be there considered affectation or dulness. Why then this continual striving to prove that English manners are the best possible? They may be so for England, but it does not follow that they should be so every where else. But we will appeal to " Philip himself, better informed." In vol. ii., p. 89, we find the following remark:

'The proper medium for the calculation of etiquette, like that of the longitude, has never been adapted to every country, nor is there any subject upon which caprice holds such a paramount sway. In Naples, for instance, it is considered highly indecorous for a lady to appear alone in her carriage: she may have her lover and her friend beside her with impunity, but to appear alone is inadmissible. Nor would an Italian coquette, who attended in the least to appearance, be seen to enter a shop unescorted, or to walk across a room unprotected, though she would run from one end to the other with conspicuous bashfulness.'

Such are the whims of fashion and ton, they vary in shades from Lisbon to Pekin, and from Petersburgh to Palermo; little or no serious inference, as to real character, can be drawn from them. In Italy itself, a well bred Roman lady accuses Neapolitan society of vulgarity; the Florentines consider the Milanese as being coarse in their manners, and nuances are to be found from one end of the Peninsula to the other.

With regard to the morals of the country, although no general sweping censure is passed upon them in this work, yet the characters selected and brought forward, such as La Terracina, and other ladies of a similar turn, and the frequent recurrence to the old tale of cicisbeism and serventism, afford by no means a fair criterion for judging of Italian females. It is well known, that serventism is ou the decline; that this highly improper custom has been mostly confined to the upper ranks, and to the idle and the effeminate in the middling ones, that the industrious classes never suffered it, that the Italian villagers and peasantry abhor the very name of it, and consider it as a stigma on the inhabitants of the cities. The country people, who constitute of course the majority of the population, have been little noticed by travellers; but we will say, that among the Italian peasantry, there is as much virtue as among the peasantry of any country. We will make no invidious comparison, but let our author himself speak on the subject. At Castel Gandolfo, he says,

They met the throng of villagers, who had just finished their early matins, and were now cheerfully preparing to fulfil the different avocations of the day. This is an Italian custom: the church door is always open, and there are few hours in which some one priest does not attend to invite his fellow mortals to prayers; nor are there many who enter on their daily business, be the time of its commencement late or early, who do not first accept his warning, and invoke a blessing on their task.'-vol. ii., p. 9.

And such, in fact, are the Italian peasantry, from the Alps to the furthest point of Calabria; such their habits, such their humble, cheerful, contented existence: very different, in every respect, from

the dregs of the idle populace that swarm in the cities, and besiege foreigners with their dishonest or vicious importunities. Such is the peasantry whom the French republicans decimated, whom foreigners stigmatise as superstitious and blood-thirsty, and which some kind speculative patriot would regenerate, coute qui coute, even by fire and sword. And let it be observed, that the peasantry above described is that of the Roman states, which is hastily supposed to be the worst in Italy; but the same simplicity and contentedness is found in the extensive provinces of the kingdom of Naples, in those bordering on the Adriatic, in the Riviera of Genoa, in the vallies of Piedmont, in most districts, in short, excepting always the Maremma, which cannot be said to be inhabited by a resident population.

We will extract our author's remarks on some whimsicalities of the English abroad :

To be French, German, Russian, is an undeniable title to respect amongst the individuals of other nations; but, strange to say of the "proud English," it is not so with them abroad. "That must be an Englishman; I know it by his lounge." "Look at that Englishwoman's poke bonnet and tight little spencer! Where would you see a Parisian so vulgarly tidy?" "There was a row last night at the opera: of course it must have been kicked up by the English." These, and a hundred such remarks, which an Italian would not have the arrogance to make, nor the each courage to repeat, are the common observations of the English upon other abroad; they seem anxious to evade personal criticism, by sacrificing a holocaust to the fury of censure, and wish to purchase the suffrage of the Italians in their own favour, at the expense of the reputation of the best of their nation: but the base bribe is seldom accepted; and the fable of old is daily verified in the fate of those who are finally rejected by all classes, with still greater scorn than that with which they originally affected to treat their own.'-vol. i., pp. 142.

This fear of contamination, which many English exhibit towards one another, puzzles foreigners, who think that a man, far from his own land, ought to rejoice at meeting a countryman.

more

Open as this work is to severe criticism, it is by no means devoid The of interest, as a description of Italian scenery and manners. few strictures we have made upon it, and which we might vastly multiply, are applicable to most of the works which treat of that country. We are happy, however, to observe, that a liberal spirit begins to prevail on this subject. We are confident that many tours and travels, which were read with curiosity some years ago, would be scouted now. It is high time it should Providence has dispensed good all over the earth; every where there are compensations; Christianity produces beneficial effects on its votaries, of every denomination; and civil, if not political society, is brought every day, by the increase of instruction and the spread of intercourse, (more upon a level, in the various countries of Europe. Let us not overlook present advantages, in

be so.

the race after speculative ones: let us turn our eyes to the past, and we must gratefully acknowledge, that almost every nation in the civilised world has made greater progress towards wisdom and happiness, in the course of the last few years, than it had done before in as many centuries.

Several of the remarks which we have made on English Fashionables Abroad,' apply with still more force to the third work on our list, Historiettes.

These volumes may be considered as a counterpart to "The English in Italy," under an altered title; a work upon whose merits we have taken occasion to express our opinion*. The difference between the two productions, such as it is, appears to us to be in favour of the junior publication; for we perceive, in the pages of the Historiettes,' that the decorations of foreign idioms, and of those other little peculiarities, which merit only the name of conceits and pedantries, have completely lost their hold on the imagination of this author. Neither does he any longer see the policy, so far as respects himself, nor the justice, as far as others are concerned, of ostentatiously telling the world, that his acquaintance with English travellers is limited to a profligate class of our countrymen, and confounding with them, absurdly enough, the high-minded and virtuous families, whom taste and intellectual curiosity have prompted to migrate to the Continent. The attempt at a resemblance to the popular work, entitled "Highways and Byeways," which struck us as having been characteristic of the English in Italy," is likewise very visible in the "Historiettes ;" and the approximation to the merits of Mr. Grattan's production, is in both instances pretty nearly the same.

The scenes of the two principal stories are laid in Switzerland, with the localities of which the author appears to be tolerably conversant, and the interest of the narratives is connected with some of those domestic revolutions which were effected, to an infinite extent, on the Continent, by one or other of the violent political convulsions of the last century. There is scarcely a tale, in the three volumes, which does not embrace elements of the strongest interest. The remark applies particularly to the Regicide's Family,' and the Fall of Berne.' If they fail, in a great measure, to produce a decisive and powerful impression, we must impute the failure to the circumstance, that the author brings too many characters on the scene; and that he gives them all an equal claim to the sympathy of his reader, who feels no more concern about any one individual than another of the personages before him.

The obvious course to success, in compositions like the present, is to introduce some particular object of attention, of such controlling eminence in the story, as that every thing else shall tend to, and

*

Monthly Review, former series, vol. cviii., p. 184.

be ultimately engrossed by it. The neglect of this unity of design constitutes the leading defects of the volumes before us. Incidents and characters are so multiplied upon each other, that it is sometimes difficult to say which facts and personages are principal or subsidiary.

The story of the Regicide' is a remarkable instance of this want of skill and arrangement. Driven from his native country, France, upon the restoration of the Bourbons, and condemned to pass a life of exile on the Swiss border with his family; there shunned by society, compelled likewise to make his children. sharers of his seclusion; he himself, his possible fortunes, his singular habits, his griefs, and not improbable consolations; all these sources of interest might have been rendered highly available instruments in fixing the sympathies of a reader. But his attention is drawn off to other persons; he loses sight of the Regicide, and, taken away from the natural current of the story, his mind is employed upon a succession of common-place accidents and events, the agents or sufferers in which, possess not the slightest claim to his consideration.

