon. I used to annoy them by speaking of his great talents. They admitted he was a man of some ability, but he could not be a legitimate monarch—he was a usurper like our Cromwell.

“You must admit that Cromwell was a most useful man to his country,” I observed.

“Why then, gentlemen, the larger part of your countrymen must be reprobate; they were attached to Bonaparte.”

“But, if divine authority appointed monarchs, it must have appointed the first king of France, and of all countries. I believe that

‘Le premier des rois fut un soldat heureux.’

We must go to the origin of things.”

“True,” I replied, “and the second too. Napoleon, emperor of France, must have been equally appointed of God, or he could not have reigned.”

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I visited, several times, the theatre of the native city of the great Corneille. I traced historically and locally the footsteps of our forefathers in the older edifices, and was presented with a sketch of the old fort erected by Henry V., destroyed a few years before to make room for barracks. I explored the antiquities since rendered so familiar by tourists, such as St. Maclou, the Abbey of St. Ouen, and the cathedral. I grieved, in the stillness of the night, over the fate of la Pucelle, at the foot of her statue. Examined the fountain of the Stone Cross, the Abbey of Jumièges, and the amphitheatre of Lillebonne, taking notes of things since become more familiar. I made nearly all my excursions on foot, sometimes walking for seven or eight successive hours.

There, too, I heard a tribute of praise paid to my countrymen. When forty thousand of the allied troops, with corresponding artillery, entered the city, the mayor who was a staunch Bonapartist, declared he should never forget the honourable conduct of the English to the citizens. If a pound of meat more than

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the supply ordered to be furnished by the city was weighed out, it was always sent back. Nothing violent marked the steps of our soldiers on the march. Though all hostilities had ceased, the Prussians stole poultry, eggs, and similar things, from the poorest cottagers—all, in fact, they could lay their hands upon, and that too when fully supplied by the proper authorities. The populace showed their feeling towards the Prussians most unequivocally; and blood would have been shed but for the activity and incessant watchfulness of the police in keeping order. One specimen of John Bullism I cannot forget. An English dragoon, on guard at his officer’s quarters near the Place de la Pucelle, was insulted by a carter smacking his whip at him, under the idea that the soldier could not move from his post. Depositing his sword and gloves in the sentry-box, the dragoon went up to the fellow, and gave him a severe drubbing with his fists, and then resumed his duty. The people wondered he did not punish the affront with the flat of his sabre. The story flew all over the city. The boys came up squaring their fists in a ludicrous way, “Vous boxie, Monsieur Anglais.”

The Duke de Castries was at this time governor, a returned emigrant, and a polished man of the true Bourbon school—one who as Dumouriez said, would have thought all France ruined if an individual came to court with ribbon in place of buckles in his shoes. He was not popular, but then Rouen was not much attached to the dynasty just restored. The citizens said they had had enough of blood and enough of the Bourbons. They wanted to follow their occupations in

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peace, being as tired of Napoleon’s wars as of the pretensions of those of whose rule they had still too many inerasable and painful recollections. This feeling was deep-rooted. There was no equality of class with the Bourbons as under Bonaparte. This alone was sufficient in memory to make the Bourbon race hateful. The citizens boasted of their Corneilles, Fontenelles, Bocharts, and other great men; but the breed seemed extinct among the Rouenese when I sojourned there. Cotton manufactures are not an atmosphere congenial to art or genius. The air is too heavy to permit the heaven-gifted spirit to pierce through the denseness into the region of light and glory that can alone sustain them.

I saw the tomb of Agnes Sorel, of which some sacrilegious hand had shaped out a balcony, having stolen it from the Abbey of Jumieges. It bore the date 1449. How little in the character of good taste to carry from its resting-place the memento of the Gentille Agnès.”

