to be expected from the kind and hearty writer, more than once a loving mention made. In Justice Talfourd literature lost a critic of a generous sort none too rife; indeed, he might almost adopt the words of old Menenius Agrippa:

For I have ever verified my friends

with all the size that verity Would without lapsing suffer, nay, sometimes, Like to a bowl upon a subtle ground,

I have tumbled past the throw:

the exemplary error (if error) of the critic being, to magnify merit, or even assume its existence, rather than to be niggard of applause, or scrupulous as to welcome. In these Supplementary Notes, among the complimentary allusions to contemporaries-lawyers, statesmen, priests, actors-we observe one to Lord Campbell, of whose legal arguments it is maintained that, "in comprehensive outline, exact logic, felicitous illustration, and harmonious structure," they excel all it ever fell to the critic's lot to hear;-another to Mr. Gladstone, whose faculty of truth-seeking, "applied to realities and inspired only by the desire to discover the truth, and to clothe it in language, assumes, in the minds of superficial observers, the air of casuistry from the nicety of its distinctions and the earnest desire of the speaker to present truth in its finest shades ;”—another to Father Faber, whose society, enjoyed in 1844 in Wordsworth's company, impressed the author of "Ion" with "a delightful recollection of the Christian graces of his deportment and conversation ;"-and, to quote an example of variety, another to Mr. Charles Kean, on his Sardanapalus, that "triumphant result of pictorial skill, and learning, and taste." Not that the Vacation Rambler is quite innocent of irony and sarcasm, however, when the occasion calls for it. He can say sharp things, for instance, of the external "make up" of Parisian artists, who "invite attention to the irregularities of nature by fantastic devices of art-cutting grizzled beards, red whiskers, and sandy moustaches into startling varieties of shape; bidding the scanty hair to fall over the shoulders in the greasiest of flakes, and affecting every strange combination of dirty and gaudy fashion. It would seem," adds the never ill-natured Rambler, "that personal vanity is so strong in each of these young men, that he thinks his particular deformity consecrated by being his own." With true-blue spirit, again, he records his estimate of a certain portrait at Versailles: "The recent naval achievements of France were irradiated by a portrait of the Prince Joinville, standing on the prow of a glittering ship, in our common sailor's neatest attire-tight blue jacket, open collar, loose black neckcloth, and snow-white trousers-the exact costume in which a very young lady dances the hornpipe in the Spoil'd Child-the type of dandified melodramatic seamanship." Lamartine is alluded to as the gentleman "who for a few days looked so glorious, and has since found that a nation cannot be governed by fine words." Mr. Holman, "the blind traveller," whom the Rambler met at Lyons, is none the more admired as a traveller for being blind, notwithstanding his own view of the subject. Of the Milanese Exhibition of the paintings of young Italy, he says: "It was intolerably radiant in colour, abounding in skies of deeper blue than Italy rejoices in, woods of the liveliest green, and ships and cities of amber; altogether a collection of gaudy impossi

bilities, few of which would be admitted at Birmingham." Of Naples he says: "How it is possible for English men and women to pass months in such a place, and bless their stars and call it luxury,' even if the satiated mosquitoes give them leave to sleep, is a mystery which has doubtless a solution-which I sought in vain." As he lingers, at evening, in St. Peter's at Rome, he sees three priests kiss the foot of the statue of Jupiter-Cephas, and kneel down before it, as if to pray; but next, "to our surprise, notwithstanding our experience of continental habits, each began zealously spitting on the beautiful pavement, as if it was a portion of his duty-I fear illustrating the habits which a priesthood, possessed of unlimited power, encourages by its example." This is not the Judge's only paper pellet at Romanism in the present itinerary.

