body, are reviewed almost every morning in the Park, where I suppose the same folks sometimes come to see them, yet none of all near where I stood could tell me the name of one officer: that, I insist upon, is peculiar to the English.

I paid some visits, and went to see Greenwich Hospitall, which is a ridiculous fine thing. The view is very pretty, which you see just as well in a rary-show glass. No wonder the English are transported with a place they can see about them in. Kensingtoun palace looks better within than without, and there is some very fine marbles, pictures, and mirrors in it. But I could not see the private apartment of the old goodman, which they say is a great curiosity. There are a small bed with silk curtains, two sattin quilts and no blanket, a hair matress; a plain wicker basket stands on a table, with a silk night-gown and night-cap in it; a candle with an extinguisher; some billets of wood on each side of the fire. He goes to bed alone, rises, lights his fire and mends it himself, and nobody knows when he rises, which is very early, and is up severall hours before he calls any body. He dines in a small room adjoining, in which there is nothing but very common things. He sometimes, they say, sups with his daughters and their company, and is verry mery, and sings French songs, but at present he is in very low spirits. Now, this appearance of the King's manner of living would not diminish my idea of a king. It rather looks as if he applyed to business, and knew these hours were the only ones he could give up to it without having the appearance of a recluse, and that he submitted to the pagantry rather than make it his only bussiness.'

Mrs. Calderwood on the English Cuisine is particularly meriWe have room only for one paragraph of this rich

torious.

section.

'As for their victualls they make such a work about, I cannot enter into the taste of them, or rather, I think they have no taste to enter into. The meat is juicy enough, but has so little taste, that, if you shut your eyes, you will not know by either taste or smell what you are eating. The lamb and veall look as if it had been blanched in water. The smell of dinner will never intimate that it is on the table. No such effluvia as beef and cabbadge was ever found at London.' [Alas! alas !] "The fish, I think, have the same fault. As for the salmond, I did not meddle with it, for it cut like cheese. Their turbet is very small by ours, but I do not think it preferable. Their soll is much smaller, and not so much meat on them; they are like the least ever you saw; were it not that they are long and narrow, I should think them common flounders. Their lobsters come from Norway or Scotland.'-pp. 116

120.

The party, after making a visit or two in Kent, proceed to Harwich, and there embark for Holland.

Saturday, 26th June.-We set out early for fear of being too late for the paquet, and breakfasted at Colchester. We were attended at breakfast by a drawer, whom I questioned according to custom about

the

the town and the country, and from whom I received much more satisfaction than common, upon which I was going to declare him the smartest Englishman I had seen, when, unfortunately for England, he turned out to be a Frenchman transplanted young.'-p. 124.

We had no intention to trespass on Mrs. Calderwood's continental chapters. Here, however, is one sentence from her description of Rotterdam :

'The Dutch maid-servants do nothing on earth but wash the house and the streets, and the veshells of the house and kitchen; none of them wash their linnen at home, they are all washed in publick fields and brought in wet, so that, when the maids have not them to dry and dress, they have nothing to do but slester and wash. They have plenty of water, and every house has a pump, and they will have a pump of water in every story. This is one inducement to wash, but the originall of it is the necessity, as the streets would in a few days gather a fog betwixt the bricks, and that in a short time would certainly breed a vermine.'-p. 135.

Her description of a Dutch house brings out some curious revelations concerning the interior finishing, &c., of the time in Scotland. It would appear, for instance, that Mrs. Calderwood viewed a door-bell as quite a novelty; but indeed, according to Chambers, it was not much before 1756 that the knocker supplanted the aboriginal rasp and pin in Auld Reekie.

The bricks of which the houses are built are vastly hard: Mr. Crawfurd had forgot to bore a hole for a bell (which, in every house, is put so as the handle is at the side of the outer door, that, instead of knocking, you ring), and in peircing that hole through the brick, it was as hard to do as if it had been marble.'—p. 140.

6

We conclude with a paragraph which, more than any other in this book, must have delighted the members of the Maitland Club of Glasgow :'—

'Most of the reproaches our country meets with can only be the effects of want of enquiry or reflection. I once thought that Scotland might carry on a greater trade than it does, from its advantageous situation for the sea; but if they should import, who is to take it off their hands? there is no country behind them to supply, who has not the advantage of the sea-ports, which is the case of Holland, who has all Germany to supply; neither have they a great demand at home, like England, which is a great country, and most part of it inland, that must be supplied from the trading towns on the coast. Or, to what country can they transport their merchandise, which they have imported more than serves themselves, that cannot be as cheap served by nearer neighbours? They have no East India goods, which are almost the only goods that are demanded by all the world, so that no country, which has not one or more of these advantages, can ever become a country of great trade.'-p. 144.

Could

Could this good lady of 1756 have had second-sight enough to catch a glimpse of her native Clyde as it is in 1842, what could have persuaded her that she had her own dearly-beloved and judiciously-admonished Scotland before her vision!

We are tempted to conclude our review of a book which perhaps few will ever handle, with an extract from one which is, or ought to be, as well thumbed as any production of the present year-'The Mirza' of the wise humourist, and gentle satirist, who more lightly and happily than any other writer conveys lessons to his own countrymen, in the shape of mirthful delineations of the absurdities of outlandish faith and practice. Mr. Morier represents himself as listening to one of the brilliant tales of wonder with which his friend-and indeed hero-the professional storyteller in chief was accustomed to cheer the evening hours of the late Shah of Persia. On its conclusion he joined the royal circle in extolling the merit of the narrative, but incautiously signified his suspicion of its marvellous incidents. There was a burst of indignation at such Pyrrhonism; but the Frank rejoins:—

6 66

Perhaps, I too, may assert some facts relating to my own country, to which you may not be willing to give credence, but to the truth of which I in my turn am ready to take my oath."