My notes on Normandy would be antique to Englishmen of the present day. The same remark will

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apply to the institutions, but I cannot omit the pleasure I derived, almost daily, from access to the fine library in the Abbey of St Ouen, or from exploring the churches, from thirty-seven, once filled with lazy ecclesiastics, now reduced to twelve Catholic and one Protestant. Besides the thirty-seven churches, there were seventeen chapels, seven hospitals, five lazarettoes, and forty-eight monasteries or convents, to eighty thousand souls, a goodly proportion of Levites. One church was used as a smithery, another as a foundry, and a third, became a diligence receptacle. The painted glass windows, some richly painted too, remained most of them in their places, and the hammer resounded or carriage rolled over inscribed gravestones. It was painful but right, for an overgorging religion must be medicined, or it will eat up its supporters. St. Ouen’s Abbey, afterwards applied to municipal purposes, contained, before the revolution, the following precious relics, of which the list was given me with the assurance of its accuracy. The ‘Times’ paper, in a leading article, called the Mohammedans of the East ‘Pagans.’ Now if there be any creed free from the taint of idolatry, and image, or symbol worship, it is that of Mahomet. The Mosaic was not more inimical to idolatry. Christianity, as it was promulgated by its founder, was not more so. Mahomet was an impostor, but the faith he founded is not Paganism. Half of those who call themselves Christians, bow down to images and pictures, and are much more of Pagans. These trumpery objects of sacred regard, to which I allude, a Mahommedan would have scorned as superstitious fooleries. A bit of the Holy Cross set in gold—a piece of the basin in which Christ washed the feet of his

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disciples—a piece of the column to which Our Saviour was bound—a part of the sponge used by Our Saviour—a stone, part of Calvary, where Christ was crucified—the bones of St. Anne and St. George—the top of the rod of Moses—the head of St. Benite, one of the eleven thousand virgins—the hand of St. Sebastian—some relics of the four Evangelists, and other trumpery. The Huguenots scattered them, but they were replaced and not utterly destroyed till 1793.

An English commissary on half-pay, who had not been in France before, made Rouen in his tour, coming from Dieppe. Like most of his countrymen, the first wine he called for was champagne. The weather was hot, the wine agreeable, and one bottle did not suffice. Intoxication from the gas in this wine, though its effects are more transient, is much more violent than that from alcohol alone. He went intoxicated to the theatre, and seeing a box nearly empty, though told it belonged to the governor, forced his way into it. An aide-decamp, who occupied it, remonstrated and opposed his entrance. He was knocked down for his pains. Two or three gendarmes came to the rescue, and the offender not without difficulty, was lodged in prison. By the interference of his countrymen, the authorities permitted him to be released on giving security to the extent of seventeen hundred francs to stand his trial. The money was duly lodged, but the culprit preferred forfeiting his cash to taking his trial, and bolted off to

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England, not to visit France again in a hurry. I went to the prison, and a miserable place it was. There were then but too many such disgraceful examples shown by Englishmen.

While here I had news of Sheridan’s death. It struck me like the removal of an old landmark. His name I had heard spoken of as well as his eloquent speeches before I could know their merits—even before I could read them. When I heard him speak subsequently, I was delighted, so ready and eloquent, so much to the point. He used to visit the Northumberland coffeehouse, which stood near where Wyld, the map-seller lives now, and I often went there to take a glass of wine. Not formally introduced, it was enough to make his acquaintance, to join in conversation with a friend of his, whom I knew, and thus slide into it. The papers had been rendering certain stories of his pecuniary difficulties. On one occasion, I wrote the following, which was put into his hands, not knowing the author—

Sheridan our pity’s given that thou Art not more wealthy if less witty, Though then alas! but few had gain’d And thousands must have had our pity.

Mike Kelly, whose manners were so much after the taste of that time as those who knew him many years after Sheridan’s death can vouch, was an enthusiastic trumpeter of Sheridan’s virtues and defects, and had a complete collection of anecdotes about him. The portraits in the magazines of Sheridan in his earlier or middle life, bear no resemblance to him at the period I first saw him. Rowlandson and Dighton hit him off well in their caricatures, with his rubicund visage, flushed nose, and a cast of feature which spoke of his resolute convivialities, and obliterated the expression which won the heart of Miss Linley. He was wonderfully quick at repartee, despite Moore’s statement that he prepared so much of it beforehand. Neither Pitt nor Fox could move the passions of their auditors like Sheridan. His voice, in his addresses to the electors in Covent Garden, I think I should recognize even now, if I were blindfolded.

I was on the point of removing to Gisors, when I received a letter from my old friend Demaria at Naples, whom I have mentioned as making one of the party on many of our excursions with Turner. He always thought he should prefer the sunny clime of Italy to that of England, and at last took up his abode there. He detailed his adventures in the following letter, in which his allusions to Englishmen picture the time.

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