To these illustrations of his mild indulgence in sarcasm and rebuke, let us add one more, referring to the hotel-book at the Montanvert, in which travellers inscribe their names, and some "perpetuate their folly for a few autumns. Among these fugitive memorials, was one ambitious scrawl of a popular and eloquent divine, whereby, in letters almost an inch long, and in words which I cannot precisely remember, he recorded his sense of the triumphant refutation given to Atheism by the Mer de Glace, intimating his conviction, that, wherever else doubts of the being of Deity might be cherished, they must yield to the grandeur of the spot; and attesting the logic by his name in equally magnificent characters." The Rambler appends his opinion that this poetical theist had wholly misapprehended the Great First Cause, and supposes him to imagine, that in proportion as the marks of order and design are withdrawn, the vestiges of Deity become manifest;-" as if the smallest insect that the microscope ever expanded for human wonder did not exhibit more conclusive indications of the active wisdom and goodness of a God than a magnificent chaos of elemental confusion." It is not for us to assume what the popular and eloquent divine may actually have meant; but at least we can suppose the Rambler to have misapprehended him, especially as he is oblivious of the wording of the entry: may not the pulpit poet have drawn his impression of a present God from the feelings, not the thoughts, inspired by the sublimities around him-from the sentiments of awe, the mysterious emotions of adoring wonder, the yearnings of religious worship, excited by such a scene, and by no means from a cold adjustment of logical mechanics, worked out by harmonious junction of Paley, Whately, and pocket microscope? Coleridge was not thinking of logic when he wrote (or translated, or adapted,-what you will) his Hymn before Sunrise, in the vale of Chamouni; and we can suppose the small poet (saving his Reverence) who wrote such a big hand, and whose theism seemed to his censor so out-of-place (of all places in the world) at the Montanvert, to have really meant very much the same as S. T. C., when he exclaimed,

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-

Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

WHO made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon?

GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, GOD!

The same honest avowal of indifference or distaste, wherever indifference or distaste was felt, which characterised Sir Thomas Talfourd's former "Rambles," is patent here also. It is refreshing to note his candid acknowledgments in every such case. No man was more ready, more eager even, to express in the most cordial way his satisfaction wherever it was felt; but he was above the trick of affecting an enthusiasm he did not feel. He found Versailles "tiresome," and he says so; the "huge morning" he spent there seemed "dragged out into eternity;" and its only consolation was the zest its tediousness imparted to a subsequent resort to claret and champagne. In the Bay of Naples he owns that he has been more deeply charmed by smaller and less famous bays." At Herculaneum he was "grievously disappointed," and was almost as glad to emerge from its "cold and dark passages that led to nothing," as from a railway tunnel. The dome of St. Peter's, when he first caught sight of it, on the road from Antium, "looked like a haycock," he says, "but soon afterwards assumed the improved aspect of a cow on the top of a malt-house." Entering Rome, he found the "famed Italian sky as filthy as a London fog;" he bewails the only too decisive contrast between the Capitol unvisited and the Capitol explored; and is indignant, for Coriolanus' sake, with that impostor and receptacle for vegetable refuse, the Tarpeian Hill. In Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" he could see "no presiding majesty; no balance of parts; nothing that stamps even the reality of a moment on the conception; nothing in this great handwriting on the wall 'to make mad the guilty and appal the free." The "Laocoon" he looked on with anything but a Winkelman's gaze. And in short, to leave Rome "was to escape," he confesses, "from a region of enchantment into the fresh air of humanity and nature; and, humiliating as the truth may be, I quitted it for ever without a sigh."

For ever! A new and touching emphasis is imparted to the phrase by the stroke which so suddenly laid the kind writer low. With the so recent memory of that stroke, it may seem frivolous, or worse, if we mention as another noticeable point in the "Rambles" his ever freely recorded appreciation of good cheer. But how take account of the "Rambles" at all, and not refer to this feature in the Rambler's individuality?-not, be it observed, that he was a "gastronome," but that he was healthily void of reserve in jotting down his interest in gastronomics. It had been unpardonable in Boswell to omit Dr. Johnson's creed and practice in this line of things. "Some people," quoth the sage, "have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else." So averred a Rambler of last century; a Plain Speaker on this as on most other topics. Now the Rambler with whom we have to do was guiltless of this "foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind." If, at Dieppe, he had to put up with a "coarse breakfast of blackish bread, cold boiled mutton, and straw-coloured coffee," he thought it a thing to be put down-in his book. He confesses how a due sense of "the eternal fitness of things" enforced on him the duty of drinking the best Burgundy he could procure in Dijon, "in gay defiance to the fever which so strangely but surely lurks beneath the sunset glow' of that insidious liquor;" how he "enjoyed some coffee and