The Fall of Berne' is more closely interwoven than the tale we have just been considering, with the events of the French revolution. The story itself is apparently of no more importance to the author, than so far as it is a vehicle for some details respecting a few of the most celebrated incidents in the early stages of that extraordinary crisis, and an account of some partial struggles to which it gave rise, in one of the cantons of Switzerland immediately adjoining the French territory. The substantial matter of this tale would have received ample justice, if it had been abridged to about half the compass to which it is at present protracted. A considerable portion of what is related, has been either long familar to the public, or is inherently undeserving of the minuteness and labour bestowed upon it.

The 'Historiettes,' however, convince us, that this author is not destitute of imagination, and that he possesses a considerable ease and fluency of expression, occasionally rising into true spirit. Generally too, but we regret to say, not always, he manifests a desire to treat with candour and liberality, opinions not his own, and peculiarities, both national and individual, of which he cannot approve. Of the tale of Falkland,' it is scarely possible for us to speak in measured terms. We cannot acquit the author of the consciousness, that he has purposely and wickedly enlarged the materials from which good men may reasonably apprehend great danger to the purity of manners.

The theme he has selected, necessarily leads him into the frequent description of scenes, in which a more or less degree of guilt is uniformly encountered. The best powers of fancy are taxed-the glowing language of passion is exhausted, in order to set off these passages. Our understandings and our consciences are sought to

be soothed into neutrality-and the interest which we are called upon to feel, in behalf of guilt, is but too apt to modify to our sense the deformity of the crime that constitutes it.

Lady Emily Mandeville, the wife of one whom she did not marry for love, but in whose society and that of her children she might have spent a useful and contented life, suddenly conceives a passion for a casual visitor, accidentally sojourning in her neighbourhood, She cherishes the unhallowed flame-and surrenders herself headlong to be consumed by it. Who is the female, that follows the gradations of unlawful affection, and traces it from its origin to its final triumph over sacred vows, and honour and reason-will not feel herself solicited by such a tale as this, to prefer one rapturous hour (as it is painted), of clandestine indulgence, to a whole age of steady paced tranquil virtue?

But what shall be said of the ethics, by which Falkland is enabled to second the successful appeals of passion to his mistress? May we not dread, that that philosophy shall appear not merely specious, but irrefutable to many, which, when resolved into its essential qualities, becomes only falsehood and ingenuity? When the sophistical suitor assures Lady Emily, that disgrace changes its nature when encountered for a beloved object-that the love which is nursed through shame and sorrow is of a deeper and holier nature than that which is reared in pride, and fostered in joy-that the adultery of the heart is no less criminal than that of the deedand that there is something of pride and triumph to dare all things, even crime itself, for the one to whom all things are as noughtwhere, we ask, is the fact, the inference or suggestion, which belies or tends to disparage such abominable tenets? Or rather, is not the whole book an elaborate gloss on a code of inverted morality, where virtue is seen to compound with passion, and passion itself finds impunity in its inordinate excess?

But, if the summer-tide of indulgence were followed by a season of suffering and repentance-if the history of Falkland added another to the thousand recorded instances, which serve to shew how indissoluble is the connection which subsists between error and chastisement; then, indeed, the portraiture of the criminal pleasure might be endured for the sake of the moral. But the story before us is framed on a different model. No symptoms of remorse-no "compunctious visitings," distract the heart of Lady Emily Mandeville, from the communion which she maintains to the latest moment with her paramour. Her case is calculated to raise the impression, that happiness may still be enjoyed by the violator of every sacred and social obligation, and every decent form which she was wont to respect; and any disaster, any untoward incident, by which the lovers are afflicted or discommoded, is altogether distinct in its origin, from a sense of the guilt which they have

incurred.

A few more productions like Falkland, and works of imagina