THE CONVERSAZIONE,

ON THE LITERATURE OF THE MONTH.

The Colonel. I have been remarkably struck with a little volume "On the Preservation of Health," by Curtis, the well-known lecturer on the ear. It is exactly of the order which I should wish to see spread among the people. At once brief, clear, and intelligent, it gives a variety of important rules for the sustenance of man in mental and bodily vigour, controverts some prominent popular errors, and furnishes instruction to young and old in the great art of reaching old age in possession of the faculties, the activity and the enjoyments of a healthful frame.

The Barrister. Curtis is clever; and his little book is alike amusing and well informed. But, as an instance of the art of viewing things through professional spectacles, have you observed his description of the tender passion? Disappointment in love," says the aurist, "is one of the principal causes of suicide. The fact clearly proves the deranging effect of the passion upon the mental faculties." He then states the progress of the disease, as he terms the too ardent admiration (is that possible?) of the most admirable product of creation, a lovely woman"As the force of love prevails sighs grow deeper; a tremor affects the heart and pulse; the countenance is alternately pale and red; the voice is suppressed in the fauces; the eyes grow dim; cold sweats break out; sleep absents itself, at least till morning; the secretions become disturbed; and a loss of appetite, a hectic fever, melancholy, or, perhaps, madness, if not death, constitute the sad catastrophe." The description is excellent, true, and odd. I question whether Cupid, among all his disguises, ever found himself enveloped in the full costume of the College of Physicians before, acting the part of Sir Henry Halford, smelling to a gold-headed cane, and shaking his luminous head over a wound inflicted by a pair of coral lips or jet-black eyes.

The Rector. The Theatrical Copyright Act is beginning to produce its effects. Clever young writers, who would have been deterred by the old and evil condition of things, are now gradually trying their strength in dramatic publication. They cannot now see their plays destined to be strangled in the desk of some careless or overworked manager; or, if they published and attained popularity, see their work seized on by half a dozen theatres before their eyes. The friends of dramatic genius have secured to the author the right of giving or withholding. The theatre must now give an equivalent for the use of the printed play; and thus the experiment, at least, does not leave him at the mercy of the first manager of a minor theatre gifted with the organ of "appropriation."

The Doctor. Take a case in point. "Wallace," a tragedy constructed on the fall of the Scottish champion. Without troubling himself with the thousand evils born of the stage's delay, he tries his chance with the public through the press, and, according to the public acceptance, will command or submit to the decision of managers. "Wallace" has the advantage of a memorable historic name, a popular subject,

and a poetic time. Of the stage effect of tragedy it is almost impossible to speak until it has been tried on the stage; but it exhibits poetic powers of no usual order. One of the partisans of the great chieftain thus speaks:

"I want no guide-name but his resting-place;

If mountain, vale, moor, wood, or misty stream,
The haunt of witching elves at shadowy eve,
Or wizard cave, where midnight demons murmur
Their nameless orgies in the ear of silence,
And startle at the cave's unhallow'd echoes,
So indistinct, they scarce believe them such,
But dread that spirits darker than themselves
Are whispering horror!-

FLOREMMA.

Hush! You make me shudder.

GRAHAM.

A guide for me! I know the pathless wild
By intuition, like its guardian genius-
And Wallace is our master. Canst thou name
A place unknown? The giddy precipice
Where fairies weave their beautiful illusions
To moonlight melody, and dance, foot-winged,
On life's last landmark; or the haunted tower,
Where desolation beckons wandering ghosts
Who miss'd their tombs, and fly the star of dawn
Perturbedly? Or the lone cataract,

Where morning's sun surprises woodland nymphs,
Disporting down the foamy dashing wave?

ELIZA.

Hast thou been up so early?

GRAHAM.

Up so early?

Why I have mused upon the evening star

Till heaven's bright herald told the noon of night.
And I have watch'd calm Nature's awful sleep
With as much transport as a mother gazes
O'er dreaming infancy-till morning smiled

In blushing loveliness upon the world.

I know each scene of wild romantic beauty,

Where magic breathes, or strains of rapture break
On wonder's ear; amid the solitude

I know each scene of popular tradition,

Veil'd by the hallow'd wing of mystery,
And peopled by the spirits of our fathers,

Who, bending from yon purple cloud of vengeance,
Call forth their children to the battle-field."