cutlets" at Lyons; how "dinner came to his inexpressible relief" at Avignon; how wistfully he looked about in the dreary kitchen of a quasi-inn, but all in vain, "for a flitch of bacon, or a rope of onions, or a mouldy cheese, to hint of something that some one might eat, or for a battered pewter-pot, or even a rim of liquor-stain on a bench or table to indicate that once upon a time something had been drank there." Gratefully he recals the fare on board the steamer to Genoa; the sumptuous breakfast at ten; "then, four dishes of exquisite French cookery, with a bottle of clear amber-coloured dry Italian wine for each person, followed by a dessert of fresh grapes and melons or peaches, and rich dried fruits, with coffee and liqueurs," &c.; while "at five in the afternoon, dinner was served with similar taste, but with greater variety and profusion." At Genoa, he says, "To secure a dinner-the first object of sensible man's selfish purpose-by obtaining the reversion of seats at a table-d'hôte, we toiled as good men do after the rewards of virtue." At the same place, the "terrible brilliancy of the sunlight" scared him from the fatigues of sight-seeing, and "unnerved" him "for anything but dinner. That was welcome, though coarsely conceived and executed," &c. At the ancient capital of the Volsci, the fatal asylum of Coriolanus," although black stale bread and shapeless masses of roughhewn mutton and beef boiled to the consistency of leather, flanked by bottles of the smallest infrà-acid wine, constituted our fare, we breakfasted with the enjoyment of the Homeric rage, and were deaf to wise suggestions that we should be obliged to dine in Rome." In a rude inn at Montefiascone, 66 we satisfied the rage of hunger with coarse and plentiful repast of fish, beef boiled to leather, and greasy beans, accompanied by a pale white wine of an acidity more pungent than ever elsewhere gave man an unmerited heartburn." In an old palatial inn at Radicofani, "we enjoyed a breakfast of hard black bread, a large platter of eggs, some boiled beef of the usual consistency, and a great skinny fowl swimming in yellowish butter, with the true relish of hunger." Further illustrations are not wanting; and, not wanted.

Something like a qualm of conscience we feel, at leaving this book, without affording means of neutralising the impression producible by such shreds of literal table-talk, by a set-off of examples of the writer's grave and reflective mood, such as, the reader is cautioned, are fairly interspersed in the course of the Rambles. Half a dozen at the least we had marked for citation, but now is space exhausted, and we can only therefore refer to the Rambler's meditations on the career of Sir William Follett, on Philo-Romanism, and other occasional musings suggested by sights and sounds in foreign travel. And another huge omission must crave the pardon it deserves not; that of the descriptive sketches of scenery and men and manners, often pencilled with a grace and animation that make the omission more unpardonable still.

THE CHARACTER OF OUR FOE.

It has always been a subject of discussion among ethnographers, whether a Russian nation existed anterior to Rurik and the foundation of the Russian state. It is certain, at any rate, that the tribe with which the Varagians founded a state was one of the numerous Sclavonic races, which in their variety present a similar type, and, spite of the different character of their history, have retained it for centuries. The prominent trait of the Sclavonic character is the want of a consciousness of right and-in close connexion with it—of an inner yearning for development. The Sclavonic tribes appear continually to be chaotic masses, blindly credulous, sensual, living in the moment and only caring for the moment, without consciousness of individual freedom, hence obedient and servile, without desire or strength to resist despotism. Two undeniable historical facts describe the Sclavonic character more fully than any words could do: no Sclavonic state was ever founded without the most effectual impulse from without, and in none of these states, after their foundation, has a bürgher class been developed. That yearning for individual action, that thirst for independence, by which the Western citizen-classes liberated themselves from harsh oppression, are thoroughly wanting in the Sclavons. Hence they have been termed an Asiatic nation; and if by that we wish to indicate the want of that organised connexion existing among the Western nations, the expression is indubitably correct. They may be counted precisely in the same category with the numerous Asiatic races who live a savage natural life, without higher impulses,-only obeying the moment and the necessities of the hour,-but who, when aroused by a migration of the nations, blindly join the movement, and following some conqueror, traverse the world to plunder and destroy all they meet with. Even when formed into states, they have been able to offer no resistance, or at least a very insufficient one, to such national inroads.

The Sclavons are gentle, effeminate, melancholy, but at the same time cruel and bloodthirsty. In the annals of no nation do the heroes weep so much as among the Sclavons, and yet none commit, at the same time, such inhuman and refined acts of cruelty. A late author,* who praises the Russians because, although they destroy and annihilate, they do not torture, can have read but little Russian history. The Sclavons are patriotic, and willing to make the greatest sacrifices of self: their religion bids them see in their fatherland and in the ruler, who is the visible representation of it, the Deity himself, and self-devotion is most frequent. They are firm in their adherence to savageness and want of cultivation, to old customs and old dirt, and the less active their natural resistance is, on the other hand, they are truly a chosen nation of passive resistance when anything contrary to their nature is forced upon them. They evince a fanatic hatred for everything foreign, and display a national vanity as ridiculous as it is improper; and as is often found in individuals, that the most extreme arrogance is united with the utmost degree of ignorance-so appears to be the case with them as a nation; and the less an

* Bruno Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum.