'Of the late sovereign, several oddish traits are related. In the sharpest weather of winter, he had every morning a cold bath, for the purpose of bracing his superannuated muscles against the encroachments of age.'-[Wonderful "oddity!"]- At night, he was quite as regularly in the habit of taking a drive through the forest, in an open carriage, by torch-light: on which occasions, a hat was rejected as an encumbrance and a superfluity.'-[" Oddish," certainly, if true; but we happen to know that the opera and scientific concerts occupied the late Grand Duke's evenings in a different manner.]—' He lived a great deal in the society of his opera-singers, with one of whom, in particular, he had been long on a footing of special intimacy. Yet have I heard him seriously held up by one of his subjects, a man of distinguished learning, as a prime pattern of piety and good morals: every Good Friday, it appeared, he used to shut himself up at his solitary devotions the greater part of the day, having previously taken the sacrament. His familiarity with the sex was considered, at his time of life, as innocent as that of the patriarch David.'-p. 281.

The rest of this passage we must suppress, as obscene, absurd, and profane. Of the ladies of Germany, our knight may be conceived to be a gallant and fair critic, when he admits that he went among those at Darmstadt with a preconceived and deeply-rooted idea of homeliness being the attribute of every rank and condition in father-land.'

'In point of fact, the ladies of Darmstadt are all remarkably homespun in their address and appearance; one reason of which may be, that they consort only with each other; or, when they have a réunion, it is for tea'-[The ladies of Sir Arthur's acquaintance doubtless prefer Mrs. Browning's beverage.] and stocking-knitting, on which occasions not even a son or a husband is allowed to be present. Yet was I so singularly fortunate, by a mistake of Lady Faulkner's, who was invited to an evening tea-party, and deemed it a fair unquestionable sequitur that I should be included in the invitation, as to spend a whole evening with some dozen and a half of these excellent, thrifty housewives. It is impossible that Clodius, when detected at the mysteries of the Bona Dea, could have been more stared at and perused" than I found myself on entering the room. I instantly made a move to retire, but it was overruled. The creatures I found, as was very natural from their secluded habits, a little shy of me at first; but this soon went off, and I hardly recollect having ever spent a more agreeable evening, or enjoyed a more intelligent conversation. The majority spoke French; and some were by no means defective in my own language.'-pp. 276, 277.

Of the accuracy of our chiaro obscuro knight, we must give one or two specimens:—

'Baden, as a watering-place, began first to be known after the holding of the Congress of Sovereigns at Rastadt in 1799.'-vol. ii. p. 145.

Baden

Baden was well known to the Romans as the Civitas Aurelia Aquensis, as is proved by the remains of Roman baths, found in abundance there, and of which Caracalla is said to have been the chief author. It has, for centuries, been frequented by the Ger man princes and nobles.

Of the Gardens of Schwetzingen, he says

'About three millions sterling have been expended in their completion; and it takes fifteen millions of florins annually to keep them in repair.'-p. 177.

Fifteen millions of florins (one million and a half of pounds sterling) is about four times the amount of the revenue of the Grand Duke of Baden, the owner of these and about seven other palaces and gardens! The magnificent Elector Palatine Charles Theodore, with a revenue at least treble that of the Grand Duke, and the main author of the costly beauties of Schwetzingen, used to spend 66,000 florins, about 6600l., upon them. We are quite sure the present Grand Duke does not expend one-third of that sum on a place where he never resides.

There are but few objects in Cassel much worth specification: it is a gilded bauble.'-vol. i. p. 57.

From the days of Reisbeck and Doctor Moore, down to those of Russell and Mrs. Trollope, every traveller has ranked Cassel, for situation and plan, ornament and general effect, as one of the most beautiful cities of Europe. Undoubtedly, Napoleon and King Jerome so esteemed it.

Of the present Grand Duchess of Baden, the daughter of Gustavus, the unfortunate dethroned King of Sweden, he speaks thus accurately, decently, and politely :—

'The royal family' (the grand ducal family) are very general favourites. The reigning Grand Duchess is an amiable personage, and of no very moderate pretensions to personal attractions. Her only fault is, that she is rather niggardly of bestowing the light of her countenance on her loving subjects, whom she treats like Turks, that is, with all the hauteur of a sultana. There is an anecdote of her, which has too general a currency to be altogether a fiction: that, on some late occasion of her holding a drawing-room or levée, this great lady had the cartel so arranged as to have her nobility placed rank and file on one side, and those not of their order on the other. After the customary affability of making glad the heart of the noble portion of her company was over, her derrière all the while to the goats on the other, she turned short, as the narrative recites, upon her august heel, and made her retreat without so much as deigning them one look or smile of favour, to sweeten existence or smooth their despair. Poor devils! whom, no doubt, she had invited from the most laudable of motives-that of teaching them to know their place in society, by seeing how she treated their superiors.'-pp. 160, 161.

A more

A more coarse and vulgar libel was never penned. It is the perpetual error and absurdity of writers of this school, coarsely to abuse individual princes and princesses for those marked distinctions as to rank amidst which they are born, and which, instead of being aggravated, are undoubtedly, in Germany (as in England) much softened by the kind-hearted and frank demeanour of the individuals, and of none more so than the amiable and cultivated woman whom Sir Arthur attacks. That some such anecdote as the above (if it be not a mere blundering exaggeration of the tourist) may have found currency among the sort of people to whom Sir Arthur had introduction, is just possible; but that this unpretending wife of one of the most popular of German sovereigns-herself a very general favourite,' according to Sir Arthur's admission-should treat, on any social occasion, the non-noble portion of the company (whether separated by custom from the nobles or not) with any intentional discourtesy, we should by no means believe on much higher authority than that of Sir Arthur Faulkner.

6

Sir Arthur, of course, bedaubs the German universities with his panegyric. Not possessing German enough to understand a lecture,' and of course not enough for the purposes of conversation, he ventures the most extravagant eulogies not only on the undoubted learning of the professors, but the very orderly' demeanour of the students; contrasting both, in a spirit of bitter prejudice and a style of blundering verbosity, with Oxford and Cambridge, of which it is evident he knows exactly nothing.

How can Sir Anybody write such unhappy trash as this?

In our universities, when this active principle (emulation) is roused at all, it is usually limited to the paltry prize of class honours, which when won, the ambition of the aspirant subsides, perhaps ceases altogether. The walls of the university bound the whole horizon of his aspirations. But if the German student has, comparatively, few of these prizes, he has one worth them all, though more distant to his view-he is taught to look to his education as the means of procuring fame and distinction, not in the university alone but in the world.'-vol. i. p. 174.

Is

Can this Irish knight have mixed with educated persons either here or in Ireland, and yet suppose that English university men are content with the paltry prize of class honours,' and do not look to education as the means of distinction in the world? he ignorant, that ten of the fifteen judges now on the bench in Westminster Hall are high wranglers and prizemen from our two universities?—that nearly one-half of our most eminent practising lawyers gave a similar promise of their fame? Does he know that the primate of all England, and the four first in consequence of our Bishops, all obtained high academical reputation ?—that

the

the two Chancellors of England preceding the present, and the present Chief Justice and his two predecessors, were equally distinguished?-while the two front rows of the old House of Commons (of course, on a matter of acquirement and honourable distinction, we do not refer to the new) were crowded with the firstclass men of the two universities? Has Sir Arthur never heard that Lord Liverpool's cabinet, which pacified Europe and subdued Napoleon, (by way of fame and distinction) was nicknamed the Christ-Church Club? But we are ashamed of wasting even a page on this obtuse and conceited person.

ART. X.-Report from his Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor-Laws. London. 1834.

FOR years past we have seized every opportunity for exposing the signal evils occasioned by the mal-administration of the poor-laws, and have never ceased to urge the expediency of an unsparing correction of their systematic abuses. It was, therefore, with unaffected sincerity that we hailed the appointment of the late poor-law commission, as an earnest of the intention of government to probe the evil to its source, and apply, without shrinking, the necessary remedies. At the same time, we expressed our own opinion that the mass of information which had been previously collected by seven or eight parliamentary committees, afforded ample data for legislating on the subject-that there could be no question that the main causes of the mischief lay in the allowance system, and the want of some general control over the local administrators of the law-that the allowance system might be at once stopped by an enactment declaring its illegality, as it had been stopped, with complete success, by the resolution of individual magistrates or vestrymen in many of the most mismanaged districts and that some very simple means might be adopted by the Home Office, or other central authority, for reducing to a regular and uniform course the proceedings of the local administrators, whether magistrates or parish officers.

We own that our opinion still remains unchanged on these points. The inquiries and publications of the commission have certainly had the beneficial effect of creating a general concurrence of opinion as to the necessity of a reform; but we do not think that much new light has been thrown upon the subject by those researches, or that even the many ponderous volumes of evidence, collected and printed by the commission (which few individuals

individuals in the country, we believe, have had the courage to open), have added materially to the stock of really useful information which parliament previously possessed, with respect to the nature and extent of the mischief, or the means which had been in many instances successfully applied, and might be generally adopted, for its suppression.

On the other hand, there was this danger to be apprehended from the magnitude of the scale on which the inquiry was conducted, that the main points of the question might be smothered in the mass of details brought forward; and likewise that, in order to justify preparations so extensive, it might be thought advisable to follow them up by measures of corresponding magnitude, such as would exceed the necessity of the case, and by attempting too much, risk the success of the entire improvement. We are not sure that these anticipations will prove to have been very incorrect. The result, certainly, has been-not the simple ameliorations which we were desirous of seeing introduced into the system of poorlaw administration-but a fundamental change in the whole scheme of that important institution, under which-and mainly through which, as we believe-this country has for centuries enjoyed an internal tranquillity, security of property, and general prosperity unexampled in the history of nations. Whether this great change will be on the whole beneficial or not, he is a bold man who at present ventures to prognosticate. There is, in fact, so much of novelty and untried experiment in the law as it has been now enacted, that we fear the chances of failure are quite as numerous as those of success; and in a matter so deeply involving the moral and physical condition of the mass of the people, and, by consequence, the safety of society, the results of failure must be of a most awful character.

The Report, though unquestionably a very able document, yet disappointed the expectations we had cherished from the high character and qualifications of the gentlemen who composed the commission, the vast extent and minuteness of their researches, and the length of time during which their inquiry had been carried on. Two circumstances will, perhaps, account for the imperfections we regret: namely, first, the preconceived theories (not to call them prejudices) upon the main points at issue, of some of the commissioners and, secondly, the tremendous bulk of the evidence which had accumulated upon them through the diligence of their assistants, the replies to their hundred queries from their thousand respondents, and the unlimited communications poured in upon them from an endless number of volunteer advisers. This mass of matter was, in fact, too great for the digestion of any halfdozen persons, even though they could have given their exclusive

and