Oh-oh, well said and well done," said the prince, his words echoed by the poet, and repeated by the rest of the company. Speak on-let us hear-our ears are open. We have given up our souls to you."

"I then said:" Perhaps every one present has seen a ship, and though they may not have sailed in one, have remarked how it is impelled by wind; perhaps, too, some may have been caught in a tempest, or observed its effects on the sea. Now, we have ships in my country, which, in defiance of storms and tempests, will make their way in the teeth of the wind, and thus perform voyages from one end of the world to the other."

'I paused awhile, after having made this assertion, to hear the remarks of the company. I could perceive incredulity in every face: a little scorn and contempt, perhaps, was associated with that feeling, but it was plain no one believed my words.

""Sahib ekhtiar. You are at liberty, of course, to affirm what you please," said the prince, "but to me it appears that what you have advanced is wholly impossible."

"What words are these?" said another. "You might as well say that I can thrust a spear through my enemy's body, and he not bleed, as to say a ship will go ahead against wind."

'I heard the word derough, derough-lie! lie! whispered about from mouth to mouth throughout the assembly, and I became convinced that I was totally disbelieved.

I then tried them upon another subject.

"There is another thing," said I, "to the truth of which I am ready

to

to take my oath. In my country our cities are lighted at night by the means of lanterns suspended on iron pillars. A subterranean vapour is made to circulate through our streets, which is led to the summit of the said pillars, and at a given hour men run about the city carrying a lighted taper in their hands, which they merely present to a small spiral tube, whence a flame is seen to issue, which, keeping alive the night through, illuminates the city like day, the inhabitants meanwhile sleeping soundly, unapprehensive of evil consequences.'

found

"Where in the name of Allah," said the prince, "have you words to affirm such things? A subterranean fire running underground all through your streets, and nobody afraid! Yours must be a world different from ours, inhabited by men of a different formation to Persians. I cannot believe what you say.'

"People may talk of Persians being liars," said one of the company, "but as there is but one Allah, and Mahommed is his prophet and Ali his lieutenant, let them go to the Franks for the future. Wonderful assertions have we heard to-day."

"Now I begin to understand," said a man of the law who was present, "why Franks are unbelievers of our faith, the ever-blessed and only true faith of Islam-why they reject our prophet and despise his sayings, while they adhere with so much pertinacity to their own. See this Sahib-he tells us of things which cannot be true, and believes in them, whilst events which may occur every day, which so many people here present, men of respectability and worthy of confidence, have seen and heard of, he rejects. Is it not plain that the reputation which Persia has acquired for the sagacity and acuteness of her sons has been well acquired, whilst all the rest of mankind are kept in a state of total blindness? Let the Sahib forgive my words," said the speaker, turning himself to me, "but in truth our holy prophet legislated with all wisdom, when he said, "As for the unbeliever, all that is left for him is katl, katl, slay, slay."

6.66

66

May your shadow never be less," said I, addressing the man of the law; may your house flourish-we are grateful-we kiss the dust of your slippers!"'-The Mirza, vol. ii. pp. 23-27.

ART. IV. Poems by Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols. 12mo. London. 1842.

WHAT poetry might be in our time and land, if a man of the highest powers and most complete cultivation exercised the art among us, will be hard to say until after the fact of such a man's existence. Waiting for this desirable event, we may at least see that poetry, to be for us what it has sometimes been among mankind, must wear a new form, and probably comprise

VOL. LXX. NO. CXL.

2 c

elements

elements hardly found in our recent writings, and impossible in former ones.

Of verses, indeed, of every sort but the excellent there is no want: almost all, however, so helpless in skill, so faint in meaning, that one might almost fancy the authors wrote metre from mere incapacity of expressing themselves at all in prose-as boys at school sometimes make nonsense-verses before they can construct a rational sentence. Yet it is plain that even our magazine stanzas, album sonnets, and rhymes in corners of newspapers aim at the forms of emotion, and use some of the words in which men of genius have symbolized profound thoughts. The whole, indeed, is generally a lump of blunder and imbecility, but in the midst there is often some turn of cadence, some attempt at an epithet of more significance and beauty than perhaps a much finer mind would have hit on a hundred years ago. The crowds of stammering children are yet the offspring of an age that would fain teach them-if it knew how-a richer, clearer language than they can learn to speak.

It is hard in this state of things not to conceive that the time, among us at least, is an essentially unpoetic one-one which, whatever may be the worth of its feelings, finds no utterance for them in melodious words.

Yet our age is not asleep. Great movements, various activities, are heard and seen on all sides. In the lowest department, that of mere mechanics, consider what fifteen years have done. It was only in the autumn of 1830, following close on the French three memorable days of July, that the Duke of Wellington opened the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad. The population of the busiest region on this earth were assembled round him, whom all acknowledged as the greatest man in England, at the inauguration of a new physical power, then felt to double the strength and swiftness of human beings. While, among myriads of gravely joyous faces, the new machines travelled at a speed matching that of eagles, the life of a great statesman shot off on a darker and more distant journey, and the thrill of fear and pain at his destruction gave the last human tragic touch to an event which would at any rate have retained for ever an historic importance. The death of Mr. Huskisson startled the fixed bosom of the veteran soldier, and those who were near perceived a quiver of the lip, a movement of the eye, such as had hardly been caused by the most unlooked-for and dreadful chances of his mighty wars. To a calm observer, the emotion of the whole multitude, great and small, might strangely have recalled far-distant ages and the feelings with which ancient peoples held every great event as incomplete, wanting the blood of a victim-too often human

solemnly