The Barrister. This is vigorous versification-and versification is a great deal in the drama. The man who has poetic language and clear conceptions wants but little to attain excellence in the drama. Character and plot are still essential; but nothing will compensate the want of the poetic faculty. To the present writer I should say, Go on and prosper. Let him accumulate ideas, observe manners, and delineate action. Let him seize on some striking plot, clothe it in the colours

which his fancy furnishes, and then throw it to take its fortune on the stage. The drama, the most difficult, but the most popular of all literature, the most delightful in its fabrication, and the most splendid in its success, has fallen into public disregard only through individual indolence. Let it be but once adopted by some great writer, and it will tower above all the other efforts of poetry. We shall no more have dreamy odes and silly minstrelsy assuming the name of poetry. Is it even impossible that we should have some gigantic genius overshadowing all the little busy toils of Parnassus? Is there any moral or physical decree registered in the laws of Helicon against our even having another Shakspeare?

The Doctor. Dr. Granville is in the field again; and the literary and philosophical world may congratulate itself on the renewed activity of a writer whose activity is always so valuable. His work on St. Petersburg, though written some years ago, is still by far the most graphic, intelligent, and well informed work on the marvellous capital of Peter the Great. After having gone through three editions it has the rank of a standard book, and possesses all the accuracy without any of the dulness of a "Guide." He has now adopted another subject, to which he brings at once the professional knowledge and the personal observation essential to the subject. The importance of that subject is expressed in the name, "The Spas of Germany."

The Rector. It would be difficult to select a topic on which a man of true medical science, and quick remark, could render more useful service. The diseases of England, in nine instances out of ten, are those for which the Spas, the life led at these watering-places, and the variety which there meets us in every aspect of nature and manners, scem to have been especially made. Lethargy is at the bottom of all our national maladies. Over-feeding, over-rest, and over-sameness, if we may coin the only word fit for the thing, are the bane of the opulent Englishman. Sent from the feastings of Grosvenor and Belgrave Squares to the feastings of his magnificent mansion embowered in parks, where everything is lazy, lulling, and luxurious, the unhappy man grows fat, fullblooded, and fanciful. Thence the progress is clear to all the evils that "wealth is heir to:" he grows tired of the world, and sick of his wifereads French romances, and finds that they recommend prussic acid— hesitates about the remedy if he is a moral man, adopts it if he is not, and finishes his plethoric career by a heathen catastrophe, with a coroner for his historian, and an epitaph for his history. But send this weary son of woe into the bosom of an Ostend steamer--contribute a brisk gale to his necessities-drive him with four Flemish horses tied to brilliant travelling equipage through the mire of the Netherlands, roll him over the pavé of Ghent, Liege, and Aix-la-Chapelle, till you sweep him in sight of the sunny banks of the noblest of all continental rivers, the great central stream of continental beauty, the loved and loving Rhine, and you fill him with a new sense of existence. The scene now changes every hour; every post-house is in a new principality. He plunges into the depths of valleys, where he is buried in vineyards-he soars up the sides of mountains, where he is roasted like a Sardinian olive-he is whirled through forests which were called Black two thousand years ago, and will be called Black two thousand years hence, if

this crumbling world is not melted in its own volcanoes long before. But all this is new to him. He occasionally has to wait an hour or two for his dinner. He discovers that he has an appetite: the discovery is equally salutary and surprising: he dines for the first time in his life; hitherto he has only fed. He now and then is forced to the formidable experiment of going to bed supperless, in his ramblings through the deeper tracts of the forest-country. Nothing can be more vexatious or more fortunate. He plunges into bed tired as a hunter, and hungry as the wolf that hunter follows. To his utter astonishment the eight hours of his night are fled like so many minutes; he is awaked by the sunrise, pouring in floods of gold and vermilion over a thousand hills. He had heard of the sight, and probably seen it in his boyhood, but all now has all the freshness of novelty, and the wonder of a celestial phenomenon. He breakfasts like a new-roused tiger, and feels that hitherto he has never known the pleasures of taste. The Spas bring all this into order -systematise his enjoyment-give him something delightful, eccentric, animating, and useful to do from sunrise to sunset-make him forget the dismal study of his inner man-abjure all investigation of bile, pancreas, liver, and spleen-teach him to think of himself simply as a vigorous and vivid creature, capable of getting through the twenty-four hours without either pill, potation, or pestle-and send him back at the end of three months to Parliament, the clubs, and his county, just the first-rate thing that a first-rate Englishman was intended to be. So, "Vivant les Spas!"

The Doctor. Of the efficacy of the Spas in England no one can doubt who has ever enjoyed the refreshing morning walks and pleasant afternoon meals which are furnished by Cheltenham. But it must be observed that the German Spas are altogether on a superior scale; that in fact the Spa country consitutes a large portion of the very finest region of Germany, itself the very finest region of Europe. The country which leads from the Rhine to Baden is chiefly flat and sandy, but as we approach Baden the landscape suddenly changes; it becomes hillythe hills are covered with orchards-the mountain chain at last becomes amphitheatrical-and in the centre of the amphitheatre lies the gay town of Baden. If a circle be drawn half a mile round this hot spring of Baden, it would be found in the centre of this succession of circular ranges, forming a scenery of singular beauty, on whose sides are the villas of the opulent inhabitants. The humbler houses, the springs, the baths, and places of amusement are at the foot of the circle. As a watering-place, Baden was known to the Romans by the name of " Civitas Aurelia Aquensis." The Germans with less taste, but more matter of fact, called it by its present name, "The Baths." It has seen its revolutions, like the rest of the world, and after passing through a long succession of Counts Palatine and Emperors, has fallen into the hands of Charles Leopold. The air is dry and very pure; several families reside in Baden during the winter. In the last fifteen years Baden has been greatly embellished: the English everywhere are the great embellishers all the glass in the German windows, all the flag-stones in the French streets, and all the carpets in the houses of the continent are the work of English money-all the creation of the years since the peace.

The Colonel. In all the German towns the accommodations for strangers were miserable at the conclusion of the peace of 1815. Foreigners are singularly content with discomforts in their style of lodging. They either sit in enormous chilling rooms, as in the palazzi of Italy— which much resemble our prisons and workhouses-or squeeze themselves into little airless hovels, where it is as hard to breathe as to see. Dr. Granville gives a very amusing description of the difficulty which he experienced in supplying himself with apartments. The landlord bargained, before he would suffer him to alight, that he should be satisfied with rooms at the top of a large straggling and lofty house: a less experienced traveller would probably have refused such mean accommodation, but, as the Doctor says, it would not do to be squeamish on such occasions, for, on the very same morning, fifteen other arrivals were added, which filled every garret of the hotel. The Doctor recommended, as the most convenient proceeding, to write a few days beforehand to the proprietor of any one of the good hotels, and engage apartments for a stated time. This plan of anticipating lodgings, by letter, his experience advises as the best, and, in the end, the cheapest, provided the object is to remain at Baden for a certain time. Baden, however, is the resort of a great number of persons, whose object is less to relieve themselves of the infirmities of the body than to heal the diseases of the purse: persons of fashion and of none, rich pigeons and clever knaves, young beauties in want of a fortune and a husband, and old chevaliers in want of wives and estates, throng the avenues; and it is the Doctor's keen calculation that not more than one in a hundred have any necessity for touching the waters of the Queen Spa of Germany.

The Doctor. The journey through the Black Forest leading to Wildbad opens a singularly picturesque country; the road ascends all the way from Calw, a town standing on an elevation of a thousand feet above the sea. From the town it dips into the thickest of the Black Forest, whose mighty and columnar firs give a sombre yet grand character to the country, and reaches at last a plateau of more than double the elevation. Passing this hill, the road sinks into the vale where exist the springs, and thirteen hundred feet above the sea. Still the Doctor's observations turn on his peculiar science. On the way he met a traveller, a subject of Bavaria, who had been in the habit for two or three years of visiting Wildbad. This gentleman was a living panegyric on the waters; he looked, said the Doctor, as if he really could spare health to others. "You will be delighted," said the patient," at the sensations you will experience in the baths. Stout and well built as you see me, a long and obstinate case of disordered digestion, which baffled all the best doctors in Paris, where I have been residing these thirty years, had so reduced me, that they despaired of my life. The death of my wife, who was snatched from me by the cholera in twenty-four hours, completed my misery, and I was sent to the place you are about to visit, to die, I verily believe. The rest I need not tell you. Regardez moi. Je suis le meilleur éloge des bains de Wildbad. Three seasons have sufficed to work this miracle: but you will meet with plenty of equally striking cases at the baths. Tenez. You noticed that feeble, emaciated old man, who sat by you at table, and sipped a mauvais bouillon with a heaving chest, incessant cough, hard breathing, and an